307 Hits since January 1970
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307 Hits since January 1970
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Alive and Well after Server HellThis past Thursday, things were looking good. I was preparing to go off on tour with the Jackalopes when the unthinkable happened: the server took a dive. Previously I was able to revive the drive when it experienced an error accessing the filesystem, and the boot record by running linux rescue, but this time, it was too fuddled to bring back to life. Fortunately, I run two servers here. Archiving the sites was done, but the other server was not set up to recieve mail, and to run any number of applications that I had configured before. It was really for development purposes. But this all flew out the window as I was literally offline ten hours before I was to board a ferry to the island. Hell, who needs sleep anyways, right? Getting the sites up and the DNS stuff solved was the least of work. The main mess was getting users and groups, and permissions set, and cgi scripts modded to work on a new server. I must be getting good at this, as I think five hours is not bad to completely change stuff over and have it up and working for the weekend. After that, it was time to build a brand new server. For this I opted to install Fedora Core 4. The benefits of this new distro is mainly fixes from the FC3 experience, which I had been using previously. A few things to note however. For one, Security Enhanced Linux is set up to be paranoid when you first install FC4, and the webserver, FTP, etc., are all disabled at boot time, but it’s quick to get up. There are some bugs I came across, most notably with system-config-security. When you enable the firewall, the GUI app dies with an error that it cannot connect to the correct socket. This could be specific to my setup however, but I’m sure mine is not too unique. It’s a basic server behind a firewall. That you need to take into consideration if your not using a switcher or router in front of it all. The firewall at first denies access to all but the most public of applications, Apache, Mysql, SMTP, FTP, etc. This all means for me that if the firewall is on, I can’t access the SE Linux setup, but it’s quick to fix by disabling the firewall for a few minutes and a reboot. One thing you’ll need to allow is HTTPD to connect to network sockets if you have any scripts that call out to newsfeeds. Overall, however, now with PHP5 and MySQL 4, this server works better than the previous FC3 distro, boots faster. I have noted a few exceptions with Up2date however. It seems not to look out for updates at all at boot time. Perhaps I have not enabled that, but on every other FC distro, it’s been enabled by default. Nothing in the logs suggests it’s bombing out either, and all the correct GPG keys have been created for it. All in all, I’d say FC4 is the most professional Linux distro I have encountered yet.
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