Category: System Administrator

Reviewing boot logs on Debian

Recently, I installed a debian system as a server from the netinst CD. From the debian website:

A network install or netinst CD is a single CD which enables you to install the entire operating system. This single CD contains just the minimal amount of software to start the installation and fetch the remaining packages over the Internet.

The install was straight forward and i only opted to install standard utilities and nothing else. Everything installed successfully and the system booted without a single problem.
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How I backup my server configs with lsyncd

In the event that something happens to my server, or one of the services running on my machine, I like to have a backup of my config for that particular service. Ain’t nothing worse than taking hours or even days to properly configure a service to have a hard drive crash, operating system got corrupted, an update replaced your config file with the default or maybe you accidentally deleted the config or made some mistakes modifying it. This post shows how i use lsyncd and logrotate to automatically sync my /etc directory on my server with a remote machine and use logrotate to create and rotate 2 backup copies of the /etc directory.

The machines involved are main_server and backup_server. Read more

Using EncFS for safefly storing data

Just wanted to share what i think is a nice solution to encrypting your data. If you have confidential data that you would like to store securely, then have a look at EncFS. According to the man page, EncFS creates a virtual file system which stores encrypted data in one directory (they call this directory the rootdir) and makes it available unencrypted in another directory (mountPoint). The user must supply a password that would be used to encrypt the user’s files and file names. EncFs relies on the underlying file system. Therefore if there are any limitations on the underlying file system, they will be inherited by EncFS.

One of the blogs that i follow (HowtoForge.com)has a nice write-up on using EncFS that I encourage you to check out. Below, I will provide a summary of the key commands that you will need to get up and running. Read more

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