Enable userdir Apache module on Ubuntu

First activate the module:

sudo a2enmod userdir

now edit the module's conf file:

sudo vi /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/userdir.conf

and change the line:

AllowOverride FileInfo AuthConfig Limit Indexes

to

AllowOverride All

By default  PHP is explicitly turned off in user directories, to enable it edit the php module conf file:

sudo vi /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php5.conf

and comment out the following lines:

#<IfModule mod_userdir.c>
#    <Directory /home/*/public_html>
#   php_admin_flag engine Off
#    </Directory>
#</IfModule>

Now just restart your apache srerver and that's it:

sudo service apache2 restart

You can now create a public_html folder on every users homes with the following script:

#!/bin/bash
for I in /home/*; do
 if [ ! -d $I/$FOLDER ]; then
mkdir -p $I/$FOLDER
U=$(basename $I)
chown $U $I/$FOLDER
chgrp $U $I/$FOLDER
 fi
done # for

Now if you whant to go further and create dynamic vhost for each of your users you can change your default virtual host with something like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteMap lowercase int:tolower
    # allow CGIs to work
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/cgi-bin/
    # check the hostname is right so that the RewriteRule works
    RewriteCond ${lowercase:%{SERVER_NAME}} ^[a-z-]+\.example\.com$
    # concatenate the virtual host name onto the start of the URI
    # the [C] means do the next rewrite on the result of this one
    RewriteRule ^(.+) ${lowercase:%{SERVER_NAME}}$1 [C]
    # now create the real file name
    RewriteRule ^([a-z-]+)\.example\.com/(.*) /home/$1/public_html/$2
    <Location / >
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
    </Location>
    DocumentRoot /var/www/
    <Directory />
        Options FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
    </Directory>
    <Directory /var/www/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride None
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
    </Directory>
       # define the global CGI directory
    ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
    <Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
        AllowOverride None
        Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

This will allow you to use user.example.com to access your user's pages.

IPTables debugging

The following command will only show rules that have the action set to DROP or REJECT and omit the rules that didn't had any matches:

watch -n1 "iptables -nvL | grep -i 'DROP\|REJECT\' | egrep -v '^\s*0\s*0'"

This one does the same but with some colour highlighting, it will only show rules with matches, the words DROP and REJECT will appear in red and the word ACCEPT will be in green:

watch --color -n1 "iptables -nvL | egrep -v '^\s*0\s*0' | sed 's/\(DROP\|REJECT\)/\x1b[49;31m\1\x1b[0m/g' | sed 's/\(ACCEPT\)/\x1b[49;32m\1\x1b[0m/g'"

Using the IP command

The command /bin/ip has been around for some time now. But people continue using the older command /sbin/ifconfig. ifconfig won't go away quickly, but its newer version, ip, is more powerful and will eventually replace it.
So here are the basics of the new ip command.

Assign a IP Address to Specific Interface:

sudo ip addr add 192.168.50.5 dev eth1 

Check an IP Address:

sudo ip addr show 

Remove an IP Address:

sudo ip addr del 192.168.50.5/24 dev eth1 

Enable Network Interface:

sudo ip link set eth1 up 

Disable Network Interface:

sudo ip link set eth1 down 

 Check Route Table:

sudo ip route show 

Add Static Route:

sudo ip route add 10.10.20.0/24 via 192.168.50.100 dev eth0 

Remove Static Route:

sudo ip route del 10.10.20.0/24 

Add Default Gateway:

sudo ip route add default via 192.168.50.100

Change Root DN Password on OpenLDAP

First, we need to locate the credentials information of the administrator account in the correct database within the LDAP tree.

This can be done using the ldapsearch command:

ldapsearch -LLL -Y EXTERNAL -H ldapi:/// -b  cn=config olcRootDN=cn=admin,dc=example,dc=com dn olcRootDN olcRootPW

(replace the olcRootDN value with the correct value to match your configuration)

This command will return something like:

SASL/EXTERNAL authentication started
SASL username: gidNumber=0+uidNumber=0,cn=peercred,cn=external,cn=auth
SASL SSF: 0
dn: olcDatabase={1}hdb,cn=config
olcRootDN: cn=admin,dc=example,dc=com
olcRootPW: {SHA}ks1xBVfgRXavGCpkPefc9hRHL4X=

There are two interesting information we know now:

we need to modify the entry “dn: olcDatabase={1}hdb,cn=config“
the current password is hashed with SHA1 algorythm.
To generate our new password with the same algorythm we'll use the command slappasswd with the syntax:

slappasswd -h <the hashing scheme we want to use - for example {SHA}>

The system will then prompt you for the new password to use, twice, and will finally display the hashed value we’re interested in:

root@testbox:~# slappasswd -h {SHA}
New password:
Re-enter new password:
{SHA}W6ph5Mm7Ps6GglULbPgzG37mj0g=

Then we’ll proceed to modify the entry we’ve identified above using the command:

root@testbox:~# ldapmodify -Y EXTERNAL -H ldapi:///

The system will start the listening mode for modifying commands:

SASL/EXTERNAL authentication started
SASL username: gidNumber=0+uidNumber=0,cn=peercred,cn=external,cn=auth
SASL SSF: 0

First, we enter the entry we want to modify:

dn: olcDatabase={1}hdb,cn=config

Second, we type in the parameter we want to modify:

replace: olcRootPW

Third, we type in the new password generated above (copy and paste is MUCH less error prone than manual typing at this point ;) )

olcRootPW: {SHA}W6ph5Mm7Ps6GglULbPgzG37mj0g=

Hit Enter another time to commit the modification and the following line will appear:

modifying entry "olcDatabase={1}hdb,cn=config"

After this, you can exit the listening mode with CTRL+C and restart the LDAP database service using:

service slapd stop
service slapd start

and login now with the new password set.

Set up GlusterFS with a volume replicated over 2 nodes

The servers setup:

To install the required packages run on both servers:

sudo apt-get install glusterfs-server

If you want a more up to date version of GlusterFS you can add the following repo:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:semiosis/ubuntu-glusterfs-3.4

Now from one of the servers you must connect to the other:

sudo gluster peer probe <ip_of_the_other_server>

You should see the following output:

peer probe: success

You can check the status from any of the hosts with:

sudo gluster peer status

Now we need to create the volume where the data will reside. For this run the following comand:

sudo gluster volume create datastore1 replica 2 transport tcp <server1_IP>:/mnt/gfs_block <server2_IP>:/mnt/gfs_block

Where /mnt/gfs_block is the mount point where the data will be on each node and datastore1 is the name of the volume you are creating.

If this has been sucessful, you should see:

Creation of volume datastore1 has been successful. Please start the volume to access data.

As the message indicates, we now need to start the volume:

sudo gluster volume start datastore1

As a final test, to make sure the volume is available, run gluster volume info.

sudo gluster volume info 

Your GlusterFS volume is ready and will maintain replication across two nodes.
If you want to Restrict Access to the Volume, you can use the following command:

sudo gluster volume set datastore1 auth.allow gluster_client1_ip,gluster_client2_ip

If you need to remove the restriction at any point, you can type:

sudo gluster volume set volume1 auth.allow *

Setup the clients:

Install the needed packages with:

sudo apt-get install glusterfs-client

To mount the volume you must edit the fstab file:

sudo vi /etc/fstab

And append the following to it:

[HOST1]:/[VOLUME]    /[MOUNT] glusterfs defaults,_netdev,backupvolfile-server=[HOST2] 0 0

Where [HOST1] is the IP address of one of the servers and [HOST2] is the IP of the other server. [VOLUME] is the Volume name, in our case datastore1 and [MOUNT] is the path where you whant the files on the client.

Or, you can also mount the volume using a volume config file:

Create a volume config file for your GlusterFS client.

vi /etc/glusterfs/datastore.vol

Create the above file and replace [HOST1] with your GlusterFS server 1, [HOST2] with your GlusterFS server 2 and [VOLNAME] with the Gluster FS volume to mount.

 volume remote1
 type protocol/client
 option transport-type tcp
 option remote-host [HOST1]
 option remote-subvolume [VOLNAME]
 end-volume

 volume remote2
 type protocol/client
 option transport-type tcp
 option remote-host [HOST2]
 option remote-subvolume [VOLNAME]
 end-volume

 volume replicate
 type cluster/replicate
 subvolumes remote1 remote2
 end-volume

 volume writebehind
 type performance/write-behind
 option window-size 1MB
 subvolumes replicate
 end-volume

 volume cache
 type performance/io-cache
 option cache-size 512MB
 subvolumes writebehind
 end-volume

Finally, edit fstab to add this config file and it's mount point. Replace [MOUNT] with the location to mount the storage to.

/etc/glusterfs/datastore.vol [MOUNT] glusterfs rw,allow_other,default_permissions,max_read=131072 0 0

Create LVM volume from multiple disks

Recently I had to crate an Amazon EC2 Instance with a storage capacity of 5Tb, unfortunately, Amazon only allows us to create 1Tb volumes so I had to create 5 volumes, attach them to the instance and create a 5Tb LVM device.

My instance was running Ubuntu and I hat to install the lvm2 package:

apt-get install lvm2 

The volumes attached to my instance where named from /dev/xvdg to /dev/xvdk

to find the names you can use the command:

fdisk -l

First we have to prepare our volumes for LVM with:

pvcreate /dev/xvdg /dev/xvdh /dev/xvdi /dev/xvdj /dev/xvdk

You can run the following command to check the result:

pvdisplay

The next step is to create a volume group, I used the command:

vgcreate storage /dev/xvdg /dev/xvdh /dev/xvdi /dev/xvdj /dev/xvdk 

And used the command:

vgdisplay

to check the result, you can also use:

vgscan 

Now we need to create the logical volume, in this case I wanted to use the entire available space so, I used the command:

lvcreate -n data -l 100%free storage

And

lvdisplay 

to check the new volume if every thing goes well it should be on /dev/storage/data 

you can also use the command 

lvscan

Now you just have to format the new device, you can use:

mkft -t ext4 /dev/storage/data

When ready you can mount it with:

mout /dev/storage/data /mnt

Create keystore from certificates

I had a wildcard certificate that already been used previously on a few apacahe servers. so I had already generated a CSR.

To generate a new keystore from the existing certificates I used the following commands:

Create a pkcs12 keystore from the certificate using openssl:

openssl pkcs12 -export -in star_domain_com.crt -inkey star_domain_com.key -certfile DigiCertCA.crt -out keystore.p12

Convert the pkcs12 keystore into a jks keystore:

keytool -importkeystore -srckeystore keystore.p12 -destkeystore keystore -srcstoretype pkcs12

You can use the following command to check your keystore contents:

keytool -list -keystore keystore

Usually your certificate will be stored under the alias 1, you might want to change that to tomcat, use the command:

keytool -changealias -alias 1 -destalias tomcat -keystore keystore