Okay, I’ve been dealing with this problem FOREVER. On one box, my syslog-ng server, logrotate consumes 100% CPU for several hours, but will eventually finish. For this whole time, I’ve been thinking it’s a bad logrotate script, but I’ve never been able to isolate it. My recent attempt to isolate the problem, I used strace… Continue reading Logrotate lockup causing 100% CPU usage

On only two boxes I manage, I had problems updating net-snmp to net-snmp-5.4.2.1. During the compile I would receive the following failure message: chmod 755 ../blib/arch/auto/NetSNMP/TrapReceiver/TrapReceiver.so cp TrapReceiver.bs ../blib/arch/auto/NetSNMP/TrapReceiver/TrapReceiver.bs chmod 644 ../blib/arch/auto/NetSNMP/TrapReceiver/TrapReceiver.bs Manifying ../blib/man3/NetSNMP::TrapReceiver.3pm make[2]: Leaving directory `/var/tmp/portage/net-analyzer/net-snmp-5.4.2.1/work/net-snmp-5.4.2.1/perl/TrapReceiver' make[1]: Leaving directory `/var/tmp/portage/net-analyzer/net-snmp-5.4.2.1/work/net-snmp-5.4.2.1/perl' Traceback (most recent call last): File "setup.py", line 2, in <module> from setuptools… Continue reading Issues with net-snmp update on some boxes

Over the years, I’ve set up multiple firewalls and fileservers for clients and my own office. What I require is a server platform that is Gentoo Linux friendly with quality components and at an affordable price. Early on, I was a big fan of the Dell PowerEdge 400SC. I remember picking those up (without operating… Continue reading Dell PowerEdge SC Servers – great deals for linux servers

I wanted to tighten up my FTP service. Currently, I use and love vsftpd. Unfortunately, as far as I know, it does not support SFTP protocol, but it does support TLS/SSL handling. You will need to ensure that the vstpd has been compiled with ssl support. Here are my current USE flags for vsftpd: net-ftp/vsftpd-2.0.6… Continue reading Configuring VSFTPD for secure connections (TLS/SSL)

Starting Nov 8, I’ve been seeing fairly consistent segfaults from amavisd. I’m unable to determine what is causing it. Below is a listing of occurances in /var/log/messages. The server has been running fine (normal load – mail traffic is normal). Also I checked uptime (reboot was Nov.1) and recent emerges. The only emerges close Nov.8… Continue reading Amavisd-new starting to segfault?

Earlier this year, I was receiving logs stating that dansguardian could not connect to IPC socket. I just recently upgraded dansguardian (2.10-r1) and finally found the problem. I originally posted this issue in February on the Gentoo forums and didn’t receive any response. Today, I found the problem and the fix. Below is an example… Continue reading Dansguardian – Error connecting via ipc to log [SOLVED]

I was bummed out when the Gentoo maintainers removed osiris from portage due to inactivity. Because of this I had to ‘unmask’ this package to keep my system somewhat happy. I’ve been a big fan of osirisd/osirismd for a long long time. I think it’s the best file integrity checker out there. I always hated… Continue reading Osiris Update – Went Smooth

Started seeing some MSN Featured Offer Spam on one of my mailservers. The annoying part is that has a forged ‘from’ value to match the recipient. On top of that, it’s being sent from a secondary MX server which is allowing relaying to my domains. So I can’t block that server from sending it, and… Continue reading MSN Featured Offer Spam – Spamassasin rule to stop it

So a buddy of mine told me about Synergy and I had to try it out for myself. Basically, Synergy allows you to manage keyboard, video and mouse across computers using a single host. Now, when I heard this, I didn’t think it was a big deal. Just another KVM or something to that affect.… Continue reading Synergy

Sometimes with Gentoo you’ll run across some weird ‘blocker’ issues. Meaning that certain older packages/libraries/etc are blocked in order to do the update. Sometimes these are super easy to fix, usually by unmerging the blocked packages and emerging the new update package. Sometimes, it’s a pain. The e2fsprogs and e2fsprogs-lib blocker problem is an example… Continue reading Quick fix for e2fsprogs, com_err, and ss blockers