The end of the work week :)
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 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 the new 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 in irc.freenode.net #iptables
jengelh I figured out the solution. To complete the requested task
it was needed to mark all packages coming 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
parents decided 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.