I chose a nice Friday evening and a good Scotch to upgrade an older Ubuntu LTS to the latest and greatest. And all went well, until I wanted to connect one of the clients via VPN. All I saw was this nasty little line in the log files of the server
... VERIFY ERROR: depth=0, error=CRL has expired: ...
Author: peter
The Master Of Foo
Send Email from the Command Line using an External SMTP Server
Sending email in Linux is pretty straight forward, once an email server is set up. Just use mutt or mail and all is good. But sometimes you actually want to test if SMTP is working correctly. And not only on your box, but on a remote box. That is of course easy using a MUA like Thunderbird or Sylpheed, but that is not always feasible on a remote server in a remote network.
Continue reading “Send Email from the Command Line using an External SMTP Server”
MySQL max_connections limited to 214 on Ubuntu Foo
After moving a server to a new machine with Ubuntu 16.10 I received some strange Postfix SMTP errors. Which turned out to be a connection issue to the MySQL server:
postfix/cleanup[30475]: warning: connect to mysql server 127.0.0.1: Too many connections
Oops, did I forgot to up max_connections during the migration:
Continue reading “MySQL max_connections limited to 214 on Ubuntu Foo”
Huawei Smartwatch Experiment
I think I am a little bit late, but I finally took the plunge and am now the (hopefully) proud owner of a smartwatch. Not sure how smart this little gizmo is, but at least it looks neat.
But first to the decision itself. It is not, that I don’t have a watch. Actually, I have two: a Seiko and a Bulova. Both nice watches and the Seiko is with me for quite a while. And they are perfect instruments to read, well.. time. What more can a smartwatch offer? Not much it seems. But I am somewhat of a geek, so I have to try it.
Labor Day Beach Pictures
Let me try something new. Just some nice pictures from our Labor Day weekend in Calabash, NC. Nothing special… just pictures.
Check SSL Connection Foo
It was that time of the year, when I had to renew some SSL certificates. Renewing and updating them in the server is a nice and easy process. But checking, whether the server is delivering the correct certificate and, that I updated and popluated the intermediate certificates correctly, is a different story.
Nagios Enabling External Command on Debian based Distributions
While debugging my check disk problem after the 15.10 upgrade, I saw that I forgot to enable external commands. That is handy, when you want to re-schedule a check to see, if your changes took effect. Again, something that is easily activated. So if you see something like this, then you might want to make some changes:
Error: Could not stat() command file ‘/var/lib/nagios3/rw/nagios.cmd’!
The external command file may be missing, Nagios may not be running, and/or Nagios may not be checking external commands. An error occurred while attempting to commit your command for processing. Continue reading “Nagios Enabling External Command on Debian based Distributions”
Nagios check_disk Foo on Ubuntu 15.10
Another day another foo, this time done to the check_disk plugin for Nagios on Ubuntu. After updating to 15.10 my disk space check all of a sudden failed with this one here:
DISK CRITICAL - /sys/kernel/debug/tracing is not accessible: Permission denied
CloudPress for Owncloud 8
Finally the Owncloud people got their updater to work for me, and I went ahead and updated. As a result I had to make some tweaks to CloudPress to keep my users active. Check it out and let me know if it works for you. Find my this new version here.
OpenVPN Windows Service Foo (Updated)
As a longtime OpenVPN user on Linux I thought it would be an easy task to set up OpenVPN as a service on Windows. Well, I was right… and couldn’t be wronger. Setting up the service is part of the installation notes for OpenVPN. Just search for “Running OpenVPN as a Windows Service” in the notes and you will find a pretty good description that should get you up and running in no time.