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CentOS NetInstall settings

by on October 30, 2008 in Uncategorized

Did we already say that among the different Linux distributions we embrace CentOS? CentOS is a community driven project derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor.  CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible.

In any case, one of the best features is to be able to have CentOS installed with a NetInstall. That means all you have to do is to download the 8MB ISO image, burn it (or use it as a startup image if you want to setup a virtual machine) and off you go. With NetInstall you don’t need to download the 5+ GB DVD or 6 ISO images anymore. Also, only the packages that you need will be downloaded.

As a note: when you get to the screen where you can define the source of the CentOS images you will want to enter the following:

For 32-bit:

Host: isoredirect.centos.org
Directory: centos-5/5.2/os/i386/

For 64-bit:

Host: isoredirect.centos.org
Directory: centos-5/5.2/os/x86_64/

Comments { 26 }

Vsftp login problems on CentOS 5.2 and SELinux

by on October 30, 2008 in Uncategorized

I was just about finishing a new CentOS 5.2 server with SELinux enabled. I then tried to transfer over some data when I was given the error “500 OOPS: cannot change directory:/home/userdir” in the FTP connection window.

First, I thought the cause was that I did not assign the user to the FTP group. Then I also made sure that the FTP group had permission to read/write to the users directory. Still, no go.

The next thing to check was that I enabled an exception in the firewall. To do that you can call “system-config-securitylevel-tui” which brings up a GUI within the shell. Here you can customize your rules. Still, FTP was allowed to go trough, so all was well, right?

Well, it turned out that SELinux with the setting “Enforcing” was the cause of it all. Now, I had the following two options;

  1. Use the “Permissive” setting (If you set SELinux to permissive you can login with FTP)
  2. Still use the “Enforcing” setting

I opted for option 2, since I really wanted to have SELinux enabled with “Enforcing”. Actually, all it took is to dig into the SELinux settings. To do so we have commands like “getsetbool” and “getsebool”.

With the command “/usr/sbin/getsetbool -a” you will get a list of all the boolean setting of SELinux (this is a long list!). Within this list there are some FTP settings which are of our interests here, like:

ftp_home_dir –> off
ftpd_disable_trans –> off
ftpd_is_daemon –> on

The particular one we are looking for is the “ftp_home_dir”. In your list this will probably set to “–> off”. To enable it, issue the following command:

usr/sbin/setsebool ftp_home_dir=1

As soon as you set this, your users should be able to FTP into their home directory and you should be on the safe side with SELinux still in the “Enforcing” mode.

Comments { 63 }

Test the OpenBD Installer

by on September 19, 2008 in CFML

Jordan Michaels, a OpenBD Steering Committee member, is inviting everyone to test out the OpenBD installer he has made. To quote him;

Many many folks have been asking for a setup that’s very similar to how CF7/CF8/BDJX are set up in that the J2EE engine is “in the background” and Apache simply processes site CFM files. This installer is hopefully a step in that direction.

For anyone who’s interested in this, I’ve got a “alpha” version of a CentOS5/RHEL5 installer here:

http://clubwheat.viviotech.net/openbd_rhel5.sh

This installer sets up isolated instances of Sun’s JRE, OpenBD, and Tomcat, specifically for the purpose of processing CFML templates.

It is meant to be run from the command-line as the root user. So…

# sh openbd_rhel5.sh

This set up configures tomcat to make OpenBD the default processor for all CFML files regardless of their host name or what directory they originate from.

There is one caveat, you will need to update the “[OpenBD InstallDir]/tomcat/server.xml” file with a new “<Host>” entry for each web site that you have listed as an Apache VirtualHost. I am in the process of writing up some documentation that will explain this in great detail, but for now, a simple host entry with just the site URL (IE:www.mysite.com) and the directory that files are coming from is all the tomcat <Host> entry will need.

I will be writing documentation, and updating the installer to be more multi-system compatible as time allows. Please let me know your experiences, and (if you dare) feel free to offer patches!

With this setup, Jordan made it possible that there is no need for a individual “bluedragon” and “WEB-INF” directory for each web application. Be sure to join the OpenBD-Discussion group and give Jordan as much feedback as possible.

Comments { 6 }

java-1.4.2-gcj-compat.i386 update problem on CentOS

by on July 11, 2008 in Uncategorized

When you try to install the current available updates;

java-1.4.2-gcj-compat.i386               1.4.2.0-40jpp.115      base
java-1.4.2-gcj-compat-devel.i386         1.4.2.0-40jpp.115      base
java-1.4.2-gcj-compat-javadoc.i386       1.4.2.0-40jpp.115      base
java-1.4.2-gcj-compat-src.i386           1.4.2.0-40jpp.115      base

you will get the following error message;

Error: Missing Dependency: /usr/bin/rebuild-security-providers is needed by package java-1.4.2-gcj-compat

Apparently the solution to this is to install the latest version of the jpackage-utils. The new version can be found at the CentOS testing repros at http://dev.centos.org/centos/5/testing/i386/RPMS/jpackage-utils-1.7.5-1jpp.1.el5.centos.noarch.rpm.

Once you downloaded the RPM, install it with rpm -Uvh. You then will be able to update your system successfully with “yum update”.

Comments { 152 }
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