Industrial's questions

I am trying to convert a very simple rewrite from a previous nginx version to the current one looking like below:

location / {
   if ( !-f $request_filename ) {
     rewrite ^/([a-z]*)$ /index.php?action=$1;
     rewrite ^/([a-z]*)/(.*)$ /index.php?action=$1&item=$2;
   }
}

This is how far I have gotten. The index page shows up, but any page that should be rewritten like above, instead throws 404's:

server {

    listen 80 default;
    root /var/www;
    index index.php;
    server_name _;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?action=$uri&item=$args;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
}

What am I doing wrong here?

I need to install npm which is done by curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh and being new to using puppet, I am a bit confused on how this should be done.

I am well aware of creating a package {} entry that invokes an exec target, but as I install npm from source, this isn't going to cut it.

I clearly don't want to build npm every time my puppet makes a pull, so I need someway to check if it is installed or not as well, so just making an exec {} alone isn't enough either.

What can I do?

Is it possible to setup puppet in a way that changes in manifests only will be applied during certain hours, so that any eventual downtime on our server will occur when we decide it to?

Thanks

I am trying to setup puppet's dashboard to be monitor the status of my servers. With the below shown configurations, my clients (or nodes) only show up as Unreported and says Has not reported in "Last report".

However the node can communicate with the server and pull changes as it's supposed to, but nothing appears in the dash. I have followed these docs trying to set it up, but I have no idea of what I am doing wrong.

Have I missed anything obvious?

// Server /etc/puppet/puppet.conf
[master]
reports = store,http
reporturl = http://192.168.1.101:3000/reports/upload

// Client /etc/puppet/puppet.conf
[agent]
report = true

So I've just setup a brand new box and thought it would be a good time to make an image with Clonezilla.

The harddrive is 250GB with ~4GB used on the partition that I have chosen to backup, so I plugged in a 16GB USB stick to store the image on, which should be sufficient (?).

But it appears that it will take more or less about 4 hours to create the image with Clonezilla. Should it really take that long to create an image of 4GB of data?

Thanks

We've used tar to backup and compress (gzip) selected directories on our file server with very good results until recently.
Each and every one of our backups are stored on mirrored (RAID) harddrives and simultaneously uploaded to a Amazon S3 bucket for off-site storage.

As our data has grown rapidly in size recently, so has also our backups. This week, our backup uploads have run 24/7 constantly just to sync the fresh backups from the last 7 days and still hasn't finished. Getting a better connection would solve some of this problem (which we can't do at the moment), but I think that it should be better to create a real solution instead of going for a workaround.

What alternative strategy, that keeps us away from multiple-digit gigabyte files and still lets us use tar, could we use to backup our directories that would reduce the amount of bandwidth needed to sync the files?

I recently posted a question regarding the issue of loadbalancing webservers on a budget. It's finally time to begin the testing so I thought about setting up two or more Ubuntu VM's in my LAN running pacemaker+corosync in order to learn the basics and try different configs out.

How do I get started after installing both corosync + pacemaker as I don't have public IP's attached to each VM living in my LAN?

I'm bit of a newcomer when it comes to networking, firewalls and port forwarding - please bear with me:

I've just setup a dynamic DNS that points to my external IP and are handled through my Cisco router. Everything fine so far. When I visited my DNS through the browser, http://exampledynamicdns.com, I got redirected to the backend GUI of my router - kind of expected, but still not cool.

So to prevent my Router settings from being available on the interwebs, I did a port forward of port 80 to a non-existent IP on my LAN.

Is this a good practice or not?

We run a small startup and just began interesting ourselves in monitoring our machines properly. The choice fell on Zabbix, which fits well into our criteria of requirements.
I've setup the Zabbix server along with Zabbix agent on a Ubuntu 11.04 VM which works perfectly, which will act as the Zabbix server to store all the stats.

The next step obviously would be to setup each Zabbix node - also Ubuntu VM's, so we ran apt-get install zabbix-agent. Running service zabbix-agent status confirms that the service is running on the node machine. Everything fine that far, so we added the host node to Zabbix.

However when we access the Zabbix GUI and browse through the GUI, we see that the error/trigger Zabbix_server is not running on {HOSTNAME} appears on our node.

Do we need to have both Zabbix_server & Zabbix_agent setup on each machine that we should monitor?

I've just setup nginx on my Ubuntu staging machince. Entering http://192.168.1.1./index.php works like a charm and loads the index.php file i've put in the /var/www/public_html folder. http://192.168.1.1 however instead shows the Welcome to nginx! page and not my index.php file.

What am I doing wrong? Here's my nginx config:

server {

    listen 80 default;
    root /var/www/public_html;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;
    server_name _;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
}

I've set up software RAID1 with the latest Ubuntu version - 11.04 using two 250GB harddrives which initially worked great. Tried to unplug both and computer still started with degraded raid status - reconnecting and rebooting makes the resync perform automatically. Everything good this far.

Unfortunately this morning, one of the harddrives died and when opening the Disk tools or gnome-disk-utility as its called, the main RAID chain shows as degraded.

If I run away to the store and get a new harddrive and plug it into the computer, will everything work out as intended or do I need to partition stuff as I did while installing Ubuntu with the Alternate installer?

I am trying to get my head around the concept of load balancing to ensure availability and redundancy to keep users happy when things go wrong, rather than load balancing for the sake of offering blistering speed to millions of users.

We're on a budget and trying to stick to the stuff where there's plenty of knowledge available, so running Apache on Ubuntu VPS's seems like the strategy until some famous search engine acquire us (Saturday irony included, please note).

At least to me, it's a complete jungle of different solutions available. Apaches own mod_proxy & HAproxy are two that we found by a quick google search, but having zero experience of load balancing, I have no idea of what would be appropriate for our situation, or what we would look after while choosing a solution to solve our availability concerns.

What is the best option for us? What should we do to get availability high whilst staying inside our budgets?

I have successfully setup a virtualbox running Ubuntu server. As everything is working now, it would be sweet to run it in the background, so I've made a small bash script to start it whenever I need to access it:

#!/bin/bash
nohup VBoxHeadless -s "Ubuntu server"&

This server uses bridged networking and has a static IP set to 192.168.1.5. When I run the following from another computer in the same network, the below shown error are thrown. Why?

ssh [email protected]
ssh: connect to host 192.168.1.5 port 22: No route to host

I assumed that running headless would not affect the Virtualbox beside the fact that it's lacking the GUI?

Thanks a lot

I've just managed to setup OpenVPN properly on my server and test it to be properly working with client computers and I came to wonder how OpenVPN keys can be generated as clients come and go.

Is it necessary to rebuild the Diffie-Hellman .dh file and recreate all previous client keys as I just need to add or remove a client?

Thanks

I finally set up a realistic backup schedule on my data through a shell script, which are handled by cron on tight intervals. Unfortunately, I keep getting empty emails each time the CRON has been executed and not only when things go wrong.

Is it possible to only make CRON send emails when something goes wrong, ie. my TAR doesn't execute as intended?

Here's how my crontab is setup for the moment;

0 */2 * * * /bin/backup.sh 2>&1 | mail -s "Backup status" [email protected]

Thanks a lot!

I just finished a fresh install of Ubuntu Server and selected the LAMP package by default.

Tested it and it's working great with PHP scripts, but now I want to be able to run RubyOnRails on the same Apache install.

How can I accomplish this through the CLI?

Thanks a lot!

Please bear with me as being a bit of a newcomer at 19" rack-mounted equipment.

I've thought a fair bit lately about the best way of getting 4x or 6x of 2.5" hard drives into my rack and are currently really confused about would be the best (read economical) solution.

After scouting the market, I've found this type of disk array units that offers built in RAID and a lot of drive slots and a truckload of geek cred, but at a price that just isn't going to fit in my budget.

I've also found these type of cute adapters that takes two 2.5" drives in one 3.5" slot, but I will obviously need a chassie with a lot of 3.5" spaces in order to make it work.

So what is the most economical way to house my harddrives in my rack?

I want to run some Linux stuff on my XP development machine which clearly doesn't work too well in their Windows specific versions.

What would be an appropriate Linux distro to install on Virtualbox if I am concerned about harddrive and ram usage? I do not need any Gnome or graphical interface...

Thanks

I'm still a bit of a freshie on Ubuntu and linux in general, so please bear with me.

I found this package that I would like to implement on my Ubuntu SSH managed server: http://repcached.lab.klab.org/

Is that possible in any way, or does it requres a degree in some to-me-unknown compiling rocket science?

Thanks!

I am totally new on configuring servers and working with EC2, so please bear with me.

I managed after a lot of hair pulling to get a server with Ubuntu up and running with memcached and some other goodies that would make a great package for me.

I thought that however, when storing it as an AMI with this tool I would be able to have memcached available next time I launched an instance based upon that image. What can I do to make sure that my configuration is saved properly to an instance?

Question number two: - Can I someway make a command that is automatically run on server creation, like initiating memcache with "memcache -d -m 1700 -u root" or even a batch of them?