One more week passed without serious server problems. Yesterday after upgrade to debian 4.0rc2 with
apt-get dist-upgrade and reboot the pc-freak box became unbootable.
I wasn’t able to fix it until today because the machine’s box seemed not to read cds well.The problem was consisted of this that after the boot process of the linux kernel has started the machine the boot up was interrupted with a message saying
/sbin/init is missing
and I was dropped to a busybox without being able to read nothing from my filesystem.Thankfully nomen came to Dobrich for the weekend and today he bring me his cdrom-drive I booted with the debian.
Using Debian’s linux rescue I mounted the partition to check what’s wrong. I suspected something is terribly wrong with the lilo’s conf.
Looking closely to it I saw it’s the lilo conf file it was setupped to load a initrd for the older kernel. changing the line to thenew initrd in /etc/lilo.conf and rereading the lilo; /sbin/lilo -C; /sbin/lilo;
fixed the mess and pc-freak booted succesfully! 🙂
Yesterday I had to do something kinky. It was requested from a client to have access to a mysql service of one of the company servers,the problem was that the client didn’t have static IP so I didn’t have a good way to put into the current firewall.
Everytime the adsl they use got restarted a new absolutely random IP from all the BTC IP ranges was assigned.
The solution was to make a port redirect to a non-standard mysql port (XXXXX) which pointed to the standard 3306 service. I had to tell the firewall not to check the coming IPs on the non-standard port (XXXXX) against the 3306 service fwall rules.
Thanks to the help of a guy inirc.freenode.net #iptables jengelh I figured out the solution.
To complete the requested task it was needed to mark all packagescoming into port (XXXXX) using the iptables mangle option and to add a rule to ACCEPT all marked packages.
The rules looked like this
/sbin/iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING -p tcp –dport XXXXX -j MARK –set-mark 123456/sbin/iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -d EXTERNAL_IP -i eth0 -p tcp –dport XXXXX -j DNAT –to-destination EXTERNAL_IP:3306
/sbin/iptables -t filter -A INPUT -p tcp –dport 3306 -m mark –mark 123456 -j ACCEPT .
Something I wondered a bit was should /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward in order for the above redirect to be working, in case you’re wondering too well it doesn’t 🙂 The working week was a sort of quiteful no serious problems with servers and work no serious problems at school (although I see me and my collegues become more and more unserious) at studying. My grand parentsdecided to make me a gift and give me money to buy a laptop and I’m pretty happy for this 🙂 All that is left is to choose a good machine with hardware supported both by FreeBSD and Linux.
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