Posts Tagged ‘hurry’

Trip to Eindhoven airport and city center – few city impressions on city Cathedrals and centre

Thursday, January 3rd, 2013

at_Eindhoven

Today, for its my 3rd time I go to Eindhoven. My first time was when I flied from Sofia, Bulgaria to Eindhoven (Holland) Airport in September, second time I was there was December 22-nd as I had to go there to take my girlfriend Svetlana from the airport; today it was the first time as unfortunately her Belarusian visa was expiring and she had to travel back to Belarus.

We travelled with Svetla from Arnhem to Eindhoven, the whole trip takes about approximate 1 hour. There is no direct train from Anrnhem to Eindhoven; thus we had to change train in 's-Hertogenbsoch. The trip thanks God went smoothly and the train was late with only few minutes (something very unusual for trains here in Holland). About 12 o'clock we were in the Train station. The bus station allowing a number of bus lines travelling to different destinations of the city is located right infront of train station, just like in Arnhem, Nijmegen (and probably a lot of other Dutch cities). Dutch architects did obviously a very good job by designing such a good road architecture in Holland, along with the ability to travel through absolutely all country on bike, the train and bus architecture is designed very well too. The bus to Airport is arriving and departing every 7 minutes, so there was no need we wait for long time for the next bus to arrive. I had to pick-up a bus tickets from a special bus tickets sell-office. The bus per person costs 3.50 EURO as of time of writing this post – something to mention is I have memorybus ticket in 22 december 2012 from train-station to Airport was 3 EUR – 50 cents less. Actually a curious fact to mention from 22 dec 2012 is I went to take the bus very early in the morning and bus-tickets office (located on the right of the entrance of Train Station entrance), were closed. I went to buy a bus ticket from the driver (a kind lady) and she told me their ticketing system is not working so "everybody is for free :)". This was quite a fun, since here in Holland they're so advanced and high-tech and they put most of their "lives" in the hands of technology and suddenly something as important as a bus-ticketing system is off and everyone in bus travels for free – absolutely ridiculous story …

My whole impression from Eindhoven is not very different from other cities I've seen in holland. The architecture of most of the streets and houses is no different. The brown beautiful houses build of little blocks with plenty of beautiful outside house decorations, green grass etc. There is however an evident difference from Arnhem and Nijmegen as many of the company buildings  near the city center and on the way while in the bus to Airport were built in a very modernistic style. Something noticable was buildings belonging to the so famous Philips company as well as the Philips stadium. Few of the buildings were quite tall looking a bit like New York's sky-scrapers. On the way to train-station, the most noticable thing I've seen was the Evuliona modernistic building build in the shape of scifi movies UFO 🙂

Evoluion Eindhoven UFO like building one of the most notable buildings in Eindhoven - Symbol of Human knowledge evolution

The eindhoven's attraction Unidentified Flying Object futuristic building

The rest was just a lot of company buildings and industrial equipment or markets, the whole city as long as I saw it is very technological and industrial. I derive this conclusion as  I've seen buildings of many of the most famous world IT companies, as well as a lot of industrial vehicles on the way to train station. After I had to leave my dear Svetlanka on airport. I've took the bus back to the train station. BTW, the bus number as of time of writting which goes from Train Station to Airport and Airport to Train-Station is bus number 401. The bus looks a bit more modern than the usual bus-es I've seen in Arnhem and Nijmegen. One thing which is different also from the regular bus-es in many other cities and towns in Holland is the driver in the bus going to and from Airport to tr. station, refuses to sell you tickets, but instead one has to buy the ticket from a ticket selling machine, which is accepting debit and credit cards, as well as probably the Dutch OV Chipcard as well as supports buying by coins. The ticket selling machine is made to work complicated, as there are few ticket types one can choose using a touch-screen computer interface; I tried inserting 3.50 euro to buy ticket for myself but the machine is just spitting the money. It is good a lady I asked on how she bought helped me showing me I first have to select the ticket type from the touch-screen as the touch screen is very much on the left side of the ticket-selling machine and I was in a hurry I didn't even noticed it. I've seen other people having the same problem with the machine, wondering why it happens – so it might be a good idea the high-tech guys who constructed it to make ticket buying using a 3 or 5 simple buttons, through which one can select the ticket type. It will save people time as well as not confuse probably multitude of foreigners like me who came to holland and get a first impression that Holland's sophisticated IT structure is not working 🙂

After Svetka check-in her laggage in around 12:40 and we had to say each other good buy in 13:10, she went inside the usual Airport Security check – metal detector scanner and I took the bus back to Eindhoven train-station. As the train station is located 3 minutes walk from the city center. I decided to take a quick look in the city center to see if there is something nice to see on centre – I was more interested to take a look at some Churches and my main idea was to see if I can find the Orthodox Church Parish of Saint Nectarios of Aegina as well as take a look at the Gothic style built Roman Catholic or Protestant Church buildings. About 10-15 minutes walk from train-station I've noticed two huge cathedrals. Both of them was heavily decorated with towers with the usual 3 enormous windows repeating pattern and the many other architectural patterns containing 3 elements (probably symbolizing) the Holy Trinity. What was new for me on both of the Cathedrals is the of Virgin Mary and Jesus or Saints? statues located on top of the Gothic Cathedrals. I checked the time schedule and it seemed both of cathedrals were functional, but only the second one I went to (St. Catherine) was opened.

Catharina kerk Roman Catholic city center church Cathedral Eindhoven

I've red the short history of the Cathedral and walked around it to check the wall paintings, statues, roman catholic crucifixes, the mosaics on the Church windows and generally the Church decoration. Many of the things in the Church seemed very unusual to me. The thing I most disliked was the ugly modern art reproductions mosaics of Jesus and various evangelica scenes. Though I'm happy I could have entered a Christian Church, I couldn't have not say how grotesque the crucifix means. There was a separate room in where it seemed people from the Church was doing something it looked a bit like an office. Though this was a still Church, for me it was somehow missing the light and feeling of spiritual deepness. There was an icon of Virgin Mary holding the most pure body of our Saviour Jesus Christ. One can clearly distinguish it is a Slavonic icon by the "МР ОУ" – abbreviation for Marry Mother of God.
I've red the Church story and it seems the earliest Church there is from the 12th century – meaning that it is possible an Orthodox Holy Liturgy was never served there.
A very short story of the Church is very similar to many of the Roman Catholic Cathedrals in Holland;

In short, Church building was taken from Roman Catholics and used by protestant in 16th / 17th century, just like with many other of the Roman Catholic Churches during the 16th – 18th century protestant reformation. In 19th century Catholics used it again, but then in 20th century it was almost completely destroyed during World War II, later rebuild and now again owned by Roman Catholics.

One thing to mention is though, I've only been in few Roman Catholic Cathedrals so far, it seems almost every one was keeping an Orthodox icon (usually Russian one), or an icon at least looking like Orthodox. Usually I would not be interested into entering a Roman Catholic Church, as we are prohibited to pray with them and I know about their errs in faith, however I know many of the Churches contain Holy Relics of saints / martyrs and bishops who preached and lived an extremely holy life, before the great schism thus I walk in Roman Catholic Churches with the hope and desire that the Church might contain Holy Relics of saint in their alter or somewhere kept and through that I might a blessing of the respective saint ….

After, walking out, I've walked through the city center, and most I saw was modernistic buildings shops and just few houses with more interesting oldish architecture. Some interesting building on city center is an Iglu shaped like called "Iglus".

Eindhoven Holland Iglus Massive Shopping Center Winkel in form of Escimos (Eskimo) Iglu

I didn't saw all of the city center but from what I've seen it seemed to me the city center of Eindhoven is less interesting to see than Arnhem and Nijmegen's. Eindhoven's city center looks modern and maybe this was main thing why I was not impressed.

Steentjeskerk church Eindhoven Holland architecture like Orthodox Church

I've seen one Church building, while traveling with the bus from Eindhoven Airport to Train-Station, and this building looked very much like Orthodox, also from the far the cross of it and the overall architecture looked very much Orthodox. I very much hoped it is an Orthodox so from Train Station walked about 20 minutes to the Church to check if it is not the Nectarios of Aegina Orthodox Church I mentioned earlier. The Steentjeskerk  Church was closed and on the main entrance doors. I've later found out the Church is not used for Roman Catholic Holy Liturgy since 1971.

It was quite striking to see shops selling souvenirs or something on the exact place where the Church entrance door used to be;  just 15 meters from the Church was a Coffee-Shop (i.e. a place here in Holland, where people go to Smoke Ganja, Mushrooms, alcohol and other light drugs ….

After checking on the Internet for the Steentjeskerk building is relatively new and had nothing to do ever with Orthodoxy. What however made me happy is it used to be dedicated to st. Anthony the Great – the saint who is considered as a father of Christian monks life.
The scenery right in front of my eyes was striking, I made a walk through the Church to see well its Architecture and in hope I can understand if it used to be Protestant or Roman Catholic. According to the Virgin Mary statue on top of Church I derived conclusion the Church used to be Roman Catholic. i've seen some text written somewhere on the back of the Church speaking the Church is used for some kind of exhibition. Even though the Church was not Orthodox, I felt sad for the poor Church being abandoned and being almost pranked with by allowing a place which was used for regular prayer to shop / exhibition …..

On the back of the Majestic Church, My amazement doubled when I saw a big mosque with a high Minaret (space ship rocket – as a friend likes to joke). The working Muslim Mosque built according to architecture norms of Muslims on the backstage of the unworking poort closed Roman Catholic Church turned to shop / exhibition was one of the saddest things I've seen. This whole scenery also explained, why Muslim faith is blooming and Europe it also explains, why Muslims are currently "taking over" Europe – just until recently the largest Christian continent.

 

Don’t revoke GoDaddy SSL certificate. (Expired) Revoked SSL is impossible to revert

Thursday, April 12th, 2012

godaddy_logo
One of our company SSL (https) Certificates recently expired so I needed to renew the SSL certificate.

I was in a hurry doing plenty of other stuffs so it seemed logical for me to Revoke the Certificate. I thought revoking the certificate will simply cancel it and afterwards, in Godaddy's SSL (Manager Certificates) interface the Revoked – Cancelled certificate will re-appear in the menu, ready to be generated in the same way as earlier I initially generated the Godaddy's bought SSL certificate

Hence I proceeded and used Revoke button:

Godaddy SSL certificate manager browser certificate Screenshot

Well guess what my calculations, were wrong.
 Revoking, just cancel it. The  revoked domain SSL certificate did not show up again in Godaddy's Cert Manager and I have no way from their interface to revert the changes.

To deal with the situation, I contacted Godaddy Support immediately with the following inquiry:
 

Other : Revoked SSL Certificate
Issue :
Hello we have revoked the SSL certificate for our domain our.domain-name.com.
 Can we revert back the certificate as it was.
If not how to generate a new key for our domain https://our.domain-name.com
Thanks in Advance.
Kindest Regards

"My-Company-name" Tech Support

In 5 hours time I received the following tech support answer:
 

Dear Tech Support,

Thank you for contacting Online Support. It is not possible to reinstate a canceled certificate. You will need to purchase a new certificate. I have requested that a refund be applied to your account. Once the credit appears in your account, please allow 5-7 business days to see the funds applied to the associated payment method. Thank you for your patience and understanding in this matter.

Please let us know if we can help you in any other way.

Sincerely,

Christian P.
Online Support Team
Customer Inquiry
Name : Cadia Tech Support
Domain Name : our.domain-name.com
ShopperID : xxxxxxxxx
Phone : xxxxxxxx
Shopper Validated : Yes
Browser : Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3

Apparently Godaddy, can work out a bit on their tech support answering time 5 hours for a simple reply is quite long.

Now taking in consideration, above reply from Godady, my only options are to either wait for 5 to 7 (business days) or buy a new credit for SSL certificate.

Buying a new credit will probably not happen as our company is experiencing some financial troubles because of the crisis. So I guess we will have to wait for this 7 days at worst. So again if you wonder to REVOKE or not an SSL certificate. Think again …

Just a small note to make here, that Godaddy has a very straight forward way to just renew an expered certificate, which I succesfully later have done for 4 domains. Well, if only I knew earlier what REVOKE SSL cert really does I wouldn't have ended in this mess …

Set ISP provider default DNS to overwrite DHCP settings on Debian / Ubuntu Linux

Monday, February 11th, 2013

dhcp linux ovewrite dns settings from console and terminal Debian Ubuntu Fedora CentOS Linux
 

These days, almost every home wireless ISP network router, ADSL modem etc. has its own local running DNS service. Generally this is very good as it puts off the burden of  Internet Service Provider DNS servers and "saves" multitude of users from so common overloads with ISP DNS Servers – caused by ISP DNS Service unable to handle the incoming user DNS (Domain resolve) traffic. Common scenario, where ISP DNS servers is unable to handle DNS traffic is when few thousands of users belonging to ISP gets infected with a Worm, Trojan horse or Virus doing plenty of DNS Spoofs and distributed DDoS attacks.

Though local DNS service (daemons) on local Cable and Wireless Network Routers is something designed to be good it becomes another bottleneck for DNS resolve problems, Calling the ISP tech support for help is often loose of time, as  in ISPs it is so rare to find someone understanding Linux Networking.

The periodic issues with DNS resolving from home routers in my observations has 3 main reasons;

  • Local Cheap network Wireless routers with slow hardware (CPU) and little memory are unable to handle DNS requests, because of torrent Downloads
     
  • DNS Wireless Router can't handle DNS requests to its DNS local service, because a small local network of computers with a landline and wireless (lets say 5 to 10) is trying to access the Internet (browsing) – again due to its low hardware paremeters router CPU heats up cause of multitude of DNS requests

     

  • Something is wrong with general network topology of PCs behind the router. Often people buy a router and use it shared with their neighbors – tampering with Router settings messing it up.

DNS resolving problems are even harder to track whether Internet provider has policy to deliver Internet via automated IP assignment protocol (DHCP),

A very common scenario, I've seen is Internet coming via ISP ADSL / Network router installed at home and mis-configured due to a custom user installation,   or because of ISP technician who installed router in hurry or lacked good competency and messed up with Router Network configuration.

During the years I had to install various Linux distributions for Desktop use in networks located behind such mis-configured Network Hubs. Because of this mis-configured DNS, even though Linux hosts succesfully graps the IP addresses for host IP, Gateway and DNS, they occasionally create problems with Internet Connection leaving the user with impression that Linux is not ready for Desktop use or somehow it is the the Linux distro fault.

After giving an introduction I will continue further to exact problem I've faced with one such mis-configured just today. The same issue has happened in my sysadmin practice over and over again so many times. So finally I decided to write this small story explaining the whole scenario, its causes and fix.

I'm writing this little post from another Linux installation like this which is living on a small local network served by a Vivacom ISP through ADSL Commtrend SmartAX MT882 Router.

The Commtrend does NAT (Network Address Translation)-ting for whole local network, auto-assigning some DNS server to Natted IP PCs local Network addresses in IP raneg; (172.16.0.0-255). The DNS the router assigns for internet is with IP (172.16.0.1), where in reality the DNS on the router is run on Network interface with IP 1921.68.1.1, in other words belonging to the router from another network. Thus PCs connected via a UTP land-line cable connection does not see 192.168.1.1 – meaning Domain name resolving works not at all.
The solution is to assign a static IP address for DNS of Google Public DNS or Open DNS, while leaving the Linux host to automatically assign LAN IP and Gateway using DHCP – (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol).

By default most Linux distributions use DNS configured in /etc/resolv.conf as a host DNS servers, however as CommTrend Network Router does provide settings for DNS Servers to be used for resolving along with other settings on each Linux host boot settings from /etc/resolv.conf gets ovewritted with the unreachable (from 172.16.0.255), nameserver 192.168.1.1.

Thus to work-around this on most all Linux distributions you can set /etc/resolv.conf to be overwritten adding a line to /etc/rc.local script (before its last line – exit 0);

echo 'nameserver 8.8.8.8' > /etc/resolv.conf
echo 'nameserver 8.8.4.4' >> /etc/resolv.conf

This method is universal, but the problem with it arises, if on the Linux host is planned to run 24 hours a day. DHCP Servers on router has configured DHCP Expiry lease time, which is different on different routers but usually few hours i.e. (4 hrs). Thus in 4 hours, due to DHCP Lease expiry the Linux host will question the DHCP Server for IP, getting together with DHCP IP and Gateway Settings also a DNS IP (overwritting again /etc/resolv.conf – with local running ISP Router IP – 192.168.1.1). One stupid solution of course is to use good old Windows philosophy (reboot it and it will work).

Other little more intelligent but not very efficient solution to problem is to set a cronjob, to run every 1 minute and overwrite /etc/resolv.conf DNS setting.

# crontab -u root -e

*/1 * * * * echo -e 'nameserver 8.8.8.8\nnameserver 8.8.4.4' > /etc/resolv.conf >/dev/null 2>&1

Since the cronjob to overwrite DNS IPs runs every one minute it is possible the host ends up without internet from few secs to 1 minute, this might happen quite rare so for a desktop this is ok. Other inconvenience is it puts a tiny load on system every 1 minute.

Final and best solution is to configure DNS server from /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf  for Ethernet Interface eth0. Inside /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf for eth0 make sure you have:

# vi /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf

interface "eth0" {
prepend domain-name-servers 8.8.8.8;
prepend domain-name-servers 8.8.4.4;
prepend domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222;
prepend domain-name-servers 208.67.220.220;
}

How to set password on a mysql server with no password via mysql command line interface

Monday, March 28th, 2011

Many Linux distributions’s offered MySQL server comes without a set default password, in practice you can freely login to the mysql server on a plain mysql server installation on Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora by simply issuing:

linux:~# mysql -u root
Enter password:

Pressing enter will straight let you in the mysql server. The same kind of behaviour is also probably true on BSD based and many other Unixes which have pre-installed or the option to install a new mysql server.

I remember in my past that I’ve even seen a productive mysql servers on a servers running CMS based websites which doesn’t have a root password set.

Some administrators doesn’t take the time to think about the implications of the no password mysql installation and therefore being in a hurry simply let the server without an administrator password.
This is very common for the most lame and uneducated ones. Many novice system administrators think that by installing a phpmyadmin and configuring a password on it’s web interface is equal to setting up the mysql server (daemon) a password.

Thus for all this the uneducated ones and for all those who already have noticed that their newly installed mysql server doesn’t have a password set I’ve decided to give an example how a new mysql server password can be set or how an existing mysql server pass can be changed to a new one

To make any password manipulations usually the mysql-client package does provide a very handy instrument called mysqladmin , mysqladmin has many possibilities among which is creating a new mysql server admin (root) password or changing a previously set mysql server password to a new one

1. Here is how you can set a new MySQL server password:

mysqladmin -u root 'password' YOURasddsaPASSWORDjqweHERE

2. If you need to change an already existing mysql password you need to provide just one more argument to mysqladmin:

mysqladmin -u root 'password' YOURasdfdsaNEWasddsaPASSWORD_HERE -pEnter password:

Whether the Enter password: field appears you will be required to fill in the original mysql server root password after which the password will be changed to the above string passed in to the mysqladmin command line ‘YOURasdfdsaNEWasddsaPASSWORD_HERE’

That’s all now you have either set a new password for the mysql server or have already changed your previous one.

How to delete MySQL user using mysql cli command

Monday, September 24th, 2012

I decided to clean up a bit my MySQL obsolete users. I use to test free software every now and then and often in the hurry I forgot to clean up the respective soft database and created user in database/table mysql.user.

This is how this tiny article get born. Deleting users in version MySQL 5.0 and higher use command:

mysql> DROP USER username@localhost;

On older MySQL versions; 3.x / 4.x the SQL query is a bit longer:

mysql> DELETE FROM user WHERE User= 'type_your_user_name_here' AND Host= 'localhost'; mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Well that's all, now user is wiped out, Enjoy 🙂
 

Easy way to look for irregularities and problems in log files / Facilitate reading log files on GNU / Linux and FreeBSD

Thursday, November 24th, 2011

LogWatch logo picture check Logcheck Linux BSD look for irregularities in log files

As a System Administrator I need to check daily the log files produced on various GNU / Linux distributions or FreeBSD. This can sometimes take too much time if the old fashioned way using the normal system tools cat, less and tail etc. is used.

Reading logs one by one eats too much of my time and often as logs are reviewed in a hurry some crucial system irregularities, failed ssh or POP3 / Imap logins, filling disk spaces etc. are missed.

Therefore I decided to implement automated log parsing programs which will summary and give me an overview (helicopter view) on what were the system activities from the previous day (24h) until the moment I logged the system and issued the log analyzer program.
There are plenty of programs available out there that does “wide scale” log analysis, however there are two applications which on most GNU / Linux and BSD systems had become a de-facto standard programs to scan system log files for interesting lines.

These are:
 

  • 1. logwatchsystem log analyzer and reporter
  • 2. logcheckprogram to scan system log files for interesting lines

1. logwatch is by default installed on most of the Redhat based Linux systems (Fedora, RHEL, CentOS etc.). On Debian distributions and as far as I know (Ubuntu) and the other deb based distros logwatch is not installed by default. Most of the servers I manage these days are running Debian GNU / Linux so, to use logwatch I needed to install it from the available repository package, e.g.:

debian:~# apt-get install logwatch
...

logwatch is written in perl and with some big files to analyze, parsing them might take hell a lot of time. It does use a bunch of configuration scripts which defines how logwatch should read and parse the various services logwatch support by default. These conf scripts are also easily extensible, so if one has to analyze some undefined service in the conf files he can easily come up with a new conf script that will support the service/daemon of choice.Using logwatch is very easy, to get an overview about server system activity invoke the logwatch command:

debian:~# logwatch
################### Logwatch 7.3.6+cvs20080702-debian (07/02/08) ####################
Processing Initiated: Thu Nov 24 05:22:07 2011
Date Range Processed: yesterday
( 2011-Nov-23 )
Period is day.
Detail Level of Output: 0
Type of Output/Format: stdout / text
Logfiles for Host: debian
 ################################################# 

——————— dpkg status changes Begin ————- 

Upgraded:
libfreetype6 2.3.7-2+lenny7 => 2.3.7-2+lenny8
libfreetype6-dev 2.3.7-2+lenny7 => 2.3.7-2+lenny8

———————- dpkg status changes End ————————-

——————— httpd Begin ————————

Requests with error response codes
400 Bad Request
HTTP/1.1: 2 Time(s)
admin/scripts/setup.php: 2 Time(s)
401 Unauthorized


———————- vpopmail End ————————-

——————— Disk Space Begin ————————

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md0 222G 58G 154G 28% /

———————- Disk Space End ————————-

###################### Logwatch End #########################

The execution might take up from 10 to 20 seconds up to 10 or 20 minutes depending on the log files size and the CPU / RAM hardware on the machine where /var/log/… logs will be analyzed.

logwatch output can be easily mailed to a custom mail address using a crontab if the server runs a properly configured SMTP server. Using a cron like:

00 5 * * * /usr/sbin/logwatch | mail -s "$(hostname) log files for $(date)"

Here is time to make a note that logwatch is ported also to FreeBSD and is available from BSD’s port tree, from a port with path:

/usr/ports/security/logcheck

2. logcheck is another handy program, which does very similar job to logwatch . The “interesting” information it returns is a bit less than compared to logwatch

The good thing about logcheck is that by default it is made to mail every 1 hour a brief data summary which might be of an interest to the sys admin.
Logcheck is available for install on RedHat distros via yum and has existing package for Debian as well as a port for FreeBSD under the port location /usr/ports/security/logcheck

To install on logcheck on Debian:

debian:~# apt-get install logcheck
...

After installation I found it wise to change the default mailing time from each and every hour to just once per day to prevent my email from overfilling with “useless” mails.

This is done by editting the default cron tab installed by the package located in /etc/cron.d/logcheck

The default file looks like so:

# /etc/cron.d/logcheck: crontab entries for the logcheck package
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
MAILTO=root
@reboot logcheck if [ -x /usr/sbin/logcheck ]; then nice -n10 /usr/sbin/logcheck -R; fi
2 * * * * logcheck if [ -x /usr/sbin/logcheck ]; then nice -n10 /usr/sbin/logcheck; fi
# EOF

To change it run only once per day its content should looks something like:

# /etc/cron.d/logcheck: crontab entries for the logcheck package
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
MAILTO=root
@reboot logcheck if [ -x /usr/sbin/logcheck ]; then nice -n10 /usr/sbin/logcheck -R; fi
2 5 * * * logcheck if [ -x /usr/sbin/logcheck ]; then nice -n10 /usr/sbin/logcheck; fi
# EOF

Altering it that way the log summary interesting info analysis will be sent on mail every day in 05:02 a.m.
Changing the default email logcheck will ship its log analyzer report emails on deb based distros is done via editting the file:

/etc/logcheck/logcheck.conf

And changing the SENDMAILTO=”” variable to point to the appropriate admin email email addr.
 

How to fix wrongly configured timezone in Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

During the install of a new Debian GNU/Linux server I was in a real hurry, so I mistakenly choose a wrong timezone of US/Pacific

As a consequence the server date and time was incorrect and I had to fix that to adjust to the proper server location which of this case was:Europe/London

Here is the quick fix:

debian:~# dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Next I choose my timezone from the ncurses interface navigating with arrow keys and used ntpdate to synchronize the time for the server like so:

debian:~# ntpdate time.nist.gov
3 Aug 16:02:26 ntpdate[26658]: adjust time server 192.43.244.18 offset 0.000802 sec

Done 😉