Linux Admin Zone

Having an android based smartphone is cool and using apps related to your core work in it is even more cooler

Though there’s not much choice available as far as apps for Linux admin are concerned, but still there are few useful. I tried hereby compiling list of 5 such apps which can be helpful for us but its definitely possible that I didn’t come through some awesome app which you are aware about, in such case, requesting you to please put a comment about it.

1. ConnectBot

This is a quick post describing some issues that you may face while installing/running vsftpd in Ubuntu host. I will quickly walk through steps, beginning with installation and then configuration for general purpose FTP access.

1. Install and run vsftpd without login shell

Most obvious thing while running a ftp server is to run it under non login shell. This is quite easy in Redhat based distro but here in Ubuntu, you need to do something extra also to enable users accessing ftp running under non login shell.

Install vsftpd server and start it:

$ apt-get install vsftpd
$ /etc/init.d/vsftpd start

When an aspiring Linux system admin inquired me about some good books to read on this topic, I recommended few ones. I glad he liked few books and this gives me an insight to share the list with my blog readers. It definitely a challenging task to filter out 5 books from ocean. There are too many books which looks superior to each other but for the sake of preparing the list, I’ve selected my 5 favorites. Does it mean I think others are not good? Nope. It only means given a choice at a certain point of time, few books will pop up in your mind, which you think are better and that’s how the list get prepared.

Here are the steps I’ve taken to turn on user chat logging for a jabber server. Please note that this way is not very efficient as it logs chats in plain html file. Logging into database might be more suitable for you.

Step 1: Checkout jabber modules
User chat logging in plain html files are provided by jabber module mod_log_chat. We are going to checkout jabber modules by using subversion client (svn). Make sure you have subversion client installed before proceeding

$ cd /usr/src
$ svn co https://svn.process-one.net/ejabberd-modules
$ cd ejabberd-modules/mod_log_chat/trunk/

Step 2: Compile mod_log_chat
We will compile and install mod_log_chat module. Make sure you have erlang installed for compilation purpose.

In a CentOS 5.5 host, we were requested to upgrade openssh to its latest version. Here are steps I took to quickly do the upgrade. You may like to compile it from source or can take my way of installing it from some repository.

Checking existing verison shows 4.3p2:

$ ssh -v
OpenSSH_4.3p2, OpenSSL 0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 01 Jul 2008

simply tried upgrading by running yum using default repositories but it didn’t find any latest version. To grab the latest one, I have installed the CentALT repository, which usually have latest packages. I’ve documented the steps to install it in earlier post here. After having installed CentALT, I tried again but found some dependency issue: