SysAdmin Valley

Do you have multiple computers? Maybe one at work and one at home, or maybe you have two at work. Have you ever said I would love to have a way to keep my documents on multiple computers at the same time and not have to worry about copying the files back and forth. Or maybe you’re just looking for a simple way to backup your files in case of emergencies. Well, you should check out DropBox.

DropBox is a new way to manage your files. First you create an account one their website, then you install a piece of software on all your computers. Then when you add a file into your DropBox on one of your computers, immediately all your other computers download the new file. If you make a change to that document on any of the computers, all the others immediately pickup the change. No more copying your documents to CD/DVD/USB and then over to your other computer. Now all your documents are synchronized immediately.

Here’s another benefit.  If you have multiple computers that have different operating systems, this doesn’t matter.  You can automatically synchronize files between Windows, Mac and Linux too.

Another great feature of DropBox, have you ever accidentally deleted or changed a file and wished that you had a backup copy of it. Well now you do. Now you can recover deleted files or get back previous versions of your documents.

To get started, just go to DropBox and click Download DropBox.

Here’s some tools that are great for managing Amazon’s EC2 servers.

ElasticFox
ElastDream

I’ve been doing quite a bit of work with the Amazon Cloud and here are a few tools I’ve found useful for managing the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

S3Fox
Simple Access for S3 & AWS
Amazon S3 Filesystem for Windows
S3Sync for Ruby
S3cmd for Perl
S3fs for Linux

Edit:
CloudBerry Explorer for S3

Today I had the new to generate some new certs for a customer.  I wanted to see what I used previously for the values when I generated the CSR (Certificate Signing Request).  To view the details I used the following:

openssl req -noout -text -in server.csr

One of the many sites I run is a ColdFusion site.  Not by choice, but because the developer that created the site was a CF developer.  When I acquired the site, the original developer would just run ColdFusion Server as a standalone web and application server.  For most cases this is fine, but as the site has grown, so has the traffic.  When you think of all the traffic that is going to the ColdFusion application server, not just dynamic CFM file, but lots of static content like images, CSS, and plain HTML files.  There is no reason why we need to put the extra stress on the ColdFusion server, when a simple webserver could handle the static content, and pass all the requests for dynamic content to ColdFusion.

The original setup was just ColdFusion running on port 80 which is the standard port when going to http://www.mydomain.com.  So first I needed to change ColdFusion’s webserver to run on a different port.  To do that you need to edit the jrun.xml file which on most Linux/Unix systems is located in cf_root/runtime/servers/coldfusion/SERVER-INF.  cf_root is the main directory where you installed ColdFusion.  In the jrun.xml file, you are looking for the section that says:

<!-- ================================================================== -->
 <!-- This is the built-in JRun Web Server                               -->
 <!-- ================================================================== -->
 <service name="WebService">
 <attribute name="port">80</attribute>
 <attribute name="interface">*</attribute>
 <attribute name="deactivated">false</attribute>
 <attribute name="activeHandlerThreads">100</attribute>
 <attribute name="minHandlerThreads">1</attribute>
 <attribute name="maxHandlerThreads">1000</attribute>
 <attribute name="mapCheck">0</attribute>
 <attribute name="threadWaitTimeout">300</attribute>
 <attribute name="backlog">500</attribute>
 <attribute name="timeout">300</attribute>
 </service>

Where is says port 80, you want to change that to another port like 8080.  Next we need to configure Nginx.  On most RedHat/CentOS based systems the Nginx config’s are in /etc/nginx and we’re looking for the nginx.conf.  Here is the basic Nginx config to server your website on port 80, then pass all the requests for ColdFusion files to ColdFusion on port 8080.  This config has some of the basic Nginx settings stripped out and just gives you the server section, this also assumes that you have installed ColdFusion in the /usr/local/coldfusionmx7 directory, and /usr/local/coldfusionmx7/wwwroot is where all your content is.

server {
  listen       80;
  server_name  _;
  access_log  /var/log/nginx/host.access.log  main;

  location / {
    root   /usr/local/coldfusionmx7/wwwroot;
    index  index.cfm index.html index.htm;
    proxy_pass          http://127.0.0.1:8080/;
    proxy_redirect      off;
    proxy_set_header    Host            $host;
    proxy_set_header    X-Real-IP       $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded_For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;         
  }

  location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|
exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js)$ {
    root /usr/local/coldfusionmx7/wwwroot;
  }
}

At this point, all you need to do is restart ColdFusion, you should be able to verify it still works by going to http://www.mydomain.com:8080. Then you can start Nginx, and go to http://www.mydomain.com.

Another tip related to one of my previous blogs.  All websites have an index page (aka Home Page), but no matter whether it’s index.html or index.php or any other name, some search engines will view http://www.domain.com/ and http://www.domain.com/index.php as duplicate content.  So I use the following to redirect index.php to /

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^index.php$ / [L,R=301]

I have setup a new website for people who use Cisco products called Cisco Sphere.  I’m hoping that it will grow to be a helpful website for those who need help with their Cisco products.

A lot of SEO experts say that if you allow people to go to either domain.com or www.domain.com the search engines will index both URLs as if they are two totally different sites.  You might think that is bad news, but what ends up happening is the search engines will see the same content (duplicate) on both domain.com and www.domain.com and the search engines will demote your listing for having duplicate content on more than one domain.

The way to fix this is to either permanently redirect all traffic from domain.com to www.domain.com, or vice-verse.  If you’re using Apache there is a quick and easy way by using .htaccess files.  To redirect all domain.com to www.domain.com, you can do the following:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Or if you want all www.domain.com to forward to domain.com, use this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Thanks to one of the SysAdmin Valley reads who alerted me to a mistype in one of the blogs.  When you are typing in Linux commands into WordPress and it uses a double hyphen, you need to change the formatting to “Preformatted” for the text.  The reason it, WordPress converts the double hyphens into a single hyphen.   See the following example.

With double hyphens & normal formatting:

rpm –version

With double hyphens & preformatted formatting:

rpm --version

A SQL query goes into a bar, walks up to two tables and says, “Can I join you?”