Max Lyth

I implemented fail2ban because of dumb Botnets that constantly try to relay through my server, 100k’s of failed attempts a day. The PenaltyBoxExtreme went some way to quench the bombardment but still consumed connections and flooded the logs with detritus.

To get fail2ban to work you first have to change the default date format in the ASSP log as it is not one of the formats supported by fail2ban. I changed LogDateFormat to ‘DD-MMM-YYYY hh:mm:ss’
Read the rest of this entry »

I had been using the iPhone WordPress app to moderate my blog since it was released but I started getting an ‘NSXMLParserErrorDomain Error 64′ error in the last few months when using the app. I thought it was a bug either in WordPress or the App but several revisions had gone by so I figured it must be my blog at fault.
A bit of Googling reveals this is a Cocoa error where the XML parser does not find the opening XML tag where it expects it. This problem is usually caused by extra carriage returns at the top of the XML RPC response.
Read the rest of this entry »

I recently wanted to temporarily move our Mac OS 10.5 Server from our G5 XServe to an Intel MacMini during an office move. I had an extra disk that would hold the live data during the transition.

I used Carbon Copy Cloner to migrate the data to the external drive in two passes. The first pass was while the server was running and got 95% of the data to the external drive. When I was ready to transition I shut down all the services in Server Admin and then re-ran Carbon Copy Cloner in update mode.

Ten minutes later we were ready to go so I figured that it would be a simple task just to boot the MacMini from my new cloned external drive and we would be off. That mostly worked until I noticed a stream of errors in Console relating to OpenLDAP:

May 31 20:42:24 fs slapd[803]: @(#) $OpenLDAP: slapd 2.3.27 (Sep 29 2009 20:28:12) $
May 31 20:42:24 fs slapd[803]: overlay_config(): warning, overlay "dynid" already in list
May 31 20:42:24: --- last message repeated 4 times ---
May 31 20:42:24 fs slapd[803]: bdb_db_open: unclean shutdown detected; attempting recovery.
May 31 20:42:24 fs slapd[803]: bdb(dc= maxlyth,dc=com): Ignoring log file: /var/db/openldap/openldap-data/log.0000000015: magic number 88090400, not 40988
May 31 20:42:24 fs slapd[803]: bdb(dc=maxlyth,dc=com): Invalid log file: log.0000000015: Invalid argument
May 31 20:42:24 fs slapd[803]: bdb(dc= maxlyth,dc=com): PANIC: Invalid argument
May 31 20:42:24 fs slapd[803]: bdb(dc= maxlyth,dc=com): PANIC: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
May 31 20:42:27 fs slapd[803]: bdb_db_open: Database cannot be recovered, err -30978. Restore from backup!
May 31 20:42:27 fs slapd[803]: bdb(dc= maxlyth,dc=com): DB_ENV->lock_id_free interface requires an environment configured for the locking subsystem
May 31 20:42:27 fs slapd[803]: bdb(dc= maxlyth,dc=com): txn_checkpoint interface requires an environment configured for the transaction subsystem
May 31 20:42:27 fs slapd[803]: bdb_db_close: txn_checkpoint failed: Invalid argument (22)
May 31 20:42:27 fs slapd[803]: backend_startup_one: bi_db_open failed! (-30978)
May 31 20:42:27 fs slapd[803]: bdb_db_close: alock_close failed
May 31 20:42:27 fs slapd[803]: slapd stopped.

This looked bad so I figured I’d roll-back and power back up the original server.
Read the rest of this entry »

I bought a daughter card for my Intel SR1600UR to upgrade the number of ethernet ports from 2 to 4 as I wanted to add a DMZ to my network setup.

The part number I was looking for was a Intel Dual Gigabit module for the server (Part # AXXGBIOMOD) and unlike all the rest of the components that made up the server this one was a real ordeal to track down.
Read the rest of this entry »

More disappointment was in store for my research when I came to partition the disks. I had bought three 1.5TB disks which I intended to mostly deploy as RAID5 which would total around 2.7TB in actual storage. I already knew that ESX4i has a 2TB limit for the maximum size of a single VMFS partition although they can bridge disks using extents to much larger sizes.

Adaptec’s web site lists the 5405 as being capable of multiple LUNs so my strategy was to initially deploy a small 8GB Raid5 LUN for ESX boot, a 96GB Raid0 stripe LUN as VM swap space and 250GB RAID5 for the initial VMs with the rest left available to use as a volume served by FreeNAS as a TimeMachine store for our office laptops.

Read the rest of this entry »