Knowledge

This section has a selection of miscellaneous items of potential interest.

Logrotate and missing log entries

published by Fonant on Wed, 2011-08-24 10:14

I recently noticed that every time logrotate rotated the logs on one of my servers, the apache process on that machine seemed to just stop logging to the log files.

The problem seems to have been caused because I'd accidentally deleted the line

delaycompress

from the logrotate conf file /etc/logrotate.d/httpd. This meant that logrotate was compressing the log file while apache was sometimes still writing to it, with the result that apache failed to switch to writing to a new clean logfile.

The man page says:

Nagios permissions

published by Fonant on Wed, 2011-06-15 18:51

By default, nagios will only allow a user called "nagiosadmin" to view host and service details. If you add other usernames to the nagios htpasswd file, you'll also need to add their names to /etc/nagios/cgi.cfg in the places where nagiosadmin is listed.

If not, you'll be able to authenticate to view Nagios pages, but they'll mostly say "It appears as though you do not have permission to view information for any of the services you requested...".

Screen Sizes

published by Fonant on Mon, 2011-02-07 09:18

A list of screen sizes in pixels, grouped by aspect ratio.

Drupal edit permissions and filters

published by Fonant on Tue, 2009-07-14 15:22

Ever had the situation where, even though you have given permissions to edit nodes to a role, and assigned that role to a user, they still can't edit the node?

Drupal will stop people from editing nodes that use a filter format that they don't have permission to use. So check that the filter in use by the node is available to the user in question.

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Copying a Drupal site to a new Drupal virtual site

published by Fonant on Mon, 2009-02-09 10:14

Copying a complete Drupal site to a new virtual site within the same Drupal installation is relatively easy. These are the steps to take:

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Installing MailScanner on Fedora Core 8

published by Fonant on Mon, 2008-01-21 15:05

I've happily installed MailScanner 4.66.5-3 (http://mailscanner.info) on FC8!

Hosts file not working for WinXP

published by Fonant on Thu, 2007-11-29 12:41

Had an odd problem recently, in that my local hosts file wasn't being used to resolve domain names.

Much Googling later I found this thread, which prompted me to try editing the hosts file using edit from the windows command prompt. It worked, and now my hosts file is being used again!

Sending web form mail to Hotmail

published by Fonant on Fri, 2007-09-21 13:07

The Situation

A simple "Contact" form on a website. The form allows people to enter their name and e-mail address, so that the message appears to come from them, and the site owner can use their Reply button to reply to the sender (and not the web server!).

The Problem

The problem is defining what the "sender" e-mail address is, which is then compared with the address's domain's SPF record to see if it is coming from an authorised mail server.

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Sending mail from ISPs that hijack port 25

published by Fonant on Tue, 2007-04-17 13:25

Some ISP's "hijack" port 25, so that all mail sent goes through their mail servers. This allows them to be sure that their internet connections are not being used to send spam.

Use port 587 for sending e-mail using the Fonant mail server to avoid this.

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