jdog's questions

I'm migrating a group of websites from one infrastructure to another, including a fairly slow rsync operation. The migration process includes changes to both the source and target systems.

Due to a fairly slow rsync operation that is part of the process, I am looping through a var file which contains the details for each website and then run through the tasks required to move one website at a time.

I cannot find a way to target some tasks at the source system and some at the target system. I have tried doing this by adding hosts: to each task: (all tasks are in a single role)

My playbook:

---
- hosts:
    - tag_aws_autoscaling_groupName_thename
    - tag_Name_server_name
  vars_files:
    - group_vars/all

  roles:
   - unmigratesite

unmigratesite role:

---

- include_tasks: "unmigrateonesite.yml"
  loop: "{{ wordpress_websites }}"

unmigrateonesite.yml:

- name: rsync site
  hosts: tag_aws_autoscaling_groupName_thename
  shell: rsync -avz /efs/www/{{new_folder}}/htdocs/ 172.31.18.217:/www/{{item.folder}}
  run_once: true
  register: rsync_out

- name: setup proxy host file
  template: src=proxy-host.j2 dest=/efs/nginx/sites-available/{{item.name}} owner=root group=root mode=0644
  hosts: tag_aws_autoscaling_groupName_thename
  notify:
    - restart nginx
  tags:
    - site
    - nginx-host-conf
    - nginx-temp-proxy

- name: setup wp-config.php WP_CONTENT_DIR on old server
  lineinfile: name=/www/{{ folder }}/{{ configuration_file }} regexp=WP_CONTENT_DIR line="define('WP_CONTENT_DIR', '/www/{{folder}}/app');"
  hosts: tag_Name_server_name
  ignore_errors: yes
  tags:
    - wp-config.php
    - wordpress
    - site
    - WP_CONTENT_DIR

However I'm getting an error:

    fatal: [54.219.216.237]: FAILED! => {"reason": "conflicting action statements: shell, hosts\n\nThe error appears to be in '/Users/jd/projects/bizinconline/ansible/roles/unmigratesite/tasks/unmigrateonesite.yml': line 22, column 3, but may\nbe elsewhere in the file depending on the exact syntax problem.\n\nThe offending line appears to be:\n\n\n- name: rsync site\n  ^ here\n"}
    fatal: [54.193.100.223]: FAILED! => {"reason": "conflicting action statements: shell, hosts\n\nThe error appears to be in '/Users/jd/projects/bizinconline/ansible/roles/unmigratesite/tasks/unmigrateonesite.yml': line 22, column 3, but may\nbe elsewhere in the file depending on the exact syntax problem.\n\nThe offending line appears to be:\n\n\n- name: rsync site\n  ^ here\n"}
    fatal: [13.57.52.221]: FAILED! => {"reason": "conflicting action statements: shell, hosts\n\nThe error appears to be in '/Users/jd/projects/bizinconline/ansible/roles/unmigratesite/tasks/unmigrateonesite.yml': line 22, column 3, but may\nbe elsewhere in the file depending on the exact syntax problem.\n\nThe offending line appears to be:\n\n\n- name: rsync site\n  ^ here\n"}

Exactly 3 times - as many times as there are hosts.

How can I run some tasks against one group and some against another group of servers?

I have an Ubuntu18.04 web server with nginx and php-fpm (7.2) installed.

There are 6 pools, each with their own user and group:

/etc/php/7.2/fpm# grep -r ^user * 
php.ini:user_dir =
pool.d/dev3.website.com.conf:user = dev3_app
pool.d/dev1.website.com.conf:user = dev1_app
pool.d/dev4.website.com.conf:user = dev4_app
pool.d/dev6.website.com.conf:user = dev6_app
pool.d/dev5.website.com.conf:user = dev5_app
pool.d/dev2.website.com.conf:user = dev2_app

/etc/php/7.2/fpm# grep -r ^group * 
pool.d/dev3.website.com.conf:group = dev3_app
pool.d/dev1.website.com.conf:group = dev1_app
pool.d/dev4.website.com.conf:group = dev4_app
pool.d/dev6.website.com.conf:group = dev6_app
pool.d/dev5.website.com.conf:group = dev5_app
pool.d/dev2.website.com.conf:group = dev2_app

Each site runs a laravel app, with the storage directory made group writable:

/var/www/dev3.website.com# ls -la
total 2236
drwxr-xr-x  20 root dev3_app    4096 Jul 17 21:39 .
drwxr-xr-x   9 root root        4096 Jul 17 21:33 ..
...
drwxrwxr-x   7 root dev3_app    4096 Jul 17 21:29 storage

nginx connects via TCP port:

server {
    listen         80;
    server_name    dev3.website.com;

    root /var/www/dev3.website.com/public;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location ~ [^/]\.php(/|$) {
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+?\.php)(/.*)$;
        if (!-f $document_root$fastcgi_script_name) {
            return 404;
        }

        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9001;
        fastcgi_index index.php;

        # include the fastcgi_param setting
        include fastcgi_params;

        # SCRIPT_FILENAME parameter is used for PHP FPM determining
        #  the script name. If it is not set in fastcgi_params file,
        # i.e. /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params or in the parent contexts,
        # please comment off following line:
        fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME   
        $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    }
}

With this configuration I get

The stream or file "/var/www/dev3.website.com/storage/logs/laravel-2019-07-17.log" could not be opened: failed to open stream: Permission denied

When I run chmod a+w on the storage directory it works.

I have also run ps -ef |grep php:

root      2468     1  0 00:53 ?        00:00:05 php-fpm: master process (/etc/php/7.2/fpm/php-fpm.conf)
root     11897 10961  0 22:12 pts/0    00:00:00 grep --color=auto php 

I'm implementing a web server with configuration and user files shared over NFS (Amazon EFS) as described here: https://serverfault.com/a/933566/81774

As part of my Apache configuration, I am running websites under different user names using mod_mpm_itk. How can I sync user names between servers without having to bake new user names into the web server AMI.

I'm assuming I can't just move /etc/passwd to NFS, as the server then won't boot without having NFS mounted?

Update based on comments:

There doesn't seem to be a way to load additional files with nsswitch.conf, only to query additional services according to this answer: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/210587

The downside of an additional service is to introduce additional points of failure.

Is it a feasible option to copy /etc/passwd from NFS when the server starts up and re-read it with pwck as described here https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/102336 ?

I have nginx terminating websites and proxying them to Apache with PHP-FPM. I'm trying to record the Clients IP in the apache log, but cannot seem to get this to work.

nginx configuration

server {
  listen         80;
  server_name    www.website.com;

  location ^~ /.well-known/acme-challenge/ {
      alias /var/www/dehydrated/;
  }

  location / {
      return         301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
  }
}

server {
  listen 443 ssl http2;
  server_name www.website.com;

  location / {
      proxy_pass http://1.2.3.4:80;
      proxy_set_header Host $host;
      proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
      proxy_read_timeout 600;
      proxy_buffer_size   128k;
      proxy_buffers   4 256k;
      proxy_busy_buffers_size   256k;
      client_max_body_size 100M;
  }

  location ~ /\.ht {
      deny all;
  }

  ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/ssl/www.website.com/privkey.pem;
  ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl/www.website.com/fullchain.pem;
  ssl_ciphers 'ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-DSS-AES128-GCM-SHA256:kEDH+AESGCM:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-DSS-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256:DHE-DSS-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:AES128-GCM-SHA256:AES256-GCM-SHA384:AES128-SHA256:AES256-SHA256:AES128-SHA:AES256-SHA:AES:CAMELLIA:DES-CBC3-SHA:!aNULL:!eNULL:!EXPORT:!DES:!RC4:!MD5:!PSK:!aECDH:!EDH-DSS-DES-CBC3-SHA:!EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:!KRB5-DES-CBC3-SHA';
  ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
  ssl_dhparam /etc/nginx/ssl/dhparams.pem;
}

apache configuration

  <VirtualHost *:80>

    ServerName www.website.com
    ServerAlias origin.www.website.com

    ServerAdmin [email protected]

    DocumentRoot /var/www/www.website.com/trunk

    <IfModule mpm_itk_module>
          AssignUserId www_arenz www_arenz
    </IfModule>
    CustomLog /var/www/www.website.com/apachelogs/www.website.com-access.log combined
    ErrorLog /var/www/www.website.com/apachelogs/www.website.com-error.log

      <FilesMatch "\.php$">
          CGIPassAuth on
          SetHandler "proxy:fcgi://127.0.0.1:9115/
      </FilesMatch>

      RemoteIPHeader X-Real-IP
      RemoteIPTrustedProxy 2.3.4.5/32


  </VirtualHost>

Apache logs always show 2.3.4.5 as the IP address of the client, which is the public IP address of nginx

I have implemented resourec expiry with the following set up

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
    ExpiresActive On
    ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 year"
    ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 year"
    ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 year"
    ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 year"
    ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month"
    ExpiresByType application/pdf "access plus 1 month"
    ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 1 month"
    ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 month"
    ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 1 month"
    ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 year"
    ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 days"
</IfModule>

with a2dismod expires, as expected I have no Expires header:

    wget --server-response --no-check-certificate https://sandbox.trinityp3.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js?ver=1.12.4
--2018-10-17 07:57:09--  https://sandbox.trinityp3.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js?ver=1.12.4
Resolving sandbox.trinityp3.com (sandbox.trinityp3.com)... 52.77.97.226
Connecting to sandbox.trinityp3.com (sandbox.trinityp3.com)|52.77.97.226|:443... connected.
WARNING: cannot verify sandbox.trinityp3.com's certificate, issued by ‘[email protected],CN=sandbox.trinityp3.com,O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd,ST=Some-State,C=AU’:
  Self-signed certificate encountered.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2018 18:57:10 GMT
  Server: Apache/2.4.10 (Ubuntu)
  Last-Modified: Tue, 06 Sep 2016 02:32:13 GMT
  Accept-Ranges: bytes
  Content-Length: 97184
  Vary: Accept-Encoding
  Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
  Referrer-Policy: 
  Cache-Control: max-age=604800, public
  Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
  Connection: Keep-Alive
  Content-Type: application/x-javascript

with a2enmod expires however I do get a 1 year expires response

  wget --server-response --no-check-certificate https://sandbox.trinityp3.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js?ver=1.12.4
--2018-10-17 08:01:26--  https://sandbox.trinityp3.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js?ver=1.12.4
Resolving sandbox.trinityp3.com (sandbox.trinityp3.com)... 52.77.97.226
Connecting to sandbox.trinityp3.com (sandbox.trinityp3.com)|52.77.97.226|:443... connected.
WARNING: cannot verify sandbox.trinityp3.com's certificate, issued by ‘[email protected],CN=sandbox.trinityp3.com,O=Internet Widgits Pty Ltd,ST=Some-State,C=AU’:
  Self-signed certificate encountered.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2018 19:01:27 GMT
  Server: Apache/2.4.10 (Ubuntu)
  Last-Modified: Tue, 06 Sep 2016 02:32:13 GMT
  Accept-Ranges: bytes
  Content-Length: 97184
  Vary: Accept-Encoding
  Cache-Control: max-age=604800, public
  Expires: Wed, 16 Oct 2019 19:01:27 GMT
  Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
  Referrer-Policy: 
  Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
  Connection: Keep-Alive
  Content-Type: application/x-javascript

I have also run grep to find any other expires statements, but there are none.

After adding ExpiresByType application/x-javascript the problem still persists. Could there be a conflict with deflate?

ubuntu@sandbox:/etc/apache2$ grep -r application/x-javascript *
mods-available/deflate.conf:        AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE     application/x-javascript application/javascript application/ecmascript
sites-available/710-tp3-au-www-sandbox.conf:    ExpiresByType     application/x-javascript "access plus 1 month"
sites-available/710-tp3-au-www-sandbox.conf:    ExpiresByType     application/x-javascript "access plus 1 month"

I have a shared Wordpress hosting server with approximately 50 sites on it, which is fully configured via Ansible.

I'm trying to find a good boundary between

a) updating AMIs every time a site is added or configuration is changed, for example this would effect Virtual hosts and PHP pool files

b) running some of these configuration changes with a custom startup script and simply giving the instance more time at start up before it receives traffic from a load balancer

Currently there is a single instance and there auto scaling is likely not needed for a while to cope with massive changes in traffic amounts. Rather, there is demand to use auto scaling for automatic replacement of the instance should it fail out of hours.

Based on my current scale for good cost management I would be best to run a c5.large at night and schedule autoscaling for 2 c5.large during day times, which would give me added benefit of having multi-AZ reliability at the same cost of a single c5.xlarge

I'm planning to use EFS to share all Wordpress files and likely Redis for shared session management, however this is not the topic of this question.

My concern with solution a) is that every time a new site is added, a staging site created or any other configuration change is needed, I need to create a new instance, make the change, create an AMI and rotate the AMIs into my autoscaling group. Even if fully automated, I would expect this take too long to be of acceptable turnaround speed.

Instead I could make these changes on a small number of instances and update the AMI programmatically. It would then only become used - in a failure scenario or - when a restore test is being done or - when development is tested on a test stack

Is this a good approach to manage a shared hosting environment?

I have a website where all pages go through AWS Cloudfront (right now with a TTL of 0).

The site domain is www.example.com, which is a CNAME to the cloudfront distribution. Cloudfront then requests the site from my web server with origin.www.example.com, adding a custom header for Authentication.

However now I also need to add Basic Auth to the site until it is launched. I've tried this by using LA-U:REMOTE_USER in a RewriteCond

This configuration works, but has no Auth:

<VirtualHost *:80>

    ServerName www.example.com
    ServerAlias www.example.com

    ServerAdmin [email protected]

    DocumentRoot /var/www/www.example.com/trunk

    <IfModule mpm_itk_module>
        AssignUserId www_site www_site
    </IfModule>

    <LocationMatch "^(.*\.php)$">
        ProxyPass fcgi://127.0.0.1:9154/var/www/www.example.com/trunk
    </LocationMatch>

    Alias "/robots.txt" "/var/www/norobots.txt"

    <Directory /var/www/www.example.com>
        RewriteEngine on
        RewriteCond  %{HTTP:X-PSK-Auth}  !^mypassword$
        RewriteRule  .* - [F]
    </Directory>

    CustomLog /var/www/www.example.com/apachelogs/www.example.com-access.log combined
    ErrorLog /var/www/www.example.com/apachelogs/www.example.com-error.log

</VirtualHost>

curl http://cxcglobal.demonow.website/

returns the site HTML. Also

curl --header "X-PSK-Auth:mypassword" "http://cxcglobal.demonow.website/

returns the site source code.

However when I amend the configuration to

<VirtualHost *:80>

    ServerName www.example.com
    ServerAlias origin.www.example.com

    ServerAdmin [email protected]

    DocumentRoot /var/www/www.example.com/trunk

    <IfModule mpm_itk_module>
        AssignUserId www_site www_site
    </IfModule>

    <LocationMatch "^(.*\.php)$">
        ProxyPass fcgi://127.0.0.1:9154/var/www/www.example.com/trunk
    </LocationMatch>

    Alias "/robots.txt" "/var/www/norobots.txt"

    <Directory /var/www/www.example.com>
        RewriteEngine on
        RewriteCond  %{HTTP:X-PSK-Auth}  !^mypassword$
        RewriteRule  .* - [F]

        RewriteCond %{LA-U:WxLaRwvCQ2yAf5KJREMOTE_USER} !^$
        RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://origin.www.example.com/$1   [P,L]

        AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/staging.passwd
        AuthType Basic
        AuthName "Review security udpates"
        Require valid-user

        LogLevel alert rewrite:trace3

    </Directory>

    CustomLog /var/www/www.example.com/apachelogs/www.example.com-access.log combined
    ErrorLog /var/www/www.example.com/apachelogs/www.example.com-error.log

</VirtualHost>

I get an error:

curl http://www.example.com/
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>401 Unauthorized</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Unauthorized</h1>
<p>This server could not verify that you
are authorized to access the document
requested.  Either you supplied the wrong
credentials (e.g., bad password), or your
browser doesn't understand how to supply
the credentials required.</p>
<hr>
<address>Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu) Server at origin.www.example.com Port 80</address>
</body></html>

for both curl requests. I have no errors in the site-specific error log, nor in the global apache error log. I can also not find any entries for the rewrite log.

I have a website hosted on EC2 with most css, JS and images loaded from Cloudfront. There is a consistent problem that even small css and js files have 1-2 seconds time to first byte, even where there is a cache hit on Cloudfront. Here is a screenshot from websitepulse:

None of these css files are particularly large. I have also run this test twice straight after each other, but there seems to be no difference.

Is there any limit I may be hitting on Cloudfront? Or any sort of interdependence of requests because of HTTP2?

I have a chain of devices connected to the Internet:

1. Draytek 2120n-plus Fibre router in a Metal Shed - Internet connection
2. TP-Link AV500 Powerline Adapter
3. Draytek 2760 VDSL Router, used as Wireless Hub
4. Linksys SPA2102 VOIP router

These devices are linked up without any special settings that I can remember. The VOIP router is configured according to my VOIP providers guide: http://blog.2talk.co.nz/spa2102.html

Generally, when computers are connected to 1. or 3. through Wifi they work very well. However on 3. I found that browsing, Skype, SSH sessions and any other application regularly "stall". No data seems to be flowing for about 30-90 seconds after which everything is back to normal. This happens every 10 minutes or so.

To troubleshoot this I reduced the MTU on 3. to 1300. This seems to have fixed the stalling problem, however I can now no longer use the VOIP device, I get no dial tone, nor any ringing out.

An Internet search indicates that there is no MTU setting in the SPA 2102 router.

I could also not find any MTU size for Ethernet over Powerline, so I presume this runs on an MTU of 1500?

How would I determine what an appropriate MTU is, I guess it should be 1492, but obviously I also want to eliminate the stalling

Some information on further network devices:

• 1. has a simple switch connected with 1-2 computers and a printer, however the switch is not in between 1. and 2.
• 3. has usually 2 mobile phones connected by Wifi and sometimes another 2 computers.

I have a 9.2GB file which I want to transfer into my AWS t2.small instance for backup purposes. When I start scp, it copies the file at around 3.4MB per second, which results in about 45 minutes expected transfer time.

Some time down the track the instance always locks up. I cannot type anything anymore in terminal windows, websites stall (its a web server) and I can't connect to it. Rebooting the instance solves the problem.

I investigated EBS limits: I have 2 RAID10 200GB gp2 disks attached. From this documentation I cannot see that I exceed IOPS or throughput for the disk. I also checked bandwidth, but cannot see any information on t2 instances in there. Finally I looked at CPU credits, but presumably it should not completely stall?

This is a one off transfer, so I'm looking to get an idea of how much I have to slow down the transfer to make it happen safely. At the same time I'd like to get an idea of limits for management of this web server.

To access a windows machine remotely I have to tunnel through a ubuntu server of mine. To setup the tunnel I have

ssh -l root -C -L 9999:windowsmachine:23389 myserver

Then I have to open another console and run

rdesktop -u user -password -f localhost:9999

How can I combine these in a single command or script?

I have /etc/cron.d/remote-server-backup as follows:

***starts***
MAILTO="[email protected]"
23 1,7,13,19 * * * root /usr/local/bin/backup-server nzs1.automatem.co
43 2,8,14,20 * * * root /usr/local/bin/backup-server nzs2.automatem.co

***ends***

The script is custom written and performs an incremental backup with rsync.

I'm finding that nzs2.automatem.co script runs every 6 hours, the nzs1.automatem.co script runs never. I don't get any emails on [email protected]. When I run from command line nzs1.automatem.co, it performs the backup correctly.

My Environment is Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

How can I get the first line to run automatically?

I have an EBS backed EC2 instance, which doesn't start The system log says:

    [    0.881605] Write protecting the kernel read-only data: 1196k

    Loading, please wait...

        %GCouldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console
    Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console
    Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console
    Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console
    Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console
    Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console
    Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console
    Begin: Loading essential drivers... ...
    [    1.006136] fuse init (API version 7.12)

    Done.
    Begin: Running /scripts/init-premount ...
    Done.
    Begin: Mounting root file system... ...
    Begin: Running /scripts/local-top ...
    Done.
    Begin: Waiting for root file system... ...
    Done.
    Begin: Running /scripts/local-premount ...
    Done.
    [    1.320965] kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds

    [    1.320984] EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with writeback data mode.

    Begin: Running /scripts/local-bottom ...
    Done.
    Done.
    Begin: Running /scripts/init-bottom ...
    Begin: Starting AppArmor profiles ...
    chroot: cannot execute /etc/apparmor/initramfs: No such file or directory
    Failure: AppArmor profiles failed to load
    Done.
    [    3.741464] EXT3-fs warning: checktime reached, running e2fsck is recommended

    [    3.742696] EXT3 FS on sda1, internal journal

    init: console-setup main process (2139) terminated with status 1


        %Ginit: plymouth main process (341) killed by SEGV signal

    init: plymouth-splash main process (2431) terminated with status 2

    init: squid main process (2493) killed by ABRT signal

    cloud-init running: Sun, 02 Dec 2012 20:36:06 +0000. up 5.77 seconds
    init: ureadahead-other main process (2511) terminated with status 4

    swapon: /dev/sda3: swapon failed: Device or resource busy
    mountall: swapon /dev/sda3 [2513] terminated with status 255
    mountall: Problem activating swap: /dev/sda3
    init: ureadahead-other main process (2522) terminated with status 4

    mountall: Disconnected from Plymouth
    Close

Does this mean there is a problem with my sda1 disk? I have a snapshot that I could use instead.

I have a 1TB xfs volumne on Amazon EBS, which contains 246GB of incremental backups, created with rsync and hardlinking. I want to copy this to a new, smaller disk.

The problem is it doesn't seem to fit into a 300GB disk. Is there any block size that I can investigate or something? I have recently removed 700GB of backups, do I need to clear something off? I'm using cp -R to copy between the mounted volumes

My Ubuntu 12.04 server comes with this cron job, which must be for cleaning up PHP session files

find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin +24 ! -execdir fuser -s {} ; -delete

In my folder there are currently ca 1110000 such files and the server performance deteriorates because the clean up process never finishes. The server is virtual on a Xen platform.

Is there a more performant method available?

I have setup a web server on Amazon with 3 Virtual hosts. For some reason I can't get any of the sites going on it, they all show a 404 error. /var/log/apache2/error.log shows "File does not exist: /etc/apache2/htdocs"

I have checked:

• a2ensite all my virtual hosts
• actually checked softlinks in sites-enabled
• access rights in /var/www to 777, in case user is not www-data
• grep -r htdocs /etc/apache2 (returns nothing)
• ports.conf has NameVirtualHost directive exactly matching Virtual Hosts

What else could this be?

ports.conf 

# If you just change the port or add more ports here, you will likely also
# have to change the VirtualHost statement in
# /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
# This is also true if you have upgraded from before 2.2.9-3 (i.e. from
# Debian etch). See /usr/share/doc/apache2.2-common/NEWS.Debian.gz and
# README.Debian.gz

NameVirtualHost 107.20.169.163:80
Listen 80

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
    # If you add NameVirtualHost *:443 here, you will also have to change
    # the VirtualHost statement in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl
    # to <VirtualHost *:443>
    # Server Name Indication for SSL named virtual hosts is currently not
    # supported by MSIE on Windows XP.
    Listen 443
</IfModule>

<IfModule mod_gnutls.c>
    Listen 443
</IfModule>


sites-available/www.seleconlight.com


<VirtualHost 107.20.169.163:80>

ServerName www.seleconlight.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/www.seleconlight.com

CustomLog /var/log/apache2/www.seleconlight.com-access.log combined
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/www.seleconlight.com-error.log

</VirtualHost>

We are testing a file transfer script that is started through a client session on a terminal server - the client is Ubuntu rdesktop. What we find is that the session is disconnected after a while, even though the file transfer is still running.

Is this a time out setting in Terminal server or likely another problem. Note that we probably don't have any "client activity", only the file transfer is running. It is a simple file copy to a locally mounted drive.

We built web applications which create a fair amount of transactional emails, such as tickets, reminders and logging messages. These emails are typically sent to end users, but most of them are also sent to users inside the client organisation, directly or via Bcc.

Our solutions are typically hosted on a web server separate from the email server and outside of the clients network.

We are finding that we have a lot of problems with email delivery to client internal staff, ie. The Bcc messages are not delivered due to spam filtering. Many of the email servers are Exchange with external add-on packages like Trendmicro, Symantec and GFI-Maxmail. Often we don't have control over the settings of the spam filters or getting around the spam filter requires to send from a specific email account - where we would rather send from the internal staff member.

I've followed Amazon SES and it appears to be a viable alternative, the cost of sending the emails certainly outweighs the effort of getting through spam filters and support requests.

Has something like Amazon SES improved anyone here on Serverfault's chances getting through spam filters? A subjective answer is fine.

You can assume that emails have non-critical content, have valid sender addresses and that SPF is setup correctly.

I have the following 2 domain records

website.com 10.0.0.1
www.website.com 10.0.0.1

I have(had) the following 2 Virtualhosts

#note how the IP address is wrong
<VirtualHost 10.0.0.2:80>

    ServerName website.com
    Redirect / http://www.website.com

</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost 10.0.0.1:80>

    ServerName www.website.com
  #note how there is no alias here
    DocumentRoot /var/www/www.website.com

    <IfModule mpm_itk_module>
            AssignUserId www-website www-website
    </IfModule>

    CustomLog /var/log/apache2/www.website.com-access.log combined
    ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/www.website.com-error.log

</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost 10.0.0.1:443>
    ServerName www.website.com

    DocumentRoot /var/www/www.website.com

    <IfModule mpm_itk_module>
            AssignUserId www-website www-website
    </IfModule>

    SSLEngine On
    SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/www.website.com

    CustomLog /var/log/apache2/www.website.com-ssl-access.log combined
    ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/www.website.com-ssl-error.log

</VirtualHost>

I expected that a request to http://website.com would be returned with a 404. However it was served as if it was delivered from http://www.website.com. Why?

When using gnome file roller (Archive manager), it never seems to overwrite existing files, independent from access rights. There is also no error message.

Is this expected functionality?