Assumptions:

You have a D-Link router that supports saving information to syslog.

You have a SuSE  Linux server or you are familiar with configuration locations on your distro. It is easy just search for syslog and your distro name. I didn’t know either.

Step 1: Open up /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf in an editor. Most web sites refer to syslog-ng.conf.in or something like that. They seem to be out of date. There is only syslog-ng.conf

Uncomment the line

#udp(ip(“0.0.0.0″) port(514));

to

udp(ip(“0.0.0.0″) port(514));

Save the file and quit.

Step 2: Restart the syslog

rcsyslog restart

Step 3: Go to your DLink routers admin page. I assume you know how to get there. On my router the tab name is Tools and then click on SYSLOG. Check “Enable logging to syslog”. and then  type the IP address of the SuSE box there. Click the “Save Settings” button at the top.

Step 4: A few minutes later check the syslog messages on the server. You can get there easily by opening up yast2 and going to Miscellaneous -> System log. Or just tail /var/log/messages.

Do not open that port on your router.

As part of my experiments to fix my gaming issues, I had uninstalled the DNS and DHCP servers from my Linux server. I don’t think that helped. But the new D-Link DIR 825 router definitely is not up to the job. All local DNS queries times out or takes forever. I did not want to install them on the same server only to have it uinstalled sometime later. That is the server where I have my file share (Samba) and mySQL running. I have a very old laptop sitting idle. I thought that was a good candidate for bare-bones Linux server. I did a bit of a search and finally decided to stick to OpenSuse. The only reason is my familiarity with this distribution.

Got the latest version: that is OpenSuse 11.1. Chrome failed to download the DVD image from the site. I installed FlashGet for IE and it is downloaded without a problem. Installed it with text GUI and minimal components required for DHCP and DNS. This laptop has only a 20GB HDD and 512MB RAM and a Pentium 4 processor. I was able to install Windows 7 Beta on it. So, Linux should not have any issues running. During this exercise the laptop died once. Battery is almost dead. It must be connected to power all the time.

After spending about 8 hours or so, I have the DHCP and DNS servers running. My home network is faster again. If you have multiple computers, none of the routers will do a good job routing data within the local network. Windows is less affected than Linux machines. Once I installed the DNS and DHCP servers, communication between Linux servers and and Windows desktops have improved a lot. PuTTY sessions were painfully slow.

Accessing my web servers from outside was also slow. I confirmed that this is a lot better now. A good use of a laptop that is not good enough for anything else.

This is on OpenSuse 11.1

Setup: Dynamic DNS setting with DHCP (?)

Setup DHCP so that it updates the DNS zone files.

There is a documentation at  /usr/share/doc/packages/dhcp-server/DDNS-howto.txt that explains half of the stuff. That will get you through the DHCP stuff.

Not documented:

Once you create the key file it need to be in the /var/lib/named/etc

The file should be owned by root:named

Ok, I am waiting for the output from genDDNSkey. How long should I wait before I press ctrl + C? I tried the same command on 2 servers so far and it won’t return. One of them Open Suse 10.x and the other one is a new 11.1.

All searches turns up the same text from /usr/share/doc/packages/dhcp-server/DDNS-howto.txt. People have copied and pasted from that file over and over on different sites.

Right now it is running one two servers and I don’t think they are ever going to come out. What is the alternative? Read the .sh file to figure out what it is doing?

Hmm, it has returned on a server that is multi core processor with lots of RAM.

Alright, it returned after about 10 minutes. I should tweet this instead of blogging

On Linux, always go for manually editing files. Automatic stuff never works. This is a fresh install. Nothing messed up by me yet.

Update: Manual edit fixed all the issues and named is running.

Search for texas instruments acx 111 wpa2. I have a Linksys PC Wireless card (WPC54G) that I use with an old laptop. Right now I am installing Linux on it. Once the setup is complete, it will be directly connected to the router. For now I needed the wireless connection. Can’t get it to working. My Router is D-Link DIR 825. Search says I canoot use anything other than WEP or Open. Tried that. Didn’t work. When I run tail -f /var/log/messages I see that the device is scanning. It cannot find any AP’s. Any AP’s. Windows 7 RC shows a page full of AP’s and a few of them even open. I will get around this one with or without the wireless working. But most other people will throw away Linux and get either Windows or a Mac. Linux is no longer about keeping old hardware working.

This is for my own reference for use in Open Suse. I got bits and pieces from many places.

jpaul-linux3:# fdisk -l 

This lists the disks. Find the entry that corresponds to the flash drive. In my case this time it is /dev/sdc1. I have seen cases where the drives are listed by device id. 

This is a temporary mount:

jpaul-linux3:# mkdir /mnt/flash

jpaul-linux3:# mount -t vfat /dev/sdc1 /mnt/flash

jpaul-linux3:# ls -l /mnt/flash

That’s all to it.

There was a power outage here last week and we were not home. When we came back the servers were not running. I guess the power outage lasted more than the UPS capacity. It also looks like there was some kind of a surge that was not filtered very well by the UPS surge protection. ON one server a hard drive died and on the other the DVD drive died. The one with dead DVD drive came back without a problem and no data loss. The other one which acts as DNS, DHCP, MySQL and SAMBA server did not come back because the dead hard drive had the /home mount and also one of the SAMBA shares that had a lot of unimportant but bulky data. That was a Maxtor drive. I have another Maxtor drive that is acting up. Time to mirror that. 

I pulled that dead hard drive from the server and mounted another partition as /home. There were not much useful stuff on the home drive. Most of activities were done as root. I had to do some SAMBA user setups again. Except SAMBA everything else is working fine now. This blog is hosted on the good server with database on the other. 

I added two new SATA II hard drives in place of the dead hard drive. Linux changed the device names of existing hard drives and I had to edit the /etc/fstab.

I can understand people who hate Windows altogether. But I have one problem with people who hate Windows Vista and professes that we should stick with Windows XP.

Windows XP inherently is weak insecurity. If you let your guard down, bot nets gets hold of your computer. You may never realize that your computer is part of a bot net.

So, my question is, who are the people who really want XP to stay alive? My answer is that the people who manage bot nets.

Solution, if you don’t like Vista and you are not that careful about web sites you visit, what you install and so on, get a Linux or Mac. Don’t stick with XP and fall prey to bot nets.

If you plan to use Outlook 2007, you need an extremely powerful computer and capability to kill it from outside of Windows. I have a Core 2 Duo E6700 desktop with 3 GB RAM and 1 TB hard drive. It is not good enough for Outlook 2007. I configured it to get POP3 for my gmail account and for my hotmail account. Nothing else. Every time I open it, after about a minute, my computer stops responding. If I don’t load Outlook 2007, there is no problem.

There is a bunch of other applications and services running on my computer. SQL Server 2005 runs without any problem. When I look at it, SQL Server 2005 uses far less resources than Outlook 2007. Funny thing is, once the system becomes too slow or unresponsive, not even task manager will come up. The system is not hanging because the mouse cursor responds and alt tab works. My only recourse is to press the reset button. Than god, the motherboard makers still have control over the hard reset.

Do you use any version of Outlook? Open the task manager and add the memory usage to the columns displayed. Now sort the list by memory usage and see where Outlook stands. Most probably that is the most memory consuming application on your desktop. Now add the number of threads to the display and sort and see which application uses most number of threads. Outlook probably uses 50 or more threads. For doing what?

I am glad that Linux desktops are becoming more and more user friendly. I was surprised by the quality of Open SuSE 10.2. It is well beyond Windows XP. May be not as good as Vista in looks. But If you are satisfied with the looks of XP and crave more security and freedom, jump to Open SuSE 10.2. I do not have a clean install of Open SuSE 10.2, it is just a patch on top SuSE Linux 10.1. I am impressed by that. I don’t know if there will be more enhancements if I did a clean install. This one runs on a pretty old Intel Pentium 4 machine and responds pretty well. I have not used Office applications on this machine because I use it as server rather than as a workstation. It looks like I will be slowly switching to Linux. Sorry Mac fans, I am not fan of extreme propriety hardware and software. Microsoft is good enough if I have to use propriety stuff.