I ordered the wrong RAM for the motherboard in my new gateway machine. When did I discover this? When I powered it up for the first time, I heard a series of 5 short beeps, 1 one beep. Looking that up in the manual and found: 5 short beeps + 1 long Memory error No memory detected in the beep system Oh. So I rechecked that the sticks were in the right slots, […]
How not to order RAM for your motherboard Read More »
All parts for the server and the gateway have been ordered. The first deliveries are expected today. Here is the list of what arrives when. Friday 11 Jan 2013 All the internal parts for the server, except those shown below, via UPS. (delivered) Case for Gateway, via UPS. (delivered) Saturday 12 Jan 2013 The 8x2TB HDD for the server ZFS array, via FedEx. (delivered) Tuesday 15 Jan 2013 The main shipment of the
This server describe herein is now known as knew. This is the fourth in a series of posts about building a new server. What’s happened since the last post? I’ve upgraded to an LSI SAS card. Why? Better throughput. And LSI is well supported on FreeBSD. This card is not used for RAID. It is used strictly as a disk controller and the disks will be presented to the OS as JBOD. Background:
Designing a new server, part IV Read More »
After my first draft, I discovered a few things: The motherboard was socket type LGA 1156 The CPU was socket type LGA 1155 NewEgg doesn’t list any LGA 1156 CPUs The board has SATA 3 The drives were SATA 6 Using an Active PFC PSU with my plain 6+ year old UPS will cause the PSU to shutdown when the UPS switches to battery Here is the new list: case – Fractal Design
Creating a new gateway box, part II Read More »
In an effort to ruthlessly eradicate legacy, I’ve decided to upgrade my gateway at the same time as I’m upgrading my development server. NOTE: the list of components, which appears below, has been updated in this post. The gateway box, which I think is about 10 years old, which contains these snippets from /var/run/dmesg.boot: CPU: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.00GHz (1999.95-MHz 686-class CPU) real memory = 536870912 (512 MB) This box runs: OpenVPN as
Creating a new gateway box Read More »
This is the third in a series of posts about building a new server. What’s happened since? My main development server is acting up again. One of the two HDD in the gmirror has gone off line. Also, I recently read an article about an interesting scam which introduced me to the phrase ruthlessly eradicate legacy. That phrase and strategy lodged firmly in my brain. Those two triggers, along with the urge to
Designing a new server, part III Read More »
People often talk about security. There are many different types of security. Personal security. Security theater. Physical security. In this post, we’ll talk about securing communications channels so that others cannot listen in, and so that others cannot connect. In this article, I’ll talk about using a toolkit, ssl-admin, to create a certificate authority, create self-signed certificates, and use them for both backups (via Bacula) and for a VPN (using OpenVPN). We will
I wrote this some time ago, but never published it. Here we go… Bacula is a fantastic backup solution. It’s open source. It uses a database to keep track of backups. I’ve been writing recently about using ssl-admin as a certificate authority tool. Today, I started using ssl-admin for generating certificates for my backup clients. In this post, I’m using Bacula 5.2.12 and using this reference page as a guide. I started playing
Bacula: TLS Allowed CN Read More »
I found this special idea about banning spammers: echo “select comment_author_IP from wp_comments where comment_approved = ‘spam'” | \ mysql –skip-column-names -u root wordpress_danlangilleorg | \ xargs -n 1 -J % sudo pfctl -t idiots -T add % Anyone care to explain how this works?
Greylisting is an interesting approach to spam. I first started using it in the form of OpenBSD’s pf and spamd tools back in 2007. That said, I now let Google handle my incoming email. Today I was trying to get spamd-setup to run: spamd-setup: Can’t connect to spamd on port 8026: Connection refused I couldn’t figure that one out. But eventually I stumbled upon it… The problem was spamlogd. It wasn’t running. So
spamlogd not running; spamd-setup won’t run Read More »