sysadminman.net

I’ve been looking round for something simple and light-weight to monitor my 2 VPS’s. I wanted to see cpu, memory, disk usage output to a web page with graphs.

Munin looks quite good so I though I’d have a go at installing that.

Installation on Ubuntu couldn’t have been easier, just -

apt-get install munin-node munin

and it was done.

That created a folder called /var/www/munin so this has to be accessible through your current web server config or you might need to change a few things.

Continue reading ‘Monitoring a VPS with munin’ »

I setup Hyperic a while ago and rather stupidly forgot the hqadmin password!

If the same happens to you it’s fairly easy to reset it. This assumes you’re using the default postgres database  -

cd to your Hyperic server’s bin directory

cd ~/hyperic/server-3.1.1/bin

Continue reading ‘Forgotten Hyperic password’ »

I’ve been using Asterisk on my VPS from Tektonic for about 2 months now and I’ve been pretty impressed with how it’s been working. I’ve used Trixbox for the past couple of years (running on my home DSL line) but thought, as I was using a fairly minimal spec VPS, that I would just install Asterisk.

I’m on the $15 a month VPS plan which is 256MB ram and 10GB disk space. I’m also running a mail server on there so things were going to be fairly tight. Also, to make my life a little easier, I installed FreePBX which requires MySQL and Apache. I’m running Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 LTS Server.

I’m running version 1.4.13 of Asterisk and version 2.3.1 of FreePBX. Installation was fairly straight forward - there are plenty of resources on the web for setting things up. The only thing I really had to do was tweak the mysql.cnf so that MySQL used less memory than it normally would.

Continue reading ‘Using Asterisk on a VPS’ »

Spent a little while trying to get WinPE2 (Vista) to boot via PXE from a linux server and thought it could be useful to someone. We already had our Red Hat stuff booting from there and it seemed like a good idea to keep it in one place!

Some of the stuff could be useful for booting via PXE from a Windows box too

Windows XP was used for WAIK stuff
Fedora Core 6 was used for PXE Server
Both running on VMWare Server along with a blank VMWare machine as the PXE client
* Note - there’s a bug in RHEL5 that’s stop’s the tftpd.remap file working. Not sure how many versions this affects

Continue reading ‘PXE boot WinPE 2 (Vista) using Linux as the PXE Server’ »

Installing WordPress on Ubuntu Gutsy. You already need to have Mysql, Apache and PHP install (see here)

Change to you www directory

cd /var/www

and get and extract the latest WordPress gz

sudo wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
sudo tar xvfz latest.tar.gz

Continue reading ‘Installing WordPress on a VPS [part4]’ »

Now we’re going to install mysql and apache and make a few changes so that they run OK in limited memory. I’m going to use the package manager to install them. You can compile and install them from source to get exactly what you want but be prepared to update them manually as bug and vulnerabilities are fixed.

Continue reading ‘Installing Mysql and Apache [part3]’ »

Now we’re updated to Gutsy it’s time to secure our system a little

First a firewall. Linux comes with a command called iptables for setting up firewall rules. It can be fairly complicated to use but we only want to do something nice and simple so we can just write the rules by hand.

Continue reading ‘Securing my Ubuntu VPS [part2]’ »

So, I’ve got my freshly setup VPS. My OS of choice is currently Ubuntu - not because it’s better than any other mainstream distribution but there’s lot’s of good documentation out there for Ubuntu and if you stick to one distribution you get to know it perculiarites. Some of the commands listed below will only work with Ubuntu so if you’re using something else you may need to look round for the equivalant commands.

Continue reading ‘Setting up a vps with cheapvps.co.uk [part1]’ »