Author: peter

The Master Of Foo

OpenVPN in Ubuntu 18.04 Foo within OpenVZ Container (Strato)

Post author By peter
Post date March 21, 2019

It has been a while since my last blog post, but there was no real foo happening to me during that time. But this issue really gave me some heartburn.

Let’s start with the general setup. We have a Linux VM in an OpenVZ environment. The hoster is Strato in Germany, but I don’t think that really matters. There are some known issues with the TUN device not being accessible within the VM, but Strato did their homework and I could see the module:

# lsmod | grep tun
tun                     4242  -2
vznetstat               4242  -2 tun,ip_vznetstat,ip6_vznetstat

Foo Linux OpenVPN

OpenVPN 2.4 CRL Expired Foo

Post author By peter
Post date December 21, 2017

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: ...

Linux Ubuntu

Send Email from the Command Line using an External SMTP Server

Post author By peter
Post date June 14, 2017

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.

Foo Linux Ubuntu

MySQL max_connections limited to 214 on Ubuntu Foo

Post author By peter
Post date June 13, 2017

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:

Android Hardware

Huawei Smartwatch Experiment

Post author By peter
Post date September 7, 2016

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.

Photos

Labor Day Beach Pictures

Post author By peter
Post date September 7, 2016

Let me try something new. Just some nice pictures from our Labor Day weekend in Calabash, NC. Nothing special… just pictures.

Foo Linux

Check SSL Connection Foo

Post author By peter
Post date July 6, 2016

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.

Linux Nagios Ubuntu

Nagios Enabling External Command on Debian based Distributions

Post author By peter
Post date December 4, 2015

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.

Foo Linux Nagios Ubuntu

Nagios check_disk Foo on Ubuntu 15.10

Post author By peter
Post date December 4, 2015

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 Owncloud Wordpress

CloudPress for Owncloud 8

Post author By peter
Post date August 30, 2015

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.