Server Administration Notes

This page has some specific notes/links to more advanced configuration instructions. We have a beginner server administration cheat-sheet for our clients over at Ubuntu VPS Administration. Apache

There's plenty of stuff out there about Apache configuration.
We're currently learning the Debian way, with its tools a2enmod and a2ensite for enabling sites and modules.
For quite some time we've been using mod_authmysql for authentication, a simple module we've compiled for Apache 1 and 2. Now Debian/Apache comes with a similar but different mod_auth_mysql (note the extra underscore in the name).
Here's a helpful site explaining the (slightly different) directives: http://www.cgi101.com/class/password/mod_auth_mysql.html Asterisk @ Home

Our latest venture: Asterisk
Certificate Authority
Running a CA
Backup removable drives

Q: My xterm scrollbar does not work with screen.
A: The problem is that xterm will not allow scrolling if the alternate text buffer is selected. The standard definitions of the termcap initialize capabilities ti and te switch to and from the alternate text buffer. (The scrollbar also does not work when you start e.g. 'vi'). You can tell screen not to use these initialisations by adding the line
termcapinfo xterm ti@:te@
to your ~/.screenrc file. Multi-user screen

Generally, you create it on the machine you're connecting from, and then copy the key to the machine(s) you want to connect to.Open a shell on your client machine (should work on a Mac...)

You may be able to add it to your Mac keychain to really simplify logging in--type your passphrase once, and have access to the machines until you log out.
In Windows, the popular PuTTY program has a key generation function built in.
I often use USB thumbdrives to transfer keys, but you should be able to copy them over using Samba or any other way you can log in... Your id_rsa.pub file is public, and is not at all sensitive--but protect the id_rsa file, and only put it on machines you know you'll need to use for logging in! LTSP
See LTSP notes. Nagios
Nagios
Samba
Auto-configure printers using RAW print spool

We run it with the command line PHP interpretor called from a cron job.
we store it at /var/www/conf/chkdomains.php
chkdomains.php
basic site monitoring script
sends an email when status is different than previous running of the script
installation instructions
create a /var/www/conf directory to store this
/var/www/conf/satus contains the cache result
this must be writable by the user running the job
add a URL to the $site array for each site to check
set $mailto to appropriate email addresses, comma seporated
schedual the cron job (php command line package required php_cli)
The status file needs to be writiable by the script ( a user accont
that runs the script)
on your server that is to be checked, create a textfile called "FILENAME" with your success string, this must match exactly, newlines and whitespace matter.
Testing instructions
delete the domain_uptime.txt
run the script
check the contents of the new domain_uptime.txt file
check your email
files,
on each server, uptime.txt
on monitoring system
/var/www/conf/chkdomains.php (this file)
/var/www/conf/status/domain_uptime.txt conists of 1's and 0's and newlinesJabber Server

http://jabberd.jabberstudio.org/1.4/doc/adminguide
(I finally found some documentation from a link in /usr/share/doc/jabberd/)