Category Archives: fedora

Goodbye fedora

I’ve commented in a number of previous posts that I have had an inordinate amount of trouble with Fedora, compared to other distributions I have used. There were also a few posts about my efforts with Arch. Now I am biting the bullet and declaring the move of my main daily work computer to Arch to have been completed. I have been running on Arch for a month or three, and there is no going back.

Continue reading Goodbye fedora

No Worthy mechs

I just built another little gateway pi, on Raspbian. It is a newer Raspbian than I used for the others. And newer is better, right? But when the little fellow came up, postfix claimed it couldn’t relay through tarragon, because it couldn’t accomplish login. Sasl authentication failed, no worthy mechs.

I remember good old “no worthy mechs” from way back when, always thought it a very cool error message. But why in the heck am I getting this? I’m not doing anything fancy.

I had a vague nagging feeling from some old Fedora problems, long ago. Could it be that I have to install some kind of sasl library, even to do plain authentication? Poked around a little. Eventually did an apt install libsasl2-modules and sasl2-bin. Sure enough, they actually installed.

And afterwords postfix came up and send the mail out of the queue. I’ll be dipped in … I am surprised. This was not something I had to do before. Is this an improvement in Raspbian. Don’t package any sasl mechs, make the poor sod figure out why sasl authentication won’t work.

This is to help me remember the next time this happens.

Re-signing Openssh Certificates

Seldom do I get to write a post where I am offering information which might not actually be out there in a lot of places. I could not find this information on the web, and had to figure it out myself, by reading the code, and doing experiments.

I talked in the last post about the need to re-issue all the openssh certificates, in order to update the hash algorithm used for the signatures. My way of maintaining the certificates, in my repository, would make it easy for the signing box to get all the existing certificates, but not (directly) the public keys that are inside those certificates.

Continue reading Re-signing Openssh Certificates

SSH Certificate signing

I’ve encountered a problem migrating from Fedora to Arch which ends up being about ssh and openssh certificates. I look back and discover that I never posted anything about my movement toward openssh certificates. Curious because I wrote a lengthy document about it (because of my leaky brain – not because I am any kind of authority on it).

I will probably go back and write a post about it, and back date it. But now a problem has arisen. Rather than explain, let the boys at openssh speak for themselves, in the release notes for openssh 8.2:

Continue reading SSH Certificate signing

Percona Toolkit

This is to help me remember how to get percona toolkit, so that I can get the grants information out of the mysql database – the database in mysql which keeps tracks of users, databases, and (in particular) grants, i.e. permissions.

I originally dug this up for use when I was migrating tarragon. But now I am working on migrating oregano from fedora to arch, and I will have to transfer the databases. I have finally learned (I admit I am slow) that one cannot expect to be able to move the database directory even from one release to another, let alone from one distribution to another. The only way to do this properly is to dump the databases, reinstall mariadb/mysql in the new place, and set it up, and then reimport the dumped databases.

Continue reading Percona Toolkit

Moving Oregano to arch

It is by no means certain that I will succeed with this effort, but I’m spending some time trying to get Oregano up on Arch.

The first step was just to get Arch booted up on oregano. My previous installation on a laptop didn’t involve an encrypted root, didn’t have raid arrays, didn’t have separate filesystems for things like /home and /var, didn’t run a web server, etc., so the first challenge is to get the system up with all that stuff.

Continue reading Moving Oregano to arch

Desktop Files

For a very goofy reason involving a bug with composer, and new warning messages in PHP, I decided I needed to reinstall eclipse on oregano. Reinstalling eclipse is always a test of my patience. During the entire course of my life I do not believe that the installation of eclipse along with the various components I need, especially subclipse, has ever “just worked”. There is always some issue. So, of course, I do not look forward to it with gleeful anticipation.

I think part of the problem for me – a problem of my own making I suppose – is that I mostly use distros (Fedora and Ubuntu) in which the packagers have already arranged for tools like eclipse to appear as “system level” rather than “user level” tools. By this I mean they appear (or are symlinked from) /usr/bin, their configuration files are located it /etc, their icons appear when you search for apps, etc. Whereas if you just use the upstream installers the installation will be carried out at the user level, they will ask you where to put the binary, and they will put configuration files in ~/.config,

Continue reading Desktop Files

Clamd signatures and Apache memory

After implementing the new tarragon the biggest problem I had involved the clamav package, and its loading of signatures. If clamd doesn’t come up and open its socket, then amavisd (the daemon who is consulted by postfix to handle all the checking of each piece of mail on input and output) will fail (assuming he is configured to do virus checking), This results in various problems. Amavis will mark the mail as “unchecked”, but worse, it will report failure back to postfix who gets confused and very often the message is delivered two or three times.

Clamd, the clamav daemon, now has over 6 million signatures. There are a lot of bad boys out there. The signatures are loaded by clamd from its database (in /var/lib/clamav) on startup, into memory. As a result, clamd has a large memory footprint, almost 800Mb on my system. The first issue, discovered before going live, was that systemd’s default parameters expect any daemon he starts to load within 90 seconds. If it fails to check in within that time, systemd considers it broken and terminates it. Clamd takes at least 3 minutes to load. I had to set a special TimeoutStartSec value in the systemd service script for clamd@.service.

Whew! I thought, boy I’m glad I figured that out. Hah!

Continue reading Clamd signatures and Apache memory

Tarragon Rebuild 2019

This server, on Amazon, hosts my website and a dozen others, provides mail service for several people’s email including my own with postfix, dovecot, opendkim, amavis, spamassassin and clamd, provides contacts and calendar service using radicale, provides vpn service with openvpn, provides a tor relay, provides nextcloud service, and hosts my svn repository.

The server was last rebuilt in 2017. Long, long ago when I built the first version of it, I was most familiar with Red Hat/Fedora, and since then it has been easiest just to upgrade it with Fedora, always grumbling to myself that someday I’m going to change it. The problem with being on Fedora, of course, is that Fedora changes every 6 months, so I’m constantly behind. And after a year I’m at end of life. This is dumb for a server that I don’t want to be messing with all the time.

Continue reading Tarragon Rebuild 2019