Tag: Debian

Executing system commands from PHP with SUID executable.

If you want to execute system commands from something like PHP, you need a SUID executable which you can call from your PHP scripts. This is such a script. It could be extended to support parameters for the commands you want to execute, but that would be an enormous security risk, because then anybody can execute any command. If you need something as flexible as that, you need to think about adding some kind of security restrictions, like a list of allowed commands. Read More »
By halfgaar, 1 year ago, on February 02, 2011, at 16:02 | 1 comment

Allowing apache to set Nagios cmd file

On debian, to prevent: Error: Could not stat() command file ‘/var/lib/nagios3/rw/nagios.cmd’! Read More »
By halfgaar, 1 year ago, on December 28, 2010, at 23:12 | No comments

Disabling exim port 25 listening when zimbra is installed

When you're installing zimbra in an Ubuntu or Debian machine, it seems it installs the MTA in such a way that command line tools like mail and such don't work. But when you install exim, it conflicts with the postfix in Zimbra. Read More »
By halfgaar, 1 year ago, on December 12, 2010, at 19:12 | No comments

grml

grml seems like an interesting Debian-based Linux Live CD. It seems interesting because “[it] includes a collection of GNU/Linux software especially for system administrators and users of texttools.”

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By Rowan Rodrik, 1 year ago, on December 08, 2010, at 22:12 | No comments

Find all manually installed packages on a Debian system

This should find all manually installed packages on a Debian system:

aptitude search '~i!~E' | grep -v "i A" | cut -d " " -f 4 Read More »
By halfgaar, 1 year ago, on December 05, 2010, at 16:12 | No comments

Making a Debian Squeeze machine into a Xen virtual machine host

My attempts to get Xen working right on Debian stable (Lenny) were not really successful. Xen has had some interesting developments and the version in Lenny is just too old. Plus, the debian bootstrap scripts used to create images don't support Ubuntu Maverick... Squeeze (testing) has the newest Xen and deboostrap, so that's cool. I used the AMD64 architecture. Read More »
By halfgaar, 1 year ago, on November 07, 2010, at 20:11 | 1 comment

Configuring a Debian exim server for internet delivery

I wanted an Exim server which could send mail on its own without the use of another SMTP server. Read More »
By halfgaar, 2 years ago, on July 20, 2010, at 11:07 | No comments

Finnix Linux Live CD

Finnix is another Linux Live CD. Like SystemRescueCD, it's not intended for the average desktop user, and does not include any desktops, productivity tools, or sound support, in order to keep distribution size low. But Finnix is based on Debian, not Gentoo.

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By Rowan Rodrik, 2 years ago, on June 29, 2010, at 12:06 | No comments

Damn Small Linux

Damn Small Linux (or DSL) is another Linux distribution that deserves a closer look someday. It's light enough that it should even run on a 486DX with 16MB of RAM and it can run fully in RAM with only 128MB of RAM.

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By Rowan Rodrik, 2 years ago, on June 29, 2010, at 12:06 | No comments

RubyGems nuisances

Because I used it successfully before, I decided to use scrAPI to scrape the entries from the old Aihato guestbook. After preprocessing the HTML a bit, I finally got beyond an endless debugging sessions (which cumulated in me discovering a whole collection of nested <html> tags, which forbad any type of sensible parsing of the page). Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 2 years ago, on June 21, 2010, at 17:06 | 1 comment