An example how to install a Windows Server 2008 guest on KVM with VirtIO (on a LVM volume in the example). Besides the installation medium you need the VirtIO drivers for windows in order to be able to access the disk device. You can get signed binary drivers here. Then set up a Windows VM with a command like this:
When the guest is running, shut it down and edit the os section of the XML file to look like this (otherwise Windows setup won’t let you install on the disk):
Connect to the VNC console and start the installation process. When you reach the form to select a disk device you won’t see any devices available. Click on “Load drivers” at the bottom left and load the drivers from E:\viostor\wlh\{amd64|x86}. After the drivers are installed, you’ll see a disk device and can continue with the installation.
Quite some time ago I wrote a tutorial on how to integrate fetchmail and sieve into virtual mail with Postfix and Dovecot. As time passes and things change, here’s an update:
I don’t use the sieve part anymore. Instead, I use the ManageSieve server provided by Dovecot. It integrates with Dovecot’s authentication system and you can use all kinds of clients supporting the managesieve protocol, e.g. Thunderbird or Roundcube.
The ISPMail database structure changed since I wrote that tutorial which still relied on the DB structure for the Debian Etch structure. I updated the script to reflect both environments (take a look at the config file). However, it does not rely on any DB views anymore.
The script (only the Fetchmail part) is now hosted on GitHub as I rarely use SVN anymore and the SVN may go offline in the near future. If anybody is interested in the Sieve part, just drop me a line.
I recently needed to restore data from a MySQL server where the host machine crashed and where I unfortunately didn’t have a proper dump backup – all I had was a backup of the MySQL data directory (/var/lib/mysql in case of Debian). After some googling I didn’t find a simple solution how to restore databases out of this backup. The solution which worked in the end was the following: I installed a fresh MySQL server in a virtual machine and replaced its data directory with the one from my backup (I had exactly the same MySQL versions on both machines). This allowed me to access the databases and create proper dumps which I could import in my real server later.
So, step one: in a virtual machine/spare server/local pc/whatever install a MySQL server and replace its data directory:
I also checked that file permissions match the normal permissions on Debian MySQL installations. Should be like this:
root@host:/var/lib/mysql# ls -al
drwx------ 5 mysql mysql 4096 Mar 1 18:20 .
drwxr-xr-x 33 root root 4096 Mar 1 18:20 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Mar 1 18:07 debian-5.1.flag
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 27262976 Mar 1 18:21 ibdata1
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 5242880 Mar 1 18:21 ib_logfile0
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 5242880 Mar 1 18:21 ib_logfile1
drwx------ 2 mysql mysql 4096 Mar 1 18:20 database1
drwx------ 2 mysql mysql 4096 Mar 1 18:21 database2
drwx------ 2 mysql root 4096 Mar 1 18:08 mysql
-rw------- 1 root root 6 Mar 1 18:08 mysql_upgrade_info
root@host:/var/lib/mysql# ls -al database1
drwx------ 2 mysql mysql 4096 Mar 1 18:20 .
drwx------ 5 mysql mysql 4096 Mar 1 18:20 ..
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 65 Mar 1 18:20 db.opt
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 8668 Mar 1 18:20 table1.frm
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 879 Mar 1 18:20 table2.frm
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 1520 Mar 1 18:20 table3.frm
Now you can try to start the server and look if your databases are readable:
$ /etc/init.d/mysql start
$ mysql -uroot -p -e "show databases;"
Enter password:
+--------------------+
| Database |
+--------------------+
| information_schema |
| database1 |
| database1 |
| mysql |
+--------------------+
Alright, if this works, simply dump your needed databases with mysqldump, transfer them to your server and import them normally.
A short howto how to use a LVM volume group with libvirt on Debian Squeeze (used for KVM VMs in my case). I assume your VG already exists and is dedicated for libvirt usage. In my case it’s /dev/vg1.
First of all, create the XML definition for the storage pool in /etc/libvirt/storage/vg1.xml. This is the minimal configuration needed, libvirt will extend it with things like UUID when you define it.
I’m currently working on a bigger paper for university using LaTeX. As it’s necessary to compile source files multiple times (especially when using BibTeX or TOCs), build runs can take quite some time. As an example, my current build script:
This is OK on my workstation, but running a build on my notebook using a small 1.4 GHz single core processor can take up to a minute which is definitely too long. So I looked for solutions how to move the build process to a central server. As I was already using Git for source control on the project, I tried setting up a remote repository on the server which triggered a build using a post-receive script. This basically worked fine, but I wanted to go a step further. I had a look at CI servers and gave Hudson a try as it seems to have a lot of features while being quite easy to set up.
The result is the following: Hudson is polling the Git repository (can be remote or local, in my case it’s a self-hosted remote gitosis installation, but could be github too), starting a new build on changes and publishing the resulting PDF if successful. Hudson is accessible over https using an Apache2 server as frontend to a Tomcat installation.
Today was the first time I had to create a new DomU after upgrading my Xen setup to Debian Lenny. When I booted the VM and logged in via xm console I got some strange errors when installing packages:
Can not write log, openpty() failed (/dev/pts not mounted?)
Additionally, after setting up SSH, I got the following error when logging in with SSH:
Server refused to allocate pty
Solution: install udev, reboot the VM and you’re good to go.
As I stated before, I really like Christoph Haas’ ISPMail setup for Debian-based mailservers. I was quite fine without any server-side spam filtering solution until now, but somehow the spam amount in my inboxes increased more and more and I was looking for a decent and simple solution to filter out all that bullshit which is distracting me day after day.
I clearly wanted to go with Spamassassin (SA), as I made good experiences with it in the past and it’s more or less the standard spamfilter on linux based mailservers. The most common solutions to integrate SA into a Postfix based mailserver are the following:
Using amavisd-new
Using Postfixs content_filter
I don’t really like both of them. Amavis is quite heavy for the pure spam filtering purpose and the content filter checks both ingoing and outgoing mails by default which is obviously not in my interest. Amavis avoids checking outgoing mail just by checking if the sender domain is managed by the same system, but spammers can bypass this quite easily by faking the sender’s address to be the same as the recipient’s one (which is done quite often). There’s a discussion about this on the ISPMail page, so head there for more information. All this can be improved by using multiple Postfix instances and different ports (e.g. using 587/submission for authenticated clients and 25/smtp for normal SMTP traffic), but I want my mailserver to be as interoperable as possible without the need of any special setups on the client side.
So I was looking for another solution. I read some tutorials where people used procmail in user scripts to pass incoming mail to spamc before delivering it to the mailbox. I like this approach as the MTA isn’t involved into the spam filtering process, outgoing mail isn’t touched and you don’t need any complicated setups on the MTA side. All alias and transport definitions work fine and the final mail is checked right before being delivered to the user’s inbox.
First I thought about Sieve, which is already running through Dovecot’s Sieve implementation until I noticed that Sieve is not able to call any external programs (correct me if I’m wrong). Then I had a look at spamc and Postfix’ master.cf. spamc is capable to pipe its output to another program and in the ISPMail setup, Postfix passes the mail directly to Dovecot’s deliver, so why not just let Spamassassin check the mail right before it’s getting passed to Dovecot? I gave it a try and seems to work fine. I still need some automation in training SA databases (might follow in a later post), but the plain SA checking is working reliably and mails can easily be filtered with Sieve afterwards.
So much for the backstory, let’s get our hands dirty. Note: I’m running Debian Lenny.
I was looking for a decent continuous integration solution for my PHP projects for some time now, but always had the problem that most of the described solutions used SVN instead of Git as VCS system. Yesterday I found an article which describes the setup exactly as I needed it: phpUnderControl with Git on a Debian/Ubuntu system. Using the article, I managed to set up a working system quickly, which basically works as expected: CruiseControl checks the repository for modifications and starts the build process if there are any new commits. The build process includes generating API documentation (phpdocumentor), running static code analysis (php-codesniffer) and executing unit tests (phpunit). If the build succeeds, the results are published and can be accessed through a nice webinterface powered by phpUnderControl (see screenshot above which I stole from the phpUnderControl site).
However, the described setup has a few issues which bugged me:
CruiseControl runs from the shellscript as root, posts all output to the console and is not automatically started at boot time.
CruiseControl runs on port 8080, but I wanted to manage access to the webinterface through the apache which is already running on the box
There’s no authentication – everybody can access my CI server, see the build details and start new builds through the webinterface.
