Category: System Administration
Manual networking for KVM
I found the networking configured by libvirt (KVM) did not allow me to firewall the network as I desired. I use Shorewall for firewalling, and DNSMasq for internal DNS and DHCP. After a little experimentation, I found that I could configure Ubuntu to create the network. This allows me to get a reliable firewall configuration with a…
Remote Desktops with VNC and RDP
I find it useful to have a remote desktop to my Ubuntu systems. On secure connections, I have been using VNC via xinetd. Connections with xrdp where possible, but it wasn’t launching the desktop for the connection. For secure terminal connections, I stick with ssh. All these connections have a login at the start of the…
Firewalling Google Chat and Skype
To enable for Internet chat I set up Google Chat and Skype. My firewall rules have been extremely restrictive with only known and approved services allowed to connect. Google Chat installed with no noticeable impact to the firewall. Things did not go so well with Skype. The installation of Skype resulted in lots of warnings…
Setting up Squid Proxy on Ubuntu
Squid is a proxy service for HTTP and other requests. This article covers installing it and configuring it to run on Ubuntu as a transparent proxy. This documentation includes configuring Web Proxy Auto-Discovery (WPAD) via DHCP and DNS. I run a heterogeneous configuration. This provided a number of challenges as various implementations of WPAD were encountered. Each seems to…
Connecting a Palm via USB
The computer to which I had been synchronizing my Palm Tungsten E died a while ago. I explored the two options for connecting to my Ubuntu system using a USB cable. The fastest is to use a direct USB connection. However, I wanted to ensure I could synchronize over a network connection. I also configured…
Analog with Report Magic and Logwrangler
I am now using Report Magic for Analog with my Analog installation. My last attempt had failed miserably, but this time it went extremely well. I found Logwrangler which does a lot of the work. I encountered an incompatibility between Report Magic and an updated graphics library. Once the patch was applied the program ran…
Analog for Multiple Sites
Analog is a fast and flexible web log analysis tool. Its configuration can consist of several files nested using include statements. This allows common configuration items to be grouped in separate files. The minimal site specific configuration items can be contained in small include files. Similarly, time period specific include files allow for reports by…
Monitoring with Munin
Munin is a system monitoring program designed to capture and graph performance statistics with minimal configuration. It is significantly easier to configure than MRTG and has a wide variety of plugins. The Ubuntu (Debian) installer will setup a reasonable configuration on installation. It requires one server, and a client daemon on all monitored servers including…
Installing WordPress on Ubuntu
WordPress is available as a packaged application for Ubuntu. However it requires a bit of post installation configuration. The installation will install the apache2 multi-user server if no server is installed. I modified the installation to run over top of an existing site. The default installation creates directories under /var/www, which I move to /srv.