Servers

Okay, let’s pretend that this isn’t the first time that I’ve posted in about a month. School really has been crazy. I haven’t really even had time to do anything new or cool lately. Tonight though, I’m putting school aside.

I’ve been having some problems with one of the daemons on one of my server’s randomly dying on me, and it got to the point that I couldn’t bear it anymore, I had to find a solution.

I’ve been messing around with iptables a bit more than usual the past week or so. Through this process, I decided that it wasn’t worth it for me to keep creating / tweaking all of my rules by hand. So.. I found an Excellent (with a capital ‘E’) frontend to iptables.

For me the frontend had to meet some strict requirements.

1. It must have a curses graphical user interface
2. It must be easy to use

Something called Jay’s Iptables Fits these requirements perfectly.

If you’ve got more than one computer running Debian that packages are downloaded through apt, then apt-cacher should help you a lot.

Apt-cacher is actually a cgi script that is run by apache. Using apt-cacher is very easy, and installing it is even easier.

Step 1: Install apt-cacher.
(Run this on the proxy computer)

apt-get install apt-cacher

Enter the webpage : http://localhost/apt-cacher
to see that the proxy is running.

Step 2: Backup and Convert Clients sources.list.
(Do this on the computers that you want to access the cache.)

I did get something good out of this whole fiasco. When I think of it, this blog being down for a day or so is a small price to pay for the amount of knowledge that I gained relating to setting up apache, mysql, and php… Over and Over Again.

Let me know if there are problems that you see.

I’m pretty sure that mail is all screwed up because I have no mail server, or at least I hope that I don’t (I uninstalled it).

For those of you who have been reading this blog for a while you that in the past I’ve had some problems keeping this server up and running for any amount of time.

This got old because every time that my server died, I’d loose all of my blog posts, which stinks because there’s usually a ton of them.

To combat this ever threatning possibility, I decided to write a bash script for linus that does a few things:

I upate hula one time per week from the Subversion tree. You can find instructions on how to do this in linux at The Hula Blog.

Each time that I update my source code using subversion I get updated versions of the new web prototypes. I put them here so that you can see them.

They’re not going to work completely yet because of the fact that they’re just prototypes.

More Later,
Jon Howe