sysadmin and security
I recently started using CloudWatch, Amazon's host monitoring service. It has a number of features but I just wanted a way to view all my logs in one place. Configuring hosts to use CloudWatch was easy, and I described the process in an article on setting up Anonymous FTP.
Timeout Errors
With monitoring in place, I noticed a lot of 408 errors coming from the Apache logs on my WordPress instance. The errors appeared in:
/var/log/httpd/access_log /var/log/httpd/ssl_access_log
I'm using a desktop that I got from System76 with an NVIDIA graphics card. Installing the NVIDIA drivers on Ubuntu wasn't simple, so here are the steps that I've gotten to work across multiple installations.
First remove any existing NVIDIA packages:
sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia* sudo apt-get autoremove
Next blacklist the nouveau driver. Without this step, the driver can re-appear after an update and cause problems. Create the blacklist file:
sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf
And add the following lines:
I wanted to create an FTP server to share some of the media that I've saved over the years. I like the old protocols and services and I plan to stand up more of them. Because each service has its own inherent security issues, the deployment process becomes an exercise in mitigating the risks. Check it out at ftp.disloops.com
I used an Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS instance for the FTP server and gave it an AWS Elastic IP (EIP). An entry must be added to the /etc/hosts file when deploying Ubuntu instances in AWS:
127.0.0.1 (hostname here)
Without specifying the hostname, using sudo creates an error message. Next I ran updates and changed SSH to a non-default port, then installed VSFTPD and backed up the config file:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade sudo vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config sudo apt-get install vsftpd sudo cp /etc/vsftpd.conf /etc/vsftpd.conf.old
This site is being hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS). It relies on a number of cloud services, including RDS, S3, and CloudFront. The following are some of the steps that were required to set it up.
Provisioning a Server
Create an AWS account if you don't already have one and complete the steps listed in the Identity and Access Management (IAM) service. It's especially important to set up multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your account. You should have an IAM user in the "Administrators" group when you're done.
Next go to the EC2 service, Amazon's storefront for virtual machines. Before launching a new instance, we'll create a key pair than can be used to access it securely. Use the following command locally to create a key pair:
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096
Upload the public key by clicking "Key Pairs" and then "Import Key Pair" from the EC2 dashboard. Now we can launch an instance.
I'm still using Ubuntu as my preferred Linux distro on personal machines. These are some of the settings that I configure each time I have to install it. Starting from the beginning:
Installation
Download the ISO image for the latest Long-Term Support (LTS) version and burn it to a disc. Boot from the disc to reach the installation menus and configure according to your needs. My own preference: