Imminent Web Services

After I did a "emerge --sync" today, "emerge -pvuDN world" showed the following package conflict:

To compile a locale in CentOS, do something like this:

root# localedef -c -f UTF-8 -i en_US en_US.utf8

To see all locales available, do this:

$ locale -a

To set locale, do something like this:

$ export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Note: This article is related to installing VMware Server 1.x on Ubuntu, with kernel 2.6.24-x.

Install and Setup VMware Server

After you downloaded the VMware Server package, and run vmware-install.pl, it will ask you to run vmware-config.pl. Run that script and you will most likely encounter some module problem. If you do, then download vmware-any-any-update-116 (or newer version) from Peter Velichkov's Blog. Then run the runme.pl found the in vmware-any-any-update-xxx package. Then reboot your Ubuntu.

1. Update the local portage tree
   root# emerge --sync
2. Check for updates in the entire system.
   root# emerge -pvuDN world
   This is equivelant to
   root# emerge --pretend --verbose --update --deep --newuse world
3. If you are ok to update the entire system, do
   root# emerge -vuDN world
   Otherwise, you can choose to update only the packages you want, by doing "emerge -v package"
4. Check for packages that are not associated with any explicitly merged packages:
   

Say, you want to remove kernel 2.6.19-gentoo-r5, you should first remove the source and the compiled image:

root# rm -rf /usr/src/linux-2.6.19-gentoo-r5
root# rm -rf /boot/System.map-genkernel-x86-2.6.19-gentoo-r5
root# rm -rf /boot/initramfs-genkernel-x86-2.6.19-gentoo-r5
root# rm -rf /lib/modules/2.6.19-gentoo-r5/

Then you would need to remove the entry for 2.6.19-gentoo-r5 in the GRUB menu:

root# vi /boot/grub/grub.conf

If your network admin complains that your computer is flooding the network with icmp requests, and if you are not aware of any program that need to do this, you should pay attention and find out what's going on.

To see a statistic report on your computer's icmp activities:

root# netstat -sp

This displays summary statistics for each protocol. Look under the section "Icmp:" for icmp related statistics report.

To see icmp traffic on your computer:

root# tcpdump icmp

This article explains clearly on how to use lsof and netstat to find out the process running on a given port:

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/184

To discover the process name, ID (pid), and other details you need to run:

lsof -i :port  

So to see which process is listening upon port 80 we can run:

root# lsof -i :80

After I upgraded package www-servers/apache today, it gave me a message as follow:

 *  Selected default MPM: prefork
 *
 * Please note that you need SysV IPC support in your kernel.
 * Make sure CONFIG_SYSVIPC=y is set.

To check, cd to /usr/src/linix, and check the file .config for CONFIG_SYSVIPC value setting.

To use HTML::Tidy, we must first make sure the libtidy is installed in the system. Otherwise, when you try to install it via cpan, it will give you compilation error.

On Gentoo, in order to install it from cpan, you must make sure you have "emerge -v app-text/htmltidy".  Or better, just directly "emerge -v dev-perl/perltidy" and that should take care of everything for you, I think.

Here are some places where you can find information for hardening your systems: