Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with centos

That Red Hat is awfully expensive!

Oktober — Wed, 20 May 2009 15:01:19 -0800

Is paying for a RHEL subscription worth it, or should we just go with CentOS? We're looking at moving our e-mail server to more-capable hardware, and would like to avoid paying $4k+ for a new Xserve, if at all possible. We're reasonably happy with our current package, Communigate, but it's severely hardware constrained now.

The only two applications that need to run on it are Communigate (which has ports for every OS under the sun) and Retrospect (our backup client, which has a Red Hat rpm).

Ideally, I'd get a cheap Quad-Core server from Dell, slap CentOS on it, installed our two applications, and call it a day. Still, I have nagging questions. Is paying for RHEL worth it? Can you continue updating your OS after your subscription expires? Is CentOS really 100% binary compatible with Red Hat?

Linux Shares: SMB or NFS?

fatbird — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:29:22 -0800

Which is the better way to share Linux folders with Vista and OS X: SMB or NFS? I'm an IT consultant who works from home. I have a MacBook Pro, a Vista x64 desktop, and a Linux box on which I run VMWare. Since a lot of what I do is LAMP based websites, my typical way of working is to set up a CentOS 5.2 VMWare image with the LAMP stack for each customer's site, running on the Linux box. I work on my Vista desktop in Eclipse 3.4.

What's worked well so far is to create an SMB share for the web directory on the VMWare image, and locate the Eclipse project there. I get to work in Eclipse on a box with plenty of horsepower so it's fast, and I don't need to transfer files to the image to see changes. I've tried using the VMWare console, and doing remote X on my Vista box, and both are sluggish in comparison.

However, the nagging detail I want to address is that SMB seems like a really poor way to access the share. When I save files in Eclipse, there's a momentary pause, and often a hard drive noise, like I'm waking something up to access the share, even if I'm doing it every 30 seconds. I'm generally dissatisfied with SMB because I'd hoped to use the Linux box's copious hard drive space (2 TB) as networked backup for my laptop and desktop, but it seems unable to keep up, especially with large numbers of files.

So: Is NFS a better way to make shares available on Linux? I'm pretty sure that Vista has no problem accessing NFS shares with it's Unix services subsystem, and Leopard is unix based, so shouldn't have a problem either (I'd like to be able to do on my laptop what I do on my desktop). Is there something else I should be looking at?

My network is via an Airport Extreme N.

Bonus Question: I'm sharing a printer connected to my Vista box, and I've allowed guest access. Whenever my girlfriend tries to print from her MacBook, she gets a dialogue that asks whether she wants to connect as a guest or a named account; selecting guest works fine. Can we get rid of the dialogue and make it connect as a guest without asking?

Bonus Bonus question: Anyone using PHP have an IDE they're more satisfied with than Eclipse, that includes SVN integration?

Thanks in advance.

Logrotate cronjob fails but running at command-line works.

your mildly obsessive average geek — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 23:32:25 -0800

Why does my logrotate.conf file work correctly when logged in as root, but fail when executed as part of cron.daily? I have a few custom application logs that I want to rotate automatically using logrotate. I picked as a base template, the logrotate.conf file that gets installed for Apache:



/var/log/httpd/*log {

    missingok

    notifempty

    sharedscripts

    postrotate

        /sbin/service httpd reload > /dev/null 2>/dev/null || true

    endscript

}

Here are two logrotate.conf entries that I created:



/var/log/hellavcr.log {

        ifempty

        missingok

        nomail

        weekly

        rotate 1

}



/var/log/hellanzbinit.log {

        ifempty

        missingok

        nomail

        daily

        rotate 2

}

If I sudo as root and execute "/usr/sbin/logrotate hellanzb" the command executes without any errors. However, every time the cronjob "/etc/cron.daily/logrotate" runs I get a bunch of error messages:

sh: line 2: missingok: command not found

sh: line 3: nomail: command not found

sh: line 4: weekly: command not found

sh: line 5: rotate: command not found

sh: line 2: ifempty: command not found

sh: line 3: missingok: command not found

sh: line 4: nomail: command not found

sh: line 5: daily: command not found

sh: line 6: rotate: command not found

I've checked the permissions for both the logrotate.conf files and the actual log files and they seems to be identical as far as my applications and Apache goes - so why the errors?

OS Info - CentOS 5, 64-bit running on a VPS.

Please help!

Why does Apache2 serve a subdomain when given an IP?

your mildly obsessive average geek — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:41:20 -0800

I have a domain hosted on a VPS running CentOS5. Whenever I enter http://my-vps-ip in my browser, I get redirected to http://subdomain.mysite.com. My limited Google-fu is no match for this particular problem, so I'm hoping the folks at AskMeFi can tell me how I should setup Apache so that http://my-vps-ip goes to http://mysite.com and not the subdomain? Extracts from the httpd.conf file:



ServerName mysite.com

...

UseCanonicalName Off

conf file defining the subdomain:



<virtualhost *:80> 

        ServerName      subdomain.mysite.com

        DocumentRoot    /var/www/subdomain

        ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/subdomain_mysite_com-error.log

        CustomLog /var/log/httpd/subdomain_mysite-access.log combined

    <directory> 

        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks

        AllowOverride AuthConfig FileInfo Indexes Limit

       Order allow,deny

       Allow from all

     </directory> 

< /virtualhost>

Also, FWIW - currently the rDNS lookup on my VPS IP goes to ns1.mysite.com.

Many thanks!

Syslog server

flipmiester99 — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:47:24 -0800

SyslogFilter: Any suggestions for a FREE centralized syslog server? The centralized server will most likely be running Centos. What programs do you suggest? I have both window and linux machines that will be sending their syslogs and i will need to do some sort of reporting. Thanks in advance.

Bizarre Linux Networking Problem

signalnine — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:13:23 -0800

I have a server running Centos 5. It's currently refusing outside connections to any port except port 22. ip-tables and SELinux are both disabled. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? By outside connections, I mean any connection that's not localhost. So, for example, I can telnet to localhost port 25, but from a machine on the same subnet (255.255.255.0) it refuses the connection. I've also checked /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny, both are empty and in xinetd.conf no_access and only_from remain unset.

Seriously guys, I'm sure I'm missing something really stupid, but I'm baffled at the moment.

RAID 10 on RHEL 5

quasistoic — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 17:26:32 -0800

How did *you* achieve a software RAID 10 (or 1+0) setup on your RHEL5 (or 4) box? I've spent the last three days running down rabbit hole after rabbit hole trying to build a Centos 5 system with its root filesystem (/) on a nested software RAID 1+0 device.

Now I've given up and adopted a compromise, with / on a RAID 5 and other frequently used directories on a RAID 10 (not true nested raid, mind you, but the single-level version), but I know I'll get myself into this situation again, and I want to hear if anyone else has found a better way out.

Some of the snags I encountered:
* Disk Druid doesn't support raid "10" or nested levels of software raid (1+0, 0+1), and it won't recognize such filesystems if I configure them through the terminal.
* While I could configure nested levels of raid post-install with mdadm, I couldn't get any to be recognized on reboot.

My setup:
* Two 64-bit Intel processors
* Four 15K 74G scsi disks
* 4G RAM

I want to stream more freely!

localhuman — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 19:42:27 -0800

I'm interested in setting up a Flash Media Server. According to Adobe, you must be running Red Hat Enterprise 3 or 4 for this to work. Is it possible that you could run an FMS on centOS?

Help finding Apache 2.2.4 x86_64

hummercash — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 11:03:39 -0800

I can't seem to find the rpm for Apache 2.2.4 x86_64 for RedHat 4 and/or CentOS 4.4... does anyone know where it is or if it even exists? Gracias.