onknows's questions

I installed Subversion Edge 5.2.2 which uses Apache on CentOS Linux release 7.2.1511. I installed it as a service which I can stop / start.

The httpd.conf has entry

PidFile "/opt/csvn-5.2.2/data/run/httpd.pid"

I configured the service to automatically start on boot but this seems to work differently from manual sudo service csvn-httpd start stop.

When the service starts on (re)boot no pid file /opt/csvn-5.2.2/data/run/httpd.pid is created!

This is rather unexpected. Ideally we would be able to configure services to automatically start on boot easily but as it turns out this requires some extra magic to work well.

What is the correct way to make services start on boot? What is the secret?

I have been running Ubuntu server 14.04 for around two years. But sinds a few weeks the server crashes and burns each day. It is unclear to me why this is happening.

I checked log files in /var/log but these do not provide any information on why or even that the server is going down.

Is there is structured approach to troubleshooting these crashes? Can I increase loging somehow / somewhere?

Does it mean something anything there is no information indicating problems of some sort? This type of crash is similar to just turing power off maybe?

I want turn a physical machine running MS Windows 7 into a VirtualBox virtual machine. This is easy, I have done this before, but this time I needed the virtual size/capacity of the disk to be a fixed and smaller size.

It needs to be fixed because I will install PGP disk encryption on it for compliance reasons. This will expand a dynamic disk to it maximum size.

Aside from this special case there are other reasons for wanting disks to be smaller and fixed. Is my experience. If you run for example a Jenkins build server on a dynamically expanding disk you could see the disk expanding quickly to its maximum size while in the guest OS disk space usage is stable and there is lots of free space.

Using Disk2vhd I have created a vhdx file. This file I converted to vdi format.

vboxmanage clonehd --format VDI MSWIN7.VHDX MSWIN7.vdi

Purportedly with vdi you could decrease virtual size/capacity with commands similar to

vboxmanage modifyhd MSWIN7.vdi --resize 160000

I found that this doesn't work. Even if you try variants you will consistently get error messages like:

Progress state: VBOX_E_NOT_SUPPORTED VBoxManage: error: Resize hard disk operation for this format is not implemented yet!

Below is the disk layout of my vdi disk. I added this to a Ubuntu VM to look at it using Gparted and CloneZilla. Capacity is around 300GB. Unallocated 145GB. Used is around 153GB.

I want to shrink capacity to around 160GB. This should be enough to fit /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb2.

BTW, I tried CloneZilla but it also does not seem to like to shrink the capacity to a smaller disk. I tried various settings in CloneZilla but no success.

How can I decrease virtual size/capacity?

I upgraded my Ubuntu server from 12.04 to 14.04 using standard do-release-upgrade.

After upgrade I found that my OpenLDAP directory data is purged. This is an unexpected outcome of an upgrade. I don't think that many people expect data on a server to be be purged or whipped as part of a standard upgrade process.

But someone must have thought it as unavoidable and necessary otherwise it would no be part of the upgrade. The question now is if this person or persons also thought about restore of data following this unexpected purge of data.

I can't find any information. How do I restore this data? Is this data still available somewhere on the server for easy restore?

The installation looks broken now, for example when I try

ostraaten@ubuntu:~$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure slapd
[sudo] password for ostraaten: 
/usr/sbin/dpkg-reconfigure: slapd is broken or not fully installed

I have two OpenLDAP directory servers. One is a standard Zimbra OpenLDAP server. Accounts are with passwords that are using SSHA-512 hash method.

When I copy these accounts to a standard OpenLDAP server with sha2 module compiled and installed only SHA-512 is supported.

I cannot succesfully bind with accounts that have a SSHA-512 hash method. I can verify the password is correct with external LDAP browser but I cannot bind. the message is always that the credentials are invalid. The authentication failed [LDAP: error code 49 - Invalid Credentials]

Is this a hash method specific for Zimbra OpenLDAP servers. It this hash method created by the Zimbra community?

Why would the Zimbra community use a non-standard hash method?

Where can we find this SSHA-512 hash method? So we can add this to standard OpenLDAP servers.

On the OpenLDAP website is "OpenLDAP supports RFC 2307 passwords, including the {SHA}, {SSHA} and other schemes. Such passwords may be used as userPassword values and/or rootpw value. See (Xref) What are RFC 2307 hashed user passwords?. {SHA} and {SSHA} are RFC 2307 passwords schemes which use the SHA1 secure hash algorithm. The {SSHA} is the seeded varient. {SSHA} is recommended over other RFC 2307 schemes."

This information is not correct. I did create the slapd-sha2.so module as described for example here https://github.com/gcp/openldap/tree/master/contrib/slapd-modules/passwd/sha2

But following this instruction will ensure not SSHA support, only SHA.

I have installed OpenLDAP 2.4.23 on CentOS 6.4. Default install.

OpenLDAP does not seem to create any log information. At times it is convient to have some information on what OpenLDAP is doing.

How can logging be enabled/configured?

After installing Zimbra I have a web client running on port 8443 and 8080. On the machine itself I can access using

http://localhost:8443

I want to allow users access to this web client via a reverse proxy server. The root web context is already used so I want to serve the web client through a folder. So for example

https://www.mydomain.com/webmail 

which is proxy for

https://localhost:8443/webmail

For this setup I think I need to change the web context of the Zimbra web client so that it will run from

https://localhost:8443/webmail

and not

http://localhost:8443

Zimbra CLI allows change of port but I did not find change of context. Is this possible? How do I do it?