Posts Tagged ‘orig’

Script to Automatically change current MySQL server in wp-config.php to another MySQL host to minimize WordPress and Joomla downtimes

Friday, July 20th, 2012

I'm running a two servers for a couple of home hosted websites. One of the servers is serving as Apache host1 and has configured MySQL running on it and the second is used just for database host2 – (has another MySQL configured on it).
The MySQL servers are not configured to run as a MySQL MASTER and MySQL SLAVE (no mysql replication), however periodically (daily), I have a tiny shell script that is actualizing the data from the active SQL host2 server to host1.

Sometimes due to electricity problems or CPU overheats the active MySQL host at host2 gets stoned and stops working causing the 2 WordPress based websites and One joomla site inaccessible.
Until I manually get to the machine and restart host2 the 3 sites are down from the net and as you can imagine this has a very negative impact on the existing website indexing (PageRank) in Google.

When I'm at home, this is not a problem as I have physical access to the servers and if somethings gets messy I fix it quickly. The problem comes, whether I'm travelling or in another city far from home and there is no-one at home to give the hanged host hard reboot ….

Lately the problems with hang-ups of host2 happaned 3 times or so for 2 weeks, as a result the websites were inaccessible for hours and since there is nobody to reboot the server for hours; the websites keep hanging until the DB host is restarted ;;;;

To work-around this I came with the idea to write a tiny shell script to check if host2 is ping-able in order to assure the Database host is not down and then if script determines host2 (mysql) host is down it changes wp-config.php (set to use host2) to a wp-config.php (which I have beforehand configured to use) host1.

Using the script is a temporary solution, since I have to actually find the real hang-up causing troubles, but at least it saves me long downtimes. Here is a download link to the script I called change_blog_db.sh .
I've configured the script to be run on the Apache node (host1) via a crontab calling the script every 10 minutes, here is the crontab:
 

*/10 * * * * /usr/sbin/change_blog_db.sh > /dev/null 2>&1

The script is written in a way so if it determins host2 is reachable a copy of wp-config.php and Joomla's configuration.php tuned to use host2 is copied over the file config originals. In order to use the script one has to configured the head variables script section, e.g.:

host_to_ping='192.168.0.2';
blog_dir='/var/www/blog';
blog_dir2='/var/www/blog1';blog_dir3='/var/www/joomla';
notify_mail='hipo@www.pc-freak.net';
wp_config_orig='wp-config.php';
wp_config_localhost='wp-config-localhost.php';
wp_config_other_host='wp-config-192.168.0.2.php';
joomla_config_orig='configuration.php';
joomla_config_other_host='configuration-192.168.0.2.php';

You will have to manually prepare;;;

wp-config-localhost.php, wp-config-192.168.0.2.php ,configuration-192.168.0.2.php, wp-config-localhost.php to be existing files configured to with proper host1 and host2 IP addresses.
Hope the script will be useful to others, experiencing database downtimes with WordPress or Joomla installs.
 

How to install php mbstring support (add php mbstring module) on CentOS 5.5

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

I needed to install support for mbstring, as it was required by a client hosted on one of the servers running on CentOS 5.5.

Installation is quite straight forward as php-mbstring rpm package is available, here is how to install mbstring:

[root@centos [~]#yum install php-mbstring
...

Further on a restart of Apache or Litespeed and the mbstring support is loaded in php.
On some OpenVZ CentOS virtual servers enabling the php-mbstring might require also a complete php recompile if php is not build with the –enable-mbstring

If thus the mbstring has to be enabled on an OpenVZ server with php precompile, this can be easily done with cpeeasyapache , like so

server: ~# cd /home/cpeasyapache/src/php-5.2.9
server: php-5.2.9# cat config.nice |head -n $(($(cat config.nice |wc -l) - 1)) >> config.nice.new;
server: php-5.2.9# echo "'--enable-mbstring' \" >> config.nice.new; echo '"$@"' >> config.nice.new
server: php-5.2.9# mv config.nice config.nice.orig; mv config.nice.new config.nice

After that follow the normal way with make, make install and make install modules , e.g.:

server: php-5.2.9# make && make install && make install modules

Next the php-mbstring is enabled enjoy 😉

How to fix “delivery 1: deferral: Sorry,_message_has_wrong_owner._(#4.3.5)/” qmail mail delivery failure message

Friday, May 20th, 2011

After a failed attempt to enable some wrapper scripts to enable domain keys support in a qmail powered mail server my qmail server suddenly stopped being able to normally send mail.

The exact error message which was logged in /var/log/qmail/current was:

@400000004dd66fcc16a088ac delivery 1: deferral: Sorry,_message_has_wrong_owner._(#4.3.5)/

This qmail messed happened after I substituted /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue and /var/qmail/bin/qmail-remote with two respective wrapper shell scripts which were calling for the original qmail-queue and qmail-remote binaries under the names qmail-queue.orig and qmail-queue.orig

Restoring back qmail-queue.orig to /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue and qmail-remote.orig to /var/qmain/bin/qmail-remote and restarting the mail server broke my qmail install.

After a bunch of nerves trying to isolate what is causing the error I found out that by mistake I forgot to copy the qmail-queue and qmail-remote permissions and ownership.

Thus I had to check another qmail working installation’s permissions for both binaries and fix the permissions to be equivalent to the permissions:

debian:~# ls -al /var/qmail/bin/qmail-remote
-rwx–x–x 1 root qmail 50464 2011-05-20 12:56 /var/qmail/bin/qmail-remote*
debian:~# ls -al /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue
-rws–x–x 1 qmailq qmail 20392 2011-05-20 12:56 /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue*

The exact chmod and chmod commands I issued to solve the shitty issues were as follows:

First I fixed the qmail-queue and qmail-remote ownership:

debian:~# chown qmailq:qmail /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue
debian:~# chown root:qmail /var/qmail/bin/qmail-remote

Second I set the proper file permissions:

# make the qmail-queue binary suid
debian:~# chmod u+s /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue
debian:~# chmod 611 /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue
debian:~# chmod 611 /var/qmail/bin/qmail-remote

Third and last I did a restart of the qmail server and tested it sends properly

debian:~# /usr/bin/qmailctl stop
Stopping qmail...
qmail-send
qmail-smtpd
debian:~# /usr/bin/qmailctl start
Starting qmail

Finally to test that the qmail server qmail-queue was queing and sending with qmail-remote I used the system mail command like so:

debian:~# mail -s "test email" testuser@www.pc-freak.net
asdfafdsdf
.
Cc:

Afterwards the mail was properly received on my mail account testuser@www.pc-freak.net immediately.

In my /var/log/qmail/current log file all seemed fine:

@400000004dd6702a2eb2b064 starting delivery 1: msg 85281596 to remote testuser@www.pc-freak.net
@400000004dd6702a2eb2b834 status: local 0/20 remote 1/20
@400000004dd6702b34cc809c delivery 1: success: 83.228.93.76_accepted_message./Remote_host_said:_250_ok_
1305899099_qp_65293/
@400000004dd6702b34cc886c status: local 0/20 remote 0/20
@400000004dd6702b34cc8c54 end msg 85281596

The test mail was properly received on my mail account testuser@www.pc-freak.net immediately.

It took me like half an hour to figure out what exactly is wrong with the permissions in situations like this I really wanted to change all my qmail installs with postfix and forget forever I ever used qmail …

Speed up your DNS resolve if your Internet Service Provider DNS servers fail or resolve slowly / Privacy concerns of public DNS services use

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

In my experience with many network Internet Service Providers by so far I’ve encountered a lot of DNS oddities and therefore surfing (web) and mail slowness.

It’s sometimes very irritating especially in cases, when I use my internet over Wireless public or university wireless networks.
In principle many of the Wireless routers which distribute the internet especially in organizations are badly configured and the slowness with DNS resolvings is an absolute classic.
If you haven’t encountered that slowness in opening web pages when connected from your University’s canteen, whether it’s fill with people for the lunch break, then I should say you’re really lucky!

My personal experience with this bad configured devices DNS services has been quite negative and every now and then I use to set and use public DNS servers like OpenDNS and Google DNS

Very often when I connect to a wireless network with my notebook running Debian Linux and the internet is too slow in opening pages I automatically set the Google or OpenDNS servers as a default DNS IP resolving servers.

1. DNS IP addresses of Google Public DNS are:

8.8.8.7
and
8.8.8.8

2. OpenDNS Public DNS servers has the IP addresses of:

208.67.222.222
208.67.222.220

I do set up and use the upper public DNS services addresses via the commands:

3. Set and use Google Public DNS services on my Linux debian:~# cp -rpf /etc/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf.orig
debian:~# echo "nameserver 8.8.8.7n nameserver 8.8.8.8 n" > /etc/resolv.conf;

I first create backu pof my resolv.conf under the name resolv.conf.orig just to make sure I can revert back to my old DNSes if I need them at some point.

If you prefer to use the OpenDNS services for some let’s say privacy reasons, you do it in the same manner as in the above commands, you only change the IP addresses. 4. Configure and use the OpenDNS public DNS services

debian:~# cp -rpf /etc/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf.orig
debian:~# echo "nameserver 208.67.222.222n nameserver 208.67.222.220 n" > /etc/resolv.conf;

Of course using Public DNS services has it’s disadvantages over the domain resolving speed up advantage.
One major issue is that Public DNS services are running on a top of a cloud and if you have red my previous article Cloud Computing a possible threat to users privacy and system administrator employment you might be agaist the idea of using a services which are powered by cloud.

The other primary concern is related to your SECURITY and a PRIVACY by using Public DNS networks, you risk that your Public DNS provider might use some DNS spoof techniques to mislead you and resolve you common domain names which usually resolve to let’s say 1.1.1.1 to let’s say 1.5.5.10

Even though this kind of practices on a side of a public DNS provider is not a likely scenario the possible implications of Public DNS providers using DNS forgery to fool you about domain names locations is a very serious issue.

As public DNS providers does contain again the good old philosophy of cloud computing embedded in themselves and they strive to become some kind of a standard which people might vote to adopt and use, the future implications of a wide adoption of Public DNS servers might be a terrible thing on internet users privacy!!!

Just think about a future scenario where we users of the Internet are forced to use a number of public DNS servers in order to use the Internet!
Usually a very huge companies are possessing the Public DNS services and do pay for the tech equipment required for building up the cluster clouds which provide the DNS services and therefore, if in the short future public DNS becomes a fashion and (God forbid!) a standard which shifts up the regular ISP DNS servers to resolve domains to IPs then it will be terrible.

The corporations which does own the Public DNS service/s might have a direct control over filtering and censoling information posted on any website on the internet.
Even worser if the world decides to adopt public DNS services somewhere in the future this means that large corporations owning the open dns cluster or clusters will be able to check each and every resolving made by any user on the net.
If you think closely such an information possessed by a company is not the best thing we want.

So let me close up this article, I’m not a fan and an evangelist who preaches the use of Public DNS services. Right on Contrary I do honestly hate the idea behind public DNS.
Nevertheless apart from my personal opinion I’m a practical person and using the public DNS servers every now and then when this will accelerate my access to the internet is still an option I do enjoy.

Maybe it’s time for a free software project (a tor like), which will provide users with an OpenDNS alternative which will run on hobbyist computers around the globe (just like with tor).

What’s rather funny is that the loud name OpenDNS is a big lie in reality OpenDNS is not opened it’s a company owned closed source service 😉