Ian Hunter's questions

I'm trying to use Monit to check the permissions of a particular directory, but I only care that it's readable to all users. I don't care about any other permissions (write, execute) for the owner, group, or all. I also don't care about any special permissions.

Knowing that I can't change the permissions of this directory, and with the possibility of another administrator changing these permissions without affecting my processes that rely on this directory (i.e., granting or revoking write access to the group), is it possible to check for a minimum permission in Monit?

I have this which is currently working:

check directory archive path /var/home/archive/
    if failed perm 0755 then alert

But I would like to have something like tihs:

check directory archive path /var/home/archive/
    if failed perm > 444 then alert

This is failing for me. Is it possible to use comparison operators in Monit's permissions checking? If not, are there any workarounds?

I'm on an Ubuntu 11.10 server with PHP 5.4 installed from a PPA. I had the MySQL library installed (php5-mysql) but wanted to try out the native driver (php5-mysqlnd), so I ran sudo apt-get install php5-mysqlnd. It caused some errors with dpkg, so I tried to remove it:

$ sudo apt-get remove php5-mysqlnd
Removing php5-mysqlnd ...
dpkg: error processing php5-mysqlnd (--remove):
  subprocess installed pre-removal script returned error exit status 1
Processing triggers for libapache2-mod-php5 ...
  * Reloading web server config apache2
Errors were encountered while processing:
   php5-mysqlnd

When I first installed php5-mysqlnd, it uninstalled php5-mysql--and now I can't reinstall that, as it tries to remove php5-mysqlnd. Now I'm left without a way to connect to my MySQL server in PHP.

How can I fix this problem? I've tried forcefully removing php5-mysqlnd (as per php5-mysqlnd on debian wheezy/sid?), but that gives the same exact error.

I recently noticed that my recently setup domain, example.com, was being used to send spam. So, I decided to fix this and found some information on SPF configuration, and that I'd need to go edit the appropriate .zone file in my server. Well, that was fine and dandy and seemed pretty simple--except I don't seem to have the ones I need!

Well, lo and behold, all I found (running Centos 5.5 under /var/named) were the following *.zone files: localdomain.zone and localhost.zone, none of which contained any information relative to my server's IP address or domain name.

So I checked the files named.conf and named.rfc1912.zone, but neither one made reference to my domain name, example.com, or my IP address. They only make reference to localhost, it appears.

Where did I go wrong in all this? I haven't found any information on creating zones to put SPF information in them, just putting SPF data in pre-existing zone files.

Thanks a bunch,