Category: System Administration

Posts related to system administration. Mostly applicable to Linux distributions, mostly Ubuntu/Debian and OpenWrt; see tags.

Firewalling Google Chat and Skype

To enable for Internet chat I set up Google Chat and Skype.  My firewall rules have been extremely restrictive with only known and approved services allowed to connect.  Google Chat installed with no noticeable impact to the firewall. Things did not go so well with Skype. The installation of Skype resulted in lots of warnings… Continue reading Firewalling Google Chat and Skype

Setting up Squid Proxy on Ubuntu

Squid is a proxy service for HTTP and other requests. This article covers installing it and configuring it to run on Ubuntu as a transparent proxy. This documentation includes configuring Web Proxy Auto-Discovery (WPAD) via DHCP and DNS. I run a heterogeneous configuration. This provided a number of challenges as various implementations of WPAD were encountered. Each seems to… Continue reading Setting up Squid Proxy on Ubuntu

Analog with Report Magic and Logwrangler

I am now using Report Magic for Analog with my Analog installation.  My last attempt had failed miserably, but this time it went extremely well.  I found Logwrangler which does a lot of the work.  I encountered an incompatibility between Report Magic and an updated graphics library.  Once the patch was applied the program ran… Continue reading Analog with Report Magic and Logwrangler

Analog for Multiple Sites

Analog is a fast and flexible web log analysis tool.  Its configuration can consist of several files nested using include statements.  This allows common configuration items to be grouped in separate files.  The minimal site specific configuration items can be contained in small include files.  Similarly, time period specific include files allow for reports by… Continue reading Analog for Multiple Sites

Monitoring with Munin

Munin is a system monitoring program designed to capture and graph performance statistics with minimal configuration. It is significantly easier to configure than MRTG and has a wide variety of plugins.  The Ubuntu (Debian) installer will setup a reasonable configuration on installation.  It requires one server, and a client daemon on all monitored servers including… Continue reading Monitoring with Munin

Installing WordPress on Ubuntu

WordPress is available as a packaged application for Ubuntu.  However it requires a bit of post installation configuration. The installation will install the apache2 multi-user server if no server is installed. I modified the installation to run over top of an existing site.  The default installation creates directories under /var/www, which I move to /srv.

Setting up Windows

The following guide is intended to help install Windows on system in a secure manner.  The steps here are intended to limit the exposure of the system to malware during installation.  However, it does not guarantee that malware will not infect the system.  There are many known vectors used by malware, some of which are… Continue reading Setting up Windows

OpenWRT and Ubuntu dnmasq setup

Now I have replaced my old firewall with OpenWRT, I needed to enhance the configuration of dnsmasq to support the network.  The old Ubunutu based firewall was already running dnsmasq, as does the DNS server on the LAN. I run a mixed network with wired and wireless clients on separate address ranges. DHCP services are… Continue reading OpenWRT and Ubuntu dnmasq setup

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