sysadmin

All posts tagged sysadmin

Remote system logging on modern machines with rsyslog

Posted by Matthew on January 10, 2013
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: , , . Leave a Comment

Like all things Linux, there are a dozen ways to do anything, and dozens of how-to guides on how to do it wrong. System logging is no exception. Modern Ubuntu distributions use rsyslog, so this is a guide to setting up remote system logging between two modern Ubuntu machines.

System logging is the way that a computer deals with all the info and error messages generated by the kernel, drivers, and userland applications that should be saved in case they are useful, but aren’t generally immediately needed by the user. So generally the messages are sent to your locally-running rsyslog program, and saved to /var/log/syslog. Remote system logging is where one computer (computer Alpha) will send out all its system messages to a different computer (computer Beta), to be processed/stored there. This can be useful if computer Alpha (the log sender) is having hardware troubles and frequently crashing, making it nice to have a record of what happened in the final few seconds before the crash.

Changes on the log receiver (computer Beta)
Edit the file /etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf. Add these lines before any other non-commented lines in the file:
# let's put the messages from alpha into a specific file
$ModLoad imudp
$RuleSet remote
*.* /var/log/alpha.log
$InputUDPServerBindRuleset remote
$UDPServerRun 514
# switch back to default ruleset
$RuleSet RSYSLOG_DefaultRuleset

This loads the “imudp” module which allows us to run a UDP (not TCP) log receiving server. Then we set up a rule set that logs all logs to the file /var/log/alpha.log. We apply that rule set to the UDP server, and start the server on port 514. Then we switch back to the default ruleset, and the rest of the file tweaks that ruleset (where different types of messages end up).

To apply the change, run “sudo service rsyslog restart”. You can use netstat to check which ports have listeners:

sudo netstat -tlnup

Which should produce a line like this:

udp6 0 0 :::514 :::* 27102/rsyslogd

Changes on the log sender (computer Alpha)
Edit the file /etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf. Add these lines before any other non-commented lines in the file:
# log all messages to this rsyslogd host
*.* @1.2.3.4:514

This tells rsyslog to send all messages (*.*) to the specified IP address via port 514. To apply the change, run “sudo service rsyslog restart”.

Test it out!
On the log receiver (computer Beta) run this command to watch the log file from alpha:

sudo tail -f /var/log/alpha.log

On the log sender (computer Alpha) run this command to put a silly message into the system log system:

logger Hello World

You should see something like this show up in the terminal on the log receiver:

Jan 10 17:56:53 alpha eceuser: Hello World

TCP instead of UDP
I initially tried to set up the log receiver to listed on a TCP port instead of UDP, but it just wasn’t working, and I’m not sure why.
If you wanted to do TCP instead of UDP you would change the lines for the log receiver configuration, and then use two @@ instead of just one @ in the log sender configuration.

Linux Samba (CIFS) secure automount

Posted by Matthew on September 13, 2012
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

I have my server set up to server files using Samba (the windows filesharing protocol) now called CIFS. I wanted to use some authentication for the read/write share so here is how to do it.

Make a file called /etc/samba.credentials, owned by root:root, with permissions 0600, with these contents:
username=blah
password=blah

Then add a line like this to your /etc/fstab:
//server/sharename /mount/point cifs auto,credentials=/etc/samba.credentials,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777,uid=youruser,gid=yourgroup,nounix 0 0

Then it should be automatically mounted when you login!

Installing Django on Ubuntu 12.04

Posted by Matthew on August 31, 2012
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

Notes for myself so I can do this again someday… (UPDATE: I had to refresh the links at the bottom of this article to the latest version of Django. Good luck.)

Let’s say we are working on a Django project called applesauce, for lack of a better name. We start by creating a directory for this project:
cd ~
mkdir applesauce
cd applesauce

We use pip to install python packages, so we must install it first:
sudo apt-get install python-pip python-setuptools

We use virtualenv to manage our python environment to make sure we don’t go too crazy. We can use pip to install it:
sudo pip install virtualenv

virtualenv has this idea of using a directory to store its settings, so let’s make one for it, and use it as a new virtual environment:
mkdir applesauce-virtualenv
virtualenv applesauce-virtualenv

The –no-site-packages is the default now, so we don’t include it here (you could, but it’s deprecated). This helps keep things sane.

virtualenv creates a shell script for you to source that sets up the necessary environment variables. You will need to source this file every time you want to work on this project:

source applesauce-virtualenv/bin/activate

You should see that your shell prompt has changed, and now has “(applesauce-virtualenv)” at the front of the prompt. This lets you know that you have already “logged in” to your virtualenv.

Now, let’s install some of the packages required to work with Django. We start with the non-python system-wide packages and libraries:
sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev python2.7-dev libpng12-dev libfreetype6-dev build-essential python-dev

Then, make sure that you are in your virtual environment and install these python things using pip. Since we’re installing these packages into the virtualenv we don’t need to use sudo.

pip install django django-debug-toolbar south httplib2 lxml

If you have any modules/packages that you want to be able to use in your Django project, you can copy them into applesauce-virtualenv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/

To verify that Django can be seen by Python, type python from your shell. Then at the Python prompt, try to import Django:

>>> import django
>>> print django.get_version()
1.4.1

Now, you can start working with Django. You might want to start with the official tutorial, Writing your first Django app.

(Some information taken from the Django Quick install guide.)