By default, when the user installs software through the RPM Package Manager or through YUM, usually, the software’s configuration files included in the RPM do not replace the existing configuration files on the filesystem, but, if they differ from those that currently exist, they are saved with the rpmnew extension. In case the rpm is [...]

It’s been a long time since the last time I checked the available software for managing long running processes. Software in this particular area has evolved and, after some research and testing on a virtual machine, I tried to install supervisord in a CentOS 5.6 box. Unfortunately, no RPM package exists for the latest 3.X [...]

Red Hat used to release its kernel SRPM package including a tarball of the vanilla kernel sources and a set of custom patches. This made it possible to rebuild the kernel with or without patches or with a custom selection of patches. It seems that things have changed and Red Hat now releases the Red [...]

I feel that the long awaited CentOS 6 will be out soon. This is a very important release for all the things I am involved with and have to do with computers. CentOS 5 was perfect, but I had to maintain several custom builds of RPMs, mainly rebuilds of Fedora RPMs plus some private builds, [...]

dnsmasq is a lightweight, open-source DNS forwarder and DHCP server. In this article we go through how to prepare the system in order to run dnsmasq and also how to configure the latter as a caching-only DNS server. A configuration file is also provided as a drop-in replacement for the default dnsmasq.conf that ships with [...]

This is a quick note that mod_wsgi daemon processes are now incompatible with mod_python. Upgraded mod_wsgi earlier today in CentOS and saw the following note. I guess this limitation has been around for a while before affecting CentOS/RHEL:

The last incident with the php-cgi errors as a result of a bad PHP script made me re-evaluate the daily reports I receive from the server. I realized that a report about the httpd errors that have occured during the previous day, including all virtualhosts, is more important than I had initially thought. Such a [...]

This is just a quick notice that during the last five days there was a problem with the website feeds. The web server returned a 500 Internal Server Error to almost all requests for /feed/ URLs. Also, there was a big increase of the server’s CPU load behind the scenes, which was caused by php-cgi [...]

I can still recall the excitement of the first time I tried to access and administer a remote system using SSH. Accessing my shell at a remote machine securely, being able to do local and remote port forwarding in order to access remote services through encrypted tunnels, X forwarding, secure file transfers using scp or [...]

It seems there is an issue with the Spamassassin FH_DATE_PAST_20XX test. This test checks whether the email has a date in the future and, if this is the case, raises the message’s score. Apparently, this test is falsely triggered by all emails that have been sent in 2010, producing several false positives. Since, I do [...]