Recently came across a problem with one system authentication to another via ssh. I added the public ssh key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys entry. Changed ownership to the proper user and also chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. Still no dice. Using ssh -vvvv the following error returned on pubkey authentication: debug1: Unspecified GSS failure. Minor code may provide more […]

I’ve been using the excellent fpm (Effing package manager!) tool for automatically generating rpms from source (for example, creating a custom compiled php-fpm binary and then wrapping it for install in an rpm for distribution from our own repository). FPM also creates .debs and other binaries as you need them. To ensure we have a […]

Usually, I will try to push clients towards using SCP (via a client such as WinSCP), however inevitably there are clients who do not understand this new method of accessing their files securely online, and who for one reason or another insist on using FTP for their online file access. As they say – the customer is always right?

Did you ever have a situation where you needed to access a website that had an IP restriction in place? I recently had a situation where I needed to access the web via my university connection (due to IP restrictions placed on accessing databases of research papers). They do not have a VPN setup so […]

Have you ever come across a server that is doing a lot of traffic? Maybe you have logged in to see a process running at 100% CPU, so you know the culprit, but instead of kill -9ing it, wouldn’t it be great to see what exactly it is up to? Or even if you see […]

I recently came across a typo that existed in a bunch of html files on my web server. I thought it should be easy enough to change, but since it was in a number of files, editing it by hand would be time consuming. Fortunately, there is an easy, one liner command to replace the […]

Zabbix is an excellent system monitoring package. It does everything from basic availability checking to detailed system resource analysis. It is capable of graphing the variables pulled from the system, and alerting admins if there is a problem or something needed for attention. Once you have the Zabbix server set up, you need to install […]

Recently I started seeing this error while provisioning Xen VPSes on a server with 8GB of RAM: [2009-03-23 15:51:40 xend.XendDomainInfo 3310] DEBUG (XendDomainInfo:1603) XendDomainInfo.destroy: domid=None [2009-03-23 15:51:40 xend 3310] ERROR (xmlrpclib2:184) (12, ‘Cannot allocate memory’) I checked the memory, and sure enough, all of the VPSes were using up the memory. More specifically, dom0 (the […]