dparrish.com

Ubuntu version prior to Karmic Koala use tspc to create an IPv6 tunnel. In Karmic this has been replaced with gw6c, and the configuration file is similar but not exactly the same. For reference, here is my /etc/gw6c/gw6c.conf which uses the Aarnet tunnel broker in Australia.

This is mostly the sample configuration file, with the changed bits in italics.

userid=dparrish
passwd=********
server=broker.aarnet.net.au
auth_method=any
host_type=router
if_tunnel_v6v4=sit1
if_tunnel_v6udpv4=tun0
if_tunnel_v4v6=
prefixlen=64
if_prefix=eth0
auto_retry_connect=yes
retry_delay=30
retry_delay_max=300
keepalive=yes
keepalive_interval=30
tunnel_mode=v6anyv4
client_v4=auto
client_v6=auto
template=linux
proxy_client=no
broker_list=/var/lib/gw6c/tsp-broker-list.txt
last_server=/var/lib/gw6c/tsp-last-server.txt
always_use_same_server=no
log_stderr=0
log_file=2
log_filename=/var/log/gw6c/gw6c.log
log_rotation=yes
log_rotation_size=32
log_rotation_delete=no
syslog_facility=USER

After you have saved this file, run service gw6c restart to start the daemon. You can then check for your new IPv6 address using ip addr ls tun0.

If you want to enable firewalling on this tunnel (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED), you can use the following two files:

• linux.sh - Copy to /usr/share/gw6c/template/linux.sh and chmod 755
• firewall.sh - Copy to /etc/gw6c/firewall.sh and chmod 755

You should also edit firewall.sh to allow/disallow what you want. By default, this script allows ssh in to any machines behind your router, and any packets out from internal machines.

EDIT: If gw6c fails to start and doesn’t give any useful information at all, try copying /usr/share/gw6c/template/linux.sh to /var/lib/gw6c/template/linux.sh.

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It’s been quite a long time since the last release, and during that time I had a nasty crash that took out my server including git repository. However, backups come to the rescue and dbackup is available again. Announcing version 1.2.0, which includes:

• Updated documentation for each application
• Changed the protocol to include flags on a list
• Added the dry_run flag to restore
• Some bug fixes and performance enhancements

Along with the new version comes a move to Google Code, sitting side-by-side with libcli and rollout. You can find the code now at http://code.google.com/p/dbackup.

The latest release is available as a tarball only, at http://dbackup.googlecode.com/files/dbackup-1.2.0.tar.gz.

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This guy has put together some amazing lego creations that remind him of New York. No wait… They aren’t amazing, but they are quite funny.

http://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/i-lego-ny/?em

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There’s been enough actual interest in Rollout for me to move it to a community site. I chose Google Code because I work there, and it’s much faster than Sourceforge.

The new URL for Rollout is: http://code.google.com/p/rollout.

Unfortunately they don’t support git, so I have to deal once again with Subversion.

The new checkout instructions are:
svn checkout http://rollout.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ rollout

The manual is online there, and an issue tracker, so submit bugs!

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Inspired by Alex King’s recent post on backups, I hacked together this short Perl script that will backup MySQL databases to Amazon’s excellent S3 storage system.

You can download it here. You will need to edit a few configuration items at the top of the script, to include your Amazon Web Services IDs and MySQL details. You will also need the Amazon::S3 and DBI perl modules. You can get them from CPAN.

$ wget -Omysql_s3.pl http://dparrish.com/files/mysql_s3.pl
$ vi mysql_s3.pl (enter your details)
$ chmod 755 mysql_s3.pl
$ ./mysql_s3.pl

It’s probably best to add it to cron so it will run daily. Something like this works nicely:

0 3 * * * perl /home/dparrish/mysql_s3.pl

I’d also suggest using S3 Firefox Organizer to manage your S3 account. It’s a Firefox plugin.

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I’ve been mucking around with Comet, and ran into a situation which I couldn’t seem to find a solution on the lazyweb for. The problem was that none of the streamed JavaScript code blocks would be executed until the entire page was loaded.

I tracked it down to the gzip encoding module, which waits for all the data to be output, compresses it and sends it on to the browser.

You can disable gzip encoding for a particular directory in a .htaccess file (with Apache) like this:

RemoveOutputFilter DEFLATE
SetEnv no-gzip

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I can’t stand it when people release open source software, expect people to use it, and don’t provide any sort of documentation. I’m not the sort of person who enjoys writing doco, but I do think it’s required.

So here, in it’s entirety: the Rollout Manual
Continue reading ‘Rollout Manual’ »

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Announcing a new Open-Source project: Rollout!

Rollout is a system developed to automate system administration on UNIX servers. It is primarily focused towards Linux, but could be adapted to Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc.

It is written purely in Perl, and the configuration is also a Perl source file. Some Perl knowledge is required to edit the configuration, but copy-and-paste may suffice.

System Administration can generally be reduced to a set of steps, which must be completed in order. Some example steps include:

• Copy files, create symlinks
• Edit configuration files
• Start / stop services
• Add / modify users & groups
• Install applications

The idea behind Rollout is to automate all these steps in a configurable way. Rollout is by design idempotent - it can be run many times on a single server and produce the same results.

There is a certain amount of overlap between this and other projects such as puppet and cfengine. They all have similar goals. Rollout is designed to be very easy to extend (as long as you can cope with Perl) and very fast.

You can get rollout from my git repository at http://git.dparrish.com/rollout. If you’re using Cogito, you can run:

cg clone http://git.dparrish.com/rollout

This is the first public release, and as such is not expected to be everything to everybody. However it is in active production use and hasn’t destroyed anything yet. Use it at your own risk. The documentation included contains instructions on setting up a server and configuring clients.

Also, I’m enabling comments on this post (and I feel dirty doing it) so that people can submit bugs/patches/requests/complaints.

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If you’re one of the lucky few using dbackup, and want to upgrade from 1.1.0 to 1.1.1 so things work (I really shouldn’t use a minor version number increase to fix such a major bug), you’ll probably want to run the following command in your backup storage root:

rename 's/^([a-z./]+).(d+).(d+).(d+-d+-d+-d+-d+-d+).(meta|data)$/
sprintf(”%s.%03d.%03d.%s.%s”, $1, $2, $3, $4, $5)/ex’ */*

This should be run as all one line. It requires the rename perl script, which is in the perl package on Debian/Ubuntu at least.

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I’ve released a new version of dbackup today, version 1.1.1. This version fixes a sorting problem, which you would see if you ever get above level 10 in a backup run.

You can download the new version at:

Along with this release, I’m also opening up my git repository, so you can grab the latest source yourself. If you’re using Cogito, which I highly recommend, you can run:

cg clone http://git.dparrish.com/dbackup

For instructions on using dbackup, see my original post.

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