rsnapshot

It’s been a while since I blogged about the installation of my eee-box – and my intention to use it as a server.

Of course, I did some basic installation in the meantime – and the box is now running perfectly.

So – here’s the final chapter in this two-part series, and a list of everything I did to get the box up and running:

Basic tools

The first thing I missed was my good old vim – easy:

sudo apt-get install vim

did the trick.

I then made sure that updates happen automatically – there’s a good page on that in the serverguide, and all I had to make sure was that mailx was installed. Logwatch is also an option – but only after a mailsystem is up and running (see below).

Web-Stuff

MySQL installation was pretty easy: I followed the server guide’s page on this, and then created also /etc/mysql/conf.d/charsets.cnf (Download here) – this helped me get rid of some UTF8-errors on my old gentoo box already…

I then made the mysql server accessible from the outside by adding

bind-address my.ip.addr.ess

into /etc/mysql/my.cnf, then following this excellent website that explains everything on how to remote access a mysql database.

After that, I installed apache2 – again, the server guide’s page on that subject includes everything necessary. The guide’s page on PHP also has a lot of good information – I ended up installing php5, libapache2-mod-php5, php5-cli and php5-mysql. Finally, I created a phpinfo.php and deleted index.html, in /var/www.

For the usage of automatic WordPress updates, I also installed an ftp-server – again, just followed the server guide. In WordPress, when installing a plugin, I then have to enter “localhost” plus my local user name plus the corresponding password, whenever it asks for a connection information.

Finally, I installed mediawiki; the packages to install were mediawiki, mediawiki-math, imagemagick and php5-gd; the installation itself is again covered in the server guide.

After the configuration of mediawiki (make sure you use the old backward-compatible charset!), I enabled TeX and uploads and moved my old mediawiki according to my own blog entry (hey – they start to come in handy!!)

For some reason, I had to change the password of my mediawiki admin user after that – luckily, I found this blog entry… and then, I installed the cite extension – again, I followed my own guide on doing so.

Samba

For Samba, the installation was really easy; the corresponding page on the ubuntu server guide explains everything needed. All I had to do was to smbpasswd my working user – and everything worked. While I now have a nice NAS, I still wanted to be able to access my home share from outside – mainly due to filesharing, see below.

Mailserver

The mailserver is always a little tricky; I decided to go with dovecot, postfix, procmail and getmail. I started with dovecot (only use the instructions relating to dovecot, not the ones relating to postfix!), and for a proper postfix installation, I closely (!) followed this doc (also, I had to install procmail in order to get over this flawlessly). I created an alias for root pointing to my working user, as explained here. And finally, I installed getmail, as explained on howtoforge.

It took me three attempts – but following these documents in the given order should do it.

Filesharing

While I obviously know that filesharing involves a lot of illegal (or at least…. grey) activities, I still use it – how to get an ubuntu ISO file faster than via bittorrent? Not to speak of all the great american tv shows that you just can’t watch around here (not even DVD’s are available, sometimes….) – so, I still rely on bittorrent and, sometimes on mldonkey. The basic instructions I noted down a while ago were useful, when it came down to configuring mldonkey (it’s config files are in /var/lib/mldonkey…)

As for bittorrent, I highly recommend to go with devinw’s installer package that installs lighthttpd, rtorrent and wtorrent – it’s in the ubuntu forums and it worked after a couple of problems – read the forum entry in case of troubles!

Backup system

I then installed rsnapshot and configured it, following the work I did a while ago.

Upgrade to 9.04

Final step was to update to 9.04 – there is a good instruction provided by the canonical folks on how to do so.

The box now runs for something over 2 months – no problems, AT ALL!

Maybe I’ll go ahead and try some anti-spam solution, once again….

I blogged about my backup concept a while ago – and now, I finally managed to get at least the client side finished.

The problem was that the tar-file with the backup stuff got too big – and this ended up in weird error messages. After some manual testing, I ended up with a final version of the script ~/bin/makebackuptar, as follows:

#!/bin/sh
cd /home/thomas
tar -cjf .clientbackup.tar.bz2 .client-backup
split --byte=1000m .clientbackup.tar.bz2 .clientbackup.tar.bz2.split
mv .clientbackup.tar.bz2.split* /home/thomas/datashare
rm .clientbackup.tar.bz2
# to combine the splitted bz2-file, use cat .clientbackup.tar.bz2.split.* > .clientbackup.tar.bz2


It works very good – the only thing missing right now are some cron jobs and of course something that triggers the backup on the server whenever I turn on the USB HDD…

As already discussed yesterday, I am going for some serious backup stuff now.

Here’s the server’s rsnapshot.conf:

config_version 1.2
snapshot_root /mnt/usbhd/
cmd_cp /bin/cp
cmd_rm /bin/rm
cmd_rsync /usr/bin/rsync
cmd_logger /usr/bin/logger
cmd_du /bin/du
cmd_rsnapshot_diff /usr/bin/rsnapshot-diff
interval fullbackup 6
verbose 2
loglevel 3
logfile /var/log/rsnapshot.log
exclude_file /etc/rsnapshot.exclude
link_dest 1
# LOCALHOST
backup /home/ localhost/
backup /etc/ localhost/
backup_script /home/thomas/.bin/backupmediawiki localhost/zuhausewiki/

And the new file ~/.bin/backupmediawiki looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/mysqldump --user=root --password=**** wikidb > wikidb.sql
/usr/bin/tar -cjf zuhausewiki.images.tar.bz2 /var/www/localhost/htdocs/mediawiki/images

Now, with rsnapshot fullbackup, the backup process is initiated. The only thing I have to work on is finding out how to start it automatically when the USB HDD is plugged in. As the Gentoo Wiki is down at the moment, I will wait for this.

OK, after yesterday’s disaster, I decided that I need a new backup concept.

Here’s the basic plan:

1. On the client, I will install rsnapshot; it will snapshot my own home-dir and the client’s /etc-dir to a directory called ~/.client-backup. After the backup is completed, I will create a tarball of this whole directory and put it into the datashare-directory – as this is a samba-share on the server
2. With a cron-entry, I’ll make sure that the rsnapshot-script will run every week
3. On the server, I will install rsnapshot as well; it will snapshot all the home-dirs and the /etc-dir to the USB-HDD (see below)
4. Within the rsnapshot-script, I will make sure that my mediawiki is backuped (dump the SQL stuff and tar the images)
5. On the server, I will install something (HAL? IVMAN?) to make the rsnapshot-script run whenever I plug in my USB-HDD

Read on for the exact setup.