Debuntu

As a sysadmin, most of my time is spent working on remote machines and different task. tmux is a terminal multiplexer, meaning it allows you to run multiple terminals in the same windows.

This tutorial will explain the basics features of tmux that should help you be more productive with your every day task.

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When enabling logs with HAProxy on a busy web site, hard disk space can quickly become a scarce resource.

The reason is that, most of the time, HAProxy is set to use local0 facility which tend to write logs to a bunch of files in /var/log such as messages…

Thanks to rsyslog, we will be able to canalize those logs to a more appropriate location and only once, saving a bunch of disk space.

This tutorial will go over the steps required to accomplish this set up.

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There were some changes in the latest kernel release (2.6.34) that prevent VMware’s VMCI Socket module to compile on Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat).

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Using freeradius for authentication

Here I am going to consider that the freeradius server is set up correctly, meaning that you can already authenticate your users with freeradius using radtest utility.

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XL2TP

Now, let’s get on the next phase: XL2TP.

Packages Requirements

You can install xl2tp with the following command:

# apt-get install xl2tp

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Even though I pretty like OpenVPN, there is still some devices that might not support the TUN/TAP driver needed by OpenVPN.

Take IPhones, Android phones for instance, you need to root them in order to get that feature, assuming somebody has already cooked a ROM for your device.

L2TP is quite and old standard that allow setting up VPNs.

On the other end, it does not provide any kind of encryption mechanism, and as such, it is pretty common to get L2TP running over an IPSec link.

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If like me you use MPD as a service daemon to listen to music, you might be annoyed anytime GDM start a pulseaudio process which prevents MPD from accessing the sound device.

Typically, the output of ps will produce the following output:

$ ps aux | grep pulse
gdm 1371 0.0 0.4 98180 4776 ? S<sl Jun13 0:00 /usr/bin/pulseaudio –start –log-target=syslog
gdm 1411 0.0 0.2 10748 2968 ? S Jun13 0:00 /usr/lib/pulseaudio/pulse/gconf-helper

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When working in a chrooted environment, there is a few special file systems that needs to be mounted so all programs behave properly.

For instance, grub will need to access your disk devices….

While most special file systems might be mounted with:

# mount fstype -t fstype /tmp/chroot/mountpoint

Where fstype will be sysfs, proc, /dev is not following this rule.

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I was trying network-manager-openvpn plugin today on Lucid, I could import my configuration, DNS was set up correctly upon connection/disconnection, route imported correctly (almost ).

One issue though is that it was also changing the default route to the VPN tunnel while this should not happen.

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When you hotplug a hard drive in a virtual machine, the drive do not show in fdisk -l output until you reboot your VM.
In order to get the drive to appear, the SCSI bus need to be rescanned.

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