Ottawa Valley SAGE

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For those who are unaware, the LISA 2010 conference registration has been opened. Visit the Usenix event page for detailed information and to register.

For the unknowing or uninformed, LISA is the big annual System Administration conference sponsored by Usenix. LOPSA has a hand in there as well. If you are really going to make this a career and not just a job, you should attend one of these conferences. Words do not really describe the experience. Ask Kelly some time.

To give you an idea of what is happening, this is the schedule for the week:

I have uploaded the config files I talked about during the meeting. These files make reference to some extra items such as greylisting and spamassassin, as well as the use of self-signed SSL certificates. You will notice a new menu item on the site under About called ovSAGE Downloads. Go there for the tarball which contains the default and production files as well as diff files for each pair.

The main documents for all of this are located on the CentOS website. The following items describe the docs and their locations:

• If you are starting over, the basic postfix install document is located here: Postfix HOWTO
• In order to do the greylisting under postfix, have a look at the Greylisting HOWTO
• To get spamassassin running, you need the spamassassin rpm installed. There is a HOWTO on using it along with anti-virus software at PostfixMail.com. I believe I just installed the package, enabled it and ran the update rules script to get it working. This site is a little more ambitious.
• One final item is creating and managing self-signed SSL certificates. I normally do this from the command line, but I had heard of a project for keeping track and managing them. It’s called tinyCA and you can find it at sm-zone.net. It uses  X-windows, so you will need to run it on one of your unix boxes. I can go over the usage next meeting after the presentation, but it is pretty straight forward and playing with it should work out OK. Don’t worry if you mess up at first, just revoke and delete any bad certificates. Unless you are a security paranoid and like generating certificates, make your certs longer than one year.

I think that covers everything. I am using all of the stuff we discussed to redo the ovsage mail server and provide authenticated SMTP from outside as well as secure IMAP access for my smartphone and laptop.

A future session will cover setting up squirrelmail as an SSL protected web front-end to your mailserver. As I have not installed this yet, I’ll probably do it live so you can all see it being done.

It’s amazing what you can fix by looking at a problem again after leaving it alone. After the server change, OS upgrade, new install, etc., one would think that everything would be simple. Well, it actually is. One of those odd little things that you need to do if you are using “pretty permalinks” is to fix the default apache configuration to allow overrides on file info. That was the whole issue. It made sense later when I remembered I had been running the old webserver and configuration for better than 10 years (with lots of changes).

Like I said. Amazing!

I’ve been delaying doing an upgrade to the latest-greatest until I had a few free hours. I made all the necessary backups, made a database backup and clicked on the upgrade button (This is a major revision upgrade). less than 2 minutes later, the whole upgrade is complete, the database has been upgraded and it looks like all the plugins are happy as well.

Another ringing endorsement for WordPress.

It looks like my remaining hard drive on the old web server is finally giving up the ghost. I will be migrating everything over to the new server this weekend, so there may be additional outages when I decide to make the cut-over, but this should be a flash cut via a firewall rule change.

I was a bit surprised when I checked the site earlier and nothing happened, attempts to log onto the server were also met with no response. A quick check on the hardware and I saw the message: Disk0: Fail, Disk1: Fail on the RAID enclosure. It’s really too bad the box doesn’t support drives larger than 80GB, but it was made many years ago. It’s also too bad I couldn’t find an additional 20GB disk in my collection with sufficiently close drive parameters to fix the mirror. Oh well, I’ve been putting it off for months now, so this is the best time to do it.

The presentation we had on a cloud-based virtual environment was quite interesting. We ended up going for just under two hours on the topic. Lots of technical discussion on how it works, the software choices and issues such as scalability, security, privacy, etc. all came up.

I may just have to sign up for a trial account just to see how it behaves. I’ve seen a number of environments that had this idea over the past 10 years, but this one may be “the one.” The concept is good, the timing is good and the implementation appears to be solid. It has pretty much anything you could want for a small virtual office and it offloads having a desktop support person on site. This is not to say there isn’t room for improvement and extra features, but the foundations appear to be solid and all of the basics are covered.

The URL is http://www.eseri.com/ and it is worth taking a look at.

Everything is based on open source software and it is all accessed via No Machine’s NX client. This provides a lightweight secure access method and the remote desktop is quite responsive. If I remember some tests I did a few years ago with a dial-up link, it was painful but usable at 9600, tolerable at 14.4 and worked pretty good above that.

It seems to have propagated rather quickly. I suspect some web-caching devices may take longer, but the three different external sites I have tried all show it as up and visible. That’s rather encouraging really.

For those looking for a web host, I have managed to find a couple of Canadian ones that have reasonable rates. I’ll post some info later, as I’d like to pull a couple of sites I have in the US back to Canada. One looks really good, but doesn’t offer secure connectivity. That I can’t really deal with. Another offers SFTP, so that’s a step in the right direction. Ideally ssh is my connectivity of choice, as it makes editing go so much faster.

As a result of this exercise, I’ll probably post a list of providers and their features that I care about. I don’t know if everyone else is as paranoid as I am, so we will see how it goes.

I’m, changing ISPs and as a result, the site may end up down while I get everything fixed up. Hopefully the changes will occur overnight and it will be quick and dirty, but I am not sure how long it will take for the changes to propagate. The short answer is that I’m expecting it all to be transparent, but you never know.

Title: June Meeting
Location: Pythian
Link out: Click here
Description:

This month we will be having a presentation from Eseri on virtual environments. Their description follows:

Cloud Computing technology is progressing at several layers – OS virtualization, data-center virtualization, browser based application delivery, and desktop virtualization. Eseri is a local company that has integrated a full organization IT solution from the best of the world’s open source, from hosted Intranet to desktops to applications, and host it in the cloud for access on virtual desktops. Eseri CTO and VP Engineering will demonstrate their solution, describe the architecture, and discuss the security advantages of the virtual desktop approach to the cloud.

Time availability will dictate if we get to continuing the server project. This month we will be adding a basic web server and webmail to the system

Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2010-06-17
End Time: 21:30