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 [...]

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/phpextensionmgr install IonCubeLoader
You can then check if ionCube was installed by running:
# php -v

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

RHEL4 Kernel – PowerPath – OCFS2 upgrade procedure

We have been working on a project for a customer to upgrade the kernel, PowerPath, OCFS2 and other operating system patches.  The project was interesting as no single source of information existed on the appropriate process.
The procedure issue comes in because OCFS2 relies on seeing the disks which PowerPath presents.  PowerPath and OCFS2 are reliant [...]