Shane's questions

This should be a simple thing to find, but I've spent over an hour on it--time to ask for some assistance. I have a very basic CentOS 5.5 box running two virtual machines. The first machine has been up for several weeks without any issues and accepts connections over 80 and 443 with a signed SSL cert.

Today I went in to add a second Virtual Host entry for a site that will only need to listen on 80. I set up the VM as I normally do, created a SIMPLE index.php script that contains only the word 'test'.

If I mv that file to index.html the page loads just fine, but when it is index.php I get a 500 error:

HTTP Error 500 (Internal Server Error): An unexpected condition was encountered while the server was attempting to fulfill the request.

In my logs I get no errors but the access log shows:

[11/May/2011:11:35:26 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 500 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_7) AppleWebKit/534.24 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/11.0.696.65 Safari/534.24"

The original site is a PHP/MySQL site and is working just fine! At this point I am just out of ideas for where to look so any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Shane

I am either having trouble understanding how DNS works, or I am having trouble configuring my DNS correctly (either one isn't good). I am currently working with a domain, I'll call it webdomain.com, and I need to allow all of our internal users to get out to dotster to get our public DNS entries just like the rest of the world. Then, on top of that, I want to be able to supply just a few override DNS entries for testing servers and equipment that is not available publically. As an example:

• public.webdomain.com - should get this from dotster

• outside.webdomain.com - should get this from dotster as well

• testing.webdomain.com - should get this from my internal dns controller

The problem that I seem to be running into at every turn is that if I have an internal DNS controller that contains a zone for webdomain.com then I can get my specified internal entries but never get anything from the public DNS server. This holds true regardless of the type of DNS server I use also--I have tried both a Linux Bind9 and a Windows 2008 Domain Controller.

I guess my big question is: am I being unreasonable to think that a system should be able to check my specified internal DNS and in the case where a requested entry doesn't exist it should fail over to the specified public dns server -OR- is this just not the way DNS works and I am lost in the sauce?

It seems like it should be as simple as telling my internal DNS server to forward any requests that it can't fulfill to dotster, but that doesn't seem to work. Could this be a firewall issue?

Thanks in advance

EXTENDED

OK, so I did a bunch of research and have been plugging at this for a few hours. I have this in my named.conf and I am STILL seeing the same result. Internal calls are fed, but anything external (in the zone controlled domain) is just dumped. Any assistance would be great! Also, this is an Ubuntu 9.04 OS I am working with.

Code removed because it was wrong.

THE CORRECT WAY -- ADDED AFTER QUESTION CLOSED

Well, thanks to the folks here on serverfault I now have this working perfectly on my server and in a much more succinct fashion. Here is how you do it. From a base install of bind9 edit your named.conf.local file and add in a zone for EACH subdomain that you want to redirect:

/etc/bind/named.conf

// WEBDOMAIN.COM ENTRIES
    zone "test.webdomain.com" {
            type master;
            file "/etc/bind/zones/test.webdomain.com";
    };

    zone "alpha.webdomain.com" {
            type master;
            file "/etc/bind/zones/alpha.webdomain.com";
    };

    zone "beta.webdomain.com" {
            type master;
            file "/etc/bind/zones/beta.webdomain.com";
    };

// INTERNETSITE.COM ENTRIES
    zone "internal.internetsite.com" {
            type master;
            file "/etc/bind/zones/internal.internetsite.com";
    };

    zone "dev.internetsite.com" {
            type master;
            file "/etc/bind/zones/dev.internetsite.com";
    };

Edit your /etc/bind/named.conf.options file and add any forwarders you want to use into the correct location:

/etc/bind/named.conf.options

options {
        directory "/var/cache/bind";

        forwarders {
                208.67.222.222;
                208.67.220.220;
                8.8.8.8;
                8.8.4.4;
        };

        auth-nxdomain no;    # conform to RFC1035
        listen-on-v6 { any; };
};

Create a new folder called zones at /etc/bind/zones/ and add a new file for EACH of the zones you created above that match the 'file' attribute above. Using test.webdomain.com as an example:

/etc/bind/zones/test.webdomain.com

$TTL    604800
@       IN      SOA     test.webdomain.com. (
                              1         ; Serial
                         604800         ; Refresh
                          86400         ; Retry
                        2419200         ; Expire
                         604800 )       ; Negative Cache TTL
;
@                       IN      NS      test.webdomain.com.
test.webdomain.com.    IN      A       10.0.1.20

Where 10.0.1.20 is the A record ip address that you want this (sub)domain to forward to. By doing it this way the record for test.webdomain.com is authoritative for only the subdomain and the global DNS will supply any other subdomains or root domains as usual.

My Environment:

Apache 2.2.9, Ubuntu 8.10

I am trying to find a way to monitor the bandwidth usage on my server broken out by each virtualhost WITHOUT installing something like PLESK, CPanel, or ISPConfig that is capable of modifying my server. I guess I am looking for a READ-ONLY solution. Since I manually administrate my servers I don't like the idea of installing a web accessible third party administration panel.

I am not even interested (necessarily) in getting graphical data out of the system, just so long as I can see bandwidth usage numbers by domain (preferably sub-domain as well) in some useful time increments like week/month/day. In the absence of time increments I will just run it in cron and manually capture the necessary time based increases.

I currently run Cacti as a system monitor but have been unable to find anything that I can add to Cacti that will gather the data I am needing. I did have a look at AWStats, but from what I could tell it only gave whole system bandwith usage by device and not by VHost (please correct if I am mistaken there).

So, is there a package I can install that already does just this?

Can I modify Cacti to show this information?

If no to the above, is there some bash script that I can run that will give me this output that I can later integrate into my own code?

Thanks in advance!

My server is currently hosting 8 separate websites (and growing) of which four are actively sending email throughout the day and some bulk (opt-in) lists at night. I just completed setting up PTR, SPF, Domainkeys and DKIM for each domain and am now wanting to move on to catching bounces to flag and remove bum email addresses.

I want to know if it is possible (and if so, how) to ask postfix to log the mail sent from each of my domains to separate files in addition to the single combined file in /var/log/. Though this doesn't gain me much as far as reading the logs myself it will allow me to run CRON parsers on the smaller logs at different times during the night so I can keep the load on my server from spiking for extended periods of time. Additionally it would make any other analytical work I need to do diagnosing errors with individual domains a little faster.

Should I run a single CRON to post-process the previous day's log and split (which would itself include some extended load), or can I set this up to be done automatically during log writing?