After posting up the last entry about SSH I noticed that I had a problem with my Permalinks. Seems that there is some nasty little injection problem with WordPress that changes the Permalinks with the addition of.
I am following the suggestions here:
http://blog.4rev.net/2009-09/wordpress-hacked-eval-base64_decode-_serverhttp_referer/
And it seemed to work.
This is a tip that I have used on OS X and on Linux, which I presume works on other *nix and BSDs using SSH.
Basically in the .ssh folder in your home directory you can create a file called config with which you can put all sorts of configuration information for your ssh client but the real benefit for me was to use this to give extra information to hosts such as defining a different port number to connect on. For instance:
This means that instead of typing:
I can type:
No need for nasty aliases in the shell or anything like that. This also works for the sshfs program on the Mac that makes use of MacFuse. Yes that’s right you can use different ports with SSHfs.
You can also change a much wider range of parameters than I have shown here, but often its probably better to introduce them on the server. But here is an example and have a look under the options flag in the Man page for SSH
I have been looking for a good way of keeping track of changes to /etc and with Ubuntu 9.04 Server I see that they have rolled in support for etckeeper (using bzr as the default).
This little util allows the use of version control (bzr, hg or git) to track changes to /etc and with the Ubuntu version integrates with apt and dpkg so that new package installs are tracked.
To install just install the following, it will take care of the dependancies:
The Initialize the repository:
And do a commit of the files to the repository.
After each change to file(s) in /etc
Now I just have to back up the files from the repository for a good way of rolling back and forth between versions. Probably onto a USB key
Over the past week or so (slowed down by the damn flu) I have been building a new server for home. Its going to have the following duties:
The hardware is mounted in rackmount chassis with space for 12 drives, 6 of which will be populated straight away, has a 64bit processor and will have 3Gb of RAM (The maximum on this old hardware).
I have installed Ubuntu 9.04 Server edition on it, and I must say that it went very smoothly except for the fact that Python 2.5 on Ubuntu 9.04 is a pain, often breaking. Here are some useful commands:
Having two installations of different version of python and switching between them:
To undo:
To force a change of version:
Then this will be the main server in the house, with lightweight front ends (This will have over 4Tb of RAID with expandability to 12TB). My old book will retire until I think of a good use for its out of date hardware.