JC Web Concepts - Custom Web Developments

Well I got Snow Leopard. I was excited at first cause I was thinking of the great features. After installing it I realized that I did not really get much. Now I am sure my thoughts are going to change real fast. I do like that Quicktime X has a screen recorder. That saves me from having to buy one. In a few days I want to write up a detailed pro and cons of Leopard. I need to use it for a few days so I can give a better review.

Oh I found a good website that shows the applications that run good, somewhat good, and not at all with Snow Leopard. http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/

Well earlier today I was looking around and I found an article about an application for Linux called WineXS. This application is a front end for wine in Linux. Wine is an application that will let you install some Windows applications and games. So let me show you how to install this app. The first thing you need to do is install wine. If you have wine installed then you can skip that step.

jcostanzo@jcwebconcepts:~$ sudo apt-get update

jcostanzo@jcwebconcepts:~$ sudo apt-get install wine

jcostanzo@jcwebconcepts:~$ cd /home/jcostanzo

jcostanzo@jcwebconcepts:~$ wget http://tsx.nl/files/winexs-1.4.2.tgz

jcostanzo@jcwebconcepts:~$ tar zxvf winexs-1.4.2.tgz

jcostanzo@jcwebconcepts:~$ cd winexs

jcostanzo@jcwebconcepts:~$ ./winexs

That is it. You can now start to use the app with all its glory.

Well today at work I was given a task to backup a server then reformat the machine and setup a new one. So I sat to think about how am I going to back this up. Am I only going to backup certain files? Or should I just do the whole system? I chose to do the whole system due to age of the OS and applications. What if I needed to go back to the way it was.

So I thought I would just quickly show you the single command I ran that did the work for me. I mount my terabyte drive to the system and ran the following:

tar cvzpf /mnt/extdrive/backupfilename.tgz --same-owner --exclude=/mnt/extdrive/backupfilename.tar.gz --exclude=/proc/* --exclude=/media/* --exclude=/dev/* --exclude=/mnt/* --exclude=/sys/* --exclude=/tmp/* /

That is what I did to do my backup. If you want to use this you can but you might need to make some changes. If you like this backup method and it works for you, you can put it in a bash script and setup a cron to do this on a regular basis.

#!/bin/bash
 
tar cvzpf /mnt/extdrive/backupfilename.tgz --same-owner --exclude=/mnt/extdrive/backupfilename.tar.gz --exclude=/proc/* --exclude=/media/* --exclude=/dev/* --exclude=/mnt/* --exclude=/sys/* --exclude=/tmp/* /

Save the file then do:

chmod a+x filename

Add it to the crontab and you are done

Well at work I have been messing with a server application call Nagios. This app is used to monitor your servers for certain issues. It can monitor anything from file space to processes running. It will ping servers and you will be notified if it has gone down. Now at first this is a little tricky to setup but once you do it you will get use to it. Now I have this running on Ubuntu servers. I do have some Windows servers but monitoring on those are limited. I will be trying to do this on some other versions of linux like gentoo or red hat. So lets get into this. Before you start this you would want to make sure that you have a configured and working Apache/www server running. You will need this for the GUI interface.

First thing you need to do is find the server that is going to be the master server. The master server will hold the Nagios Server app. To install the server on Ubuntu do the follow:

# sudo apt-get update
# sudo apt-get install nagios3

During install you will need to tell nagios how you want to setup a mail server. The choices are Internet Site, Internet with smarthost, Satellite system, and Local only. Now the Internet with smarthost will take you thru setting up to use sendmail to point to another mail server. Internet Site will setup sendmail to send mail to the internet by itself. I am going to choose Internet Site. It will ask you for the System mail name will be your domain name.

Now lets setup the nagios user. First thing you want to do is check the /etc/nagios3/cgi.cfg to see what user it is expecting. So open that file and look for this line

authorized_for_system_information=nagios

If you are going to change the username for nagios to the username nagios then when you open the file, I would use vim and do the following command

:% s/nagiosadmin/nagios/g

Now it might show you something like nagiosadmin. You are welcome to change this but you will have to change it in multiple places. You are welcome to do that. I changed mine to just nagios as you can see. So save the file and run the following commands

# cd /etc/nagios3
# sudo htpasswd -c htpasswd.users nagios
<strong>Note</strong>: nagios needs to be what ever username is specifed in the cgi.cfg

So that should be good for a start. Lets start Nagios or restart it.

# sudo /etc/init.d/nagios3 restart

Now in your web browser go to http://ipaddress/nagios3

If something goes wrong or you get permissions error you might have to check the cgi.cfg to make sure your usernames match up. So now that you have a working install it is time to go over some configuration stuff. So lets check the first service that is setup in nagios. Open the localhost_nagios2.cfg in the /etc/nagios3/conf.d/

define host
{
    generic-host;
    host_name localhost
    alias localhost
    address 127.0.0.1
}

This file does not require and editing really. One last thing we want to edit is the contacts.cfg All you have to edit here is the email line to match your email address.

Here below is a video of what I have done above:

So I thought I would write up a tutorial on how to install a web server that will support Apache, PHP, and MySQL. I will go over some configuration file adjustments as well. So lets get into this and lets open up your terminal and do the following:

john@jcwebconcepts.net:~$ sudo taskel install lamp-server

Now during this process you will be asked a few things. You will be asked for a MySQL password. The password you will set will be your root users password. When it is installing PHP it might ask you what type of module do you want to install for. You will want to select Apache2. This will take a few minutes to install. Once done you can open up your web browser and put in the address bar the IP address of your web server.

Now lets edit the default file for your website.

john@jcwebconcepts.net:~$ sudo vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

        # If this is going to be internal only then you can leave this alone
        ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
 
        # Now you need to add the following line. If this will be internal then put internal
        # IP. If this will be external then you would either put domain name or outside IP
        ServerName 192.168.2.110
        # Because you server will support PHP we need to setup a directory index
        DirectoryIndex index.php index.htm index.html
 
        DocumentRoot /var/www
 
                Options FollowSymLinks
                AllowOverride None
 
                Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                AllowOverride None
                Order allow,deny
                allow from all
 
        ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
 
                AllowOverride None
                Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
                Order allow,deny
                Allow from all
 
        ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
 
        # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
        # alert, emerg.
        LogLevel warn
 
        CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
 
    Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"
 
        Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
        Order deny,allow
        Deny from all
        Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128

The directory index basically tells the server what files to look for in one is not specified. For example if I do http://www.jcwebconcepts.net/ the server will look in the server root directory for the following files: index.php index.htm index.html. If they do not exist you will get an error.

And that is it for setting up your own web server in Ubuntu 9.04. I have tried this in the alpha 9.10 and it works as well.