This is the second half of that magento issue. Mainly, after having got a directory with millions of files in it, you can do one of two things.
mv sessions sessions_full && mkdir sessions && chown www-data:www-data sessions
rm -rfv sessions_full
Or
find /loc/of/sessions -ctime +1 -type f -exec rm -v {} \;
After an upgrade, I’ve noticed a few times that bind has refused to restart or reload, saying:
Stopping domain name service: namedrndc: connect failed: connection refused
This seems to be a permissions bug in debian, quite a long lasting one. In order to cheat-fix it quickly, I do the following:
chown bind:root /etc/bind/rndc.key
chmod 660
/etc/init.d/bind9 restart
That seems to fix it well enough. I think it’s a problem in that bind starts as one user, but runs as another. It may be that 440 are all the perms that are necessary. The debian bug report is here: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=169577
Magento (the popular open-source online shop system) likes to store its PHP session files in ~/public_html/var/session/
Most debian servers don’t have that in their cron job that deletes old session files.
So, you probably want to set it to store it’s session files in the default location (/var/lib/php5) or alter your cron job (/etc/cron.d/php5)
Fun!
Two useful things I have found or use 🙂
A wonderful tip, that someone sent into the ubuntu-uk podcast. (I can’t remember who, or the episode. Comment if you know and I’ll credit them here! 🙂 )
You can search, in any website’s search function, using firefox’s address bar. Now, at first glance this sounds really boring and useless, but it really isn’t, at all.
First, we need to find a website to search. Let’s use launchpad’s bugs search, for Ubuntu. So, we go here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/
Then, right click on the search box, and click “Add a keyword for this search”. This brings up the standard bookmark – your search keywords are stored as a bookmark. Give it a useful name, something to help you next time you go sorting through your book marks. Now, the keyword is how we use this trick. I’m going to use “bugs”, but you can use anything you want, just remember, this is the word you put before your search string in the address bar. Click Add.
Now, all we have to do, is to search for a bug. Let’s use the classic bug 1.
Open a new tab (CTRL + T), then in the address bar type [your keyword] microsoft market share, and hit enter.
Lo and behold:
Found a really handy little command line program called “swaks”. Great if you’ve ever needed to test SMTP-AUTH, and didn’t want to have to base64 the username and password yourself. Here’s a quick rundown on the command and flags I use with them. (Should be fairly obvious, comment if not!)
swaks -s [smtp-server-name-or-ip] -au [smtp-auth-user] -ap [smtp-auth-password] -f [from-address-of-testing-email]
Hit enter, and it’ll ask you the “to” email address. Type it in, and it gives you the full connection readout, just as if you were doing it with telnet (or netcat) on the command line:
<- 220 smtp.our-domain.com ESMTP
-> EHLO gemini
<- 250-smtp.our-domain.com
<- 250-AUTH LOGIN
<- 250-AUTH=LOGIN
<- 250-PIPELINING
<- 250 8BITMIME
-> AUTH LOGIN
<- 334 Z29vZCB0cnkgOikK
And so on. 🙂
“Update systems can no longer assume that hosts are alive but must either chase after them until they reappear or be initiated by the host itself on a schedule, as well as any time it discovers that it has rejoined its home network.”
-The Practice of System and Network Administration (second edition) by Thomas Limoncelli, Christina Hogan and Strata Chalup.
To join in just follow the instructions below:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.