On a date with bash_history
Ever try to determine what caused the latest outage by trying to determined when a command was last executed?
Look in your .bash_history (if you are running a bash shell), and you will see your recently executed commands. However, it is generally impossible to tell when the command was executed.
yum python logger error bad marshal data
Interesting bug encountered today after a fresh install of RHEL5 from 5.3 media.
When attempting to run the command, ‘yum’. The following error was presented:
# yum
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/yum", line 4, in ?
import yum
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/__init__.py", line 30, in ?
import logging
ValueError: bad marshal data
CentOS5 and PHP52 upgrade rpms
We encounter many scenarios where using the latest version of PHP is required. No great way, aside from downloading the PHP5 source and compiling, is available. That is, until you discover then IUS Community Project.
Upgrade Urchin5 from RHEL3 to RHEL5
Just a quick note about upgrading the operating system, or migrating your Urchin 5 installation from RedHat 3 -> RedHat 5 (or CentOS5).
You think you’ve done everything properly, and you probably did. But you are getting some DNS resolution error messages like:
Installing IonCube in cPanel
To install IonCube loading in cPanel, run the following as root:
# /scripts/phpext
You can then check if ionCube was installed by running:
# php -v Read more
Great security and auditing resource for your network
The Center for Internet Security has a great list of security configuration and audit guidelines.
A great resource comprised of 40+ consensus Security Configuration Benchmarks for Operating Systems, Middleware, Software Applications and Network Devices.
The Benchmarks are:
- Recommended technical control rules/values for hardening operating systems, middleware and software applications, and network devices;
- Unique, because the recommendations are defined via consensus among hundreds of security professionals worldwide;
- Downloaded approximately 1 million times per year;
- Distributed freely by CIS in .PDF format (some are available to CIS Members only in XML format via the CIS Members web site);
- Used by thousands of enterprises as the basis for security configuration policies and the de facto standard against which to compare them.
Visit the benchmark/tools page to download your copy.
Python password generator
Here is a simple few liner password generator written in compact python.
import string as s; from random import choice as c
x=10; print ''.join([c(s.letters + s.digits) for i in range(x)])
# python pw.py
Bz7DKuzqCL
Amazon EC2 benchmark – performance
“Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers”, according to to Amazon.
All EC2 instances are sold based on hourly usage and instance type. Each instances type consists of a certain number of EC2 Compute Units (ECU) and a set RAM size. One EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor. Since the ECU is such a vague definition, I wanted to see some benchmarks (but couldn’t find any).
The information below is completly CPU based (using the Python Pystone test), and does not take into account any other factors.
MySQL Backup User Privilege Grant
LOCK TABLES and SELECT are the minimal requirements to use ‘mysqldump’.
You can use the following grant statement to create a user with as little privileges as possible: Read more
CUPS Purging not-completed print jobs older than..
When working with CUPS using remote print queues, you may find that the remote printer is not always available, has timed out, ran out of paper, has a paper jam, etc. Sometimes this causes a job to ‘not-complete’ and when running ‘lpstat -o’, you see old print jobs.
We put together a quick script to auto-purge these jobs. Hopefully this helps someone in the future.