[ t h e f r a g g l e . c o m ]

Well reading popeys blog entry on how many servers he has, and what he uses them for made me feel a bit better than I did previously, about running more than one server of my own for personal use. I only have three servers, and a workstation and a laptop; maybe I don’t waste as much electricity as I thought I did

• etch.thefraggle.com – Debian etch, xen vps from bitfolk; general webserver for www.thefraggle.com, and master mail server.
• sarge.thefraggle.com – Debian etch, xen vps from bitfolk; run’s IRCd’s for blitzed.org and nixhelp.org and tertiary mail exchanger.
• beastie.thefraggle.com – FreeBSD-6.2-stable on an old p2 400mhz 128mb ram; used to run an ircd for nixhelp, and thefraggle.com website, but now has been retired to being a development machine and tertiary mail exchanger.
• laptop – centrino duo 1.7ghz 1gb ram; work laptop with winxp / debian etch for work stuff

There’s actually another box there, my dads p4 3ghz, that I have pretty much nicked off him for day to day internetting . I suppose the fact that I have three servers kind of means I am pretty geeky?

Would be interesting if anyone reading this also commented with what they use .

Came up against the strangest problem the other day, which in the end made it blatantly clear that the most simple 1st checks should always be done; that is things like disk space etc.

A server I have access too uses LDAP for user info and Kerberos5 for realm authentication. It was reported that this server wasn’t letting anyone login via ssh, and the only way that I was able to login, was via the console connection for the box (so essentially the only way to connect was locally).

I was able to prove that LDAP lookups were working, by simply id’ing on user accounts I knew to not exist locally which were stored in LDAP. I was also able to init a kerberos ticket when logged in, and login as ldap/krb5 users “locally”.

After a while of faffing about, enabling debug logging on sshd and so on, it dawned on me to check the disk space, thanks to an odd I/O moan in the sshd debug log. Low and behold! the partition where the kerberos key cache for ssh was completely full!

It goes to show that even simple checks like that which sometimes seem noddy, should always be done!

A while back at work I had to create a configuration for an internal squid http accelerator, and thought “hey, wouldn’t it be neat if I could load balance thefraggle.com with this method”.

Now, usually Squid is used to act as a caching proxy server, which means that client http requests are sent to the proxy server, the proxy server then goes out onto the web and attempts to grab the request, and returns the entry back to the client; in the process caching the pages (depending on the way the cache has been set up).

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Last night I had the idea that it would be nice to login to one of my servers (beastie.thefraggle.com) and grab a look at the squid configuration I wrote a while back to load balance my website, there was a slight problem with that, however; The server was inaccesible.

I’ve now found out that thanks to spammers, exim was using up so much system resource that the server had started swapping, and even running out of swap space!

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Roll on payday, I say.

I’ve been looking at what kit I fancy for my camera when I finally get paid at the end of the month. So far it’s boiled down to two important items:

Canon EF 75-300mm f/4.5-5.6 USM MKIII
Tripod (I’m not yet sure what to get )

I really fancy a prime telephoto and attempting to do some portrait work, but that will have to wait:

Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 USM

It’s only about £250, however, if I’m not careful I’ll end up spending all my wages on kit!!