Archive for the ‘Debian/Ubuntu Administration’ Category

vsftpd setup – the missing information

Tuesday, July 5th, 2011

So I set up vsftpd on my Debian box the other day. I wanted a simple virtual users setup, so I created /etc/vsftpd, moved and symlinked my vsftpd.conf into this directory (to keep Debian happy) and also added a /etc/vsftpd/users.txt file - the source for my db(1) database that pam ...

Tip: Ctrl-R with zsh in GNU screen

Friday, December 18th, 2009

If you can't search the history with zsh in GNU screen, check if Ctrl-R is issued at all through your terminal, ie. by $ cat ^R If this works, append the following keybinding to your ~/.zshrc: bindkey '^R' history-incremental-search-backward (Source)

Simple script to build Dovecot with sieve / managesieve support

Sunday, August 16th, 2009

One important principle in software engineering is DRY - Don't Repeat Yourself. This can of course also be applied on tasks a system administrator has to do over and over again. One of this tasks for me was recently to have a working dovecot installation with sieve support. Unfortunately the authors ...

Useful Gotcha #27

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

If you get this error ssl_error_rx_record_too_long when browsing an SSL-secured virtual host and wonder what the heck is going on (hey, it worked the day before), ensure that you've noticed that your admins have changed the IP address of the machine and that you have to adapt the IP-based VHost ...

Enable more locales in stock Debian installations

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

If you wonder why $ php -r "setlocale(LC_TIME, 'de_DE.UTF-8'); echo strftime ('%A %e %B %Y', mktime (0, 0, 0, 12, 22, 1978));" gives you Freitag 22 Dezember 1978 on most systems like f.e. openSuSE and Ubuntu, but Friday 22 December 1978 on Debian, you need to remember that the Debian guys ...

Hint #746: How to preserve alternative names when signing certificate requests

Monday, January 12th, 2009

If you follow this guide to setup your own CA and your certificate requests contain subjectAltNames (i.e. to match multiple virtual hosts with the same certificate), don't forget to add copy_extensions = copy under the [ CA_default ] section of the default openssl.cnf file. Took me a while to realize... Happy signing!

Server-side email filtering (update)

Monday, November 17th, 2008

If you're having more than one computer where you look regularily for your emails (f.e. at home, at work and while you're on the way) and you get a reasonable amount of (non-spam) emails every day, you probably know the problem: Client-side email filters just don't do it. Being a novice ...

If you’re setting up exim from scratch…

Saturday, September 27th, 2008

...and you're a bloody novice like me, you'll probably stumble upon Marc Merlin's "Very detailled and featureful configuration example". If you use that one and you wonder why on earth people can't authenticate against your local SMTP via PAM, you seek hours and hours in different places, forums, IRC and ...

$_POST empty?!

Saturday, September 20th, 2008

So I was about to SSL-secure my new webmail setup, created a new cert on CAcert, installed it, configured my vhost accordingly, went to the webmail login page and... boom. Login was not possible. No error message, no log message, nothing. What happened? To make a long story short, the PHP superglobal ...

New server setup

Friday, September 19th, 2008

I finally got sick of my SuSE 9.3 V-Server when a good friend of mine pointed me to this really fancy and sexy IMAP web frontend called RoundCube last week. Written entirely in PHP 5 there was no real chance that I could get this easily working on my oldish ...