Many times you might want to fine tune the default permissions of the files created on a linux system. This is very simple and usually if you are using bash all you have to do is to define somewhere in the bash startup files (/etc/profile is a good place for this) a new value for umask like this:
umask 002
(this will allow by default group write permissions on the newly created files)

Normally on modern linux distributions this is by default set to 022 and you can easily find out what it is on your system by running the umask command:
umask

Contrary to what you might think, this is not enough to have this working for all applications and daemons on the system. This works fine for any files created from a shell session, but the files created by other processes, like the web server for example, will still use the default, unless otherwise configured. In order to have apache use a different umask we can define this inside /etc/apache2/envvars (debian, and ubuntu systems) or /etc/sysconfig/httpd (rhel,centos systems) like this:
umask 002
and restart apache to enable it.

Other daemons will have different locations where you can define this to overwrite the default setting for umask (check their documentation if you are unsure).

The moment a PHP application grows to run on more servers, normally people will see problems caused by PHP sessions. If the application is not persistent you are lucky and don’t care about this, but if not you will quickly see this regardless of how good the load balancer you use is handling stickiness (sending the users to the same real server), this will slowly become a major issue. There are various solutions that can be used to store PHP sessions in a shared location, but I want to present today one solution that is very simple to implement, yet very efficient and on the long term better suited than using a database backend for this: using memcache to store the sessions.

The pecl memcache php extension has supported for a long time the memcache session.save_handler, but with the release 3.0.x (still in beta at this time) this brings in a set of interesting features for us:
- UDP support
- Binary protocol support
- Non-blocking IO using select()
- Key and session redundancy (values are written to N mirrors)
- Improved error reporting and failover handling

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We all know and love vmstat, but wouldn’t it be nice to get such information on a per process basis, to be able to better understand what is causing i/o problems? This is exactly what iopp, written by Mark Wong and released as open source does:
“It’s a custom tool to go through the Linux process table to get i/o statistics per process. It is open source and can be downloaded from: http://git.postgresql.org/?p=~markwkm/iopp.git;a=summary“

Now this sounds interesting, and I am sure anyone that has dealt with i/o issues in the past will probably find this very useful. Let’s see how we can install it and what kind of reporting we get. We will install this from source and here are some quick steps to do this (you will need git and cmake for this):
git clone git://git.postgresql.org/git/~markwkm/iopp.git
cd iopp
cmake CMakeLists.txt
make

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Mdadm is the modern tool most Linux distributions use these days to manage software RAID arrays; in the past raidtools was the tool we have used for this. This cheat sheet will show the most common usages of mdadm to manage software raid arrays; it assumes you have a good understanding of software RAID and Linux in general, and it will just explain the commands line usage of mdadm. The examples bellow use RAID1, but they can be adapted for any RAID level the Linux kernel driver supports.

1. Create a new RAID array

Create (mdadm –create) is used to create a new array:
mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=1 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb2
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The Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is the method for finding a host’s link layer (hardware) address when only its Internet Layer (IP) or some other Network Layer address is known. ARP is a Link Layer protocol (Layer 2) because it only operates on the local area network or point-to-point link that a host is connected to. When we migrate one IP from a machine to another one, we might have problems caused by ‘arp caching‘. Various devices will cache the arp information for a specified amount of time and even after we moved the IP this will not be seen by some devices that will still use the cached information. I am talking about directly connected switches or routers, that we might have control or maybe not. If we have control on all the external devices, normally we just connect to the router or switch and remove the arp entry, forcing the device to query again for the information. This post will try to help in the situation where we don’t have direct control on the external devices (we are collocated or use rented servers in a remote datacenter, etc.), to minimize the downtime associated with this type of IP migration.

It is quite frequent to use separate IPs for various services on the same machine, and move those IPs to another server if needed. These are sometimes called portable IPs that can be migrated to any server in a particular colo/lan. This is done normally to minimized downtime and keep maintenance of such operations minimal (and to not rely on dns changes). Still arp caching on various network devices can cause big problems. Let’s assume we moved the IP from one server to another one in the same LAN to move away some service from our main web server. Taking down the IP from the existing server and bringing it up on the new server will complete our direct work if we don’t have access on the switches/routers in front of us. Again if you have control on all devices just connect to them and delete the arp cache for this ip to allow it to be re-cached on the new machine.

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Awstats will consider as a page hit any entry from the log it processes. By default some file extensions (for regular image types and css/js) are excluded from what awstats will consider as a page:
NotPageList="css js class gif jpg jpeg png bmp ico"(this is the default). All other file types will be counted as pages. Now, if we want to completely ignore some files, or even all the content of one folder from the awstats processing we can use the SkipFiles parameter. We might want to do this to ignore some frames, hidden pages, ajax calls, etc.

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Sendmail will use by default a single mail queue. This is what most users will need, and if you don’t have any special requirement you will not care about this. Still for high traffic mail servers it might be useful to split the queue over several directories, as thousands of files in a single directory will become a performance penalty at some point and also processing the queue sequentially will become very slow. This post will show how we can implement multiple mail queues with modern sendmail versions.

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One month after RedHat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 (20080521), the CentOS team released yesterday their own 5.2 update for CentOS-5. There are available new iso images for the i386 and x86_64 architectures, while PowerPC, IA64 and Sparc are planned and will be released soon. CentOS-5.2 is based on the upstream release EL 5.2.0, and includes packages from all variants including Server and Client. All upstream repositories have been combined into one, to make it easier for end users to work with.

Besides the changes introduced by rhel5.2 you can find the centos particularities here.

Updating from CentOS-5.0 and 5.1:

Systems running CentOS-5 (either 5.0 or 5.1) will notice the update in the yum/up2date repositories and can be upgraded immediately by running:
yum upgrade

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Last week RedHat released RHEL5.2 on the 21st, and probably most people running Centos 5 are wandering when they will get the updated Centos5.2 release as well. From past releases I have noticed that this takes a couple of weeks, close to a month, but didn’t really track the exact time lag between the releases.

Reading from Tim Verhoeven’s explanation:

“For some background information, why does it take 3,5 weeks ? First we need to remove all the logos and trademarks of Upstream. Secondly we need to build everything from source and this for both i386 and x86_64. Then everything that gets build goes past the QA team that verify that everything works as it should. From all the build packages install media will be created and these also need to be tested by the QA team. For each release a set of release notes are created and these are translated in different languages (12 for 5.1). Finally all the packages and media need to be uploaded in distributed to the mirror network so you can download it.”

we learn that we should expect Centos 5.2 released sometimes around June 14th 2008 (sooner or later).

Anyone coming from the “sendmail world” to postfix will notice immediately the care taken by postfix developers to make the transition as easy as possible. The same commands you would be used to, like for ex. mailq, newaliases, are working in postfix also.

The newaliases command works on postfix as expected, rebuilding the aliases database:
newaliases

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