Follow your debian server updates by email with apticron
apticron is a shell script that send you an email report when new packages are available on your debian server.
Install apticron
As root, do:
apt-get install apticron
apticron configuration via /etc/apticron/apticron.conf
To receive reports on your email change the EMAIL variable in the configuration file. By default, reports are sent to the root user.
EMAIL="root" -> EMAIL="you@domain.com"
Reports received
Now apticron will send you reports like this:
apticron report [Sat, 26 Jul 2008 06:45:47 +0200] ============================================== apticron has detected that some packages need upgrading on: localhost.localdomain [ 127.0.0.1 XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX ] The following packages are currently pending an upgrade: lighttpd 1.4.13-4etch10 ======================================================================== Package Details: Reading changelogs... --- Changes for lighttpd --- lighttpd (1.4.13-4etch10) stable-security; urgency=low [ Pierre Habouzit ] * Non-maintainer upload. * Fix [CVE-2008-1531] patches mess, and add a missing hunk of the patch. -- Thijs Kinkhorst thijs debian org Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:19:10 +0200 ======================================================================== You can perform the upgrade by issuing the command: aptitude dist-upgrade as root on localhost.localdomain It is recommended that you simulate the upgrade first to confirm that the actions that would be taken are reasonable. The upgrade may be simulated by issuing the command: aptitude -s -y dist-upgrade -- apticron
Apticron files
For more informations, you can have a look to those files:
/etc/cron.daily/apticron /usr/sbin/apticron
This entry was written by , posted on July 30, 2008 at 7:34 am, filed under Distro and tagged apticron, debian, linux. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Maintenance mode (HTTP 503) with lighttpd and PHP
When you put your website in maintenance mode, it’s a good idea to return a HTTP 503 error code to the client.
This code indicates that “the server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server”.
The 503 code is used to avoid crawlers or caching proxy use the maintenance page as the new valid content for the request. You certainly don’t want Google save this content in his search index as the content of your website 
To achieve this we will use a rewrite rule in lighttpd to redirect all requests to a single PHP script which will return a 503 error code and print an informative message.
Lighttpd configuration
url.rewrite = ( "" => "/maintenance.php" )
This configuration will redirect any request to maintenance.php script.
If you need to serve an image in your maintenance page, you have to add another rule to the rewrite process like that :
url.rewrite = ( "upgrading.png" => "$0", "" => "/maintenance.php" )
Let some users see the website
It might be usefull to let admins or developers access the website during the maintenance.
For that, you can disable the maintenance rewrite rule for certain IP addresses :
$HTTP["remoteip"] != “192.168.1.42″ {
url.rewrite = ( "upgrading.png" => "$0",
"" => "/maintenance.php" )
}
PHP code example
<?php
header("HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable");
?>
We're currently upgrading our servers...
Links
This entry was written by , posted on July 22, 2008 at 2:28 am, filed under http and tagged lighttpd, php. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Rotate Nginx log files under FreeBSD
To rotate your nginx log files, you can use the log file handler provided by FreeBSD: newsyslog.
Configuring /etc/newsyslog.conf
/var/log/nginx-access.log 644 7 1024 * JC /var/run/nginx.pid /var/log/nginx-error.log 644 7 1024 * JC /var/run/nginx.pid
Before log rotation:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 104278002 Jul 16 11:35 nginx-access.log -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1509531 Jul 16 11:17 nginx-error.log
After log rotation:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 967 Jul 16 12:42 nginx-access.log -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 5310443 Jul 16 12:41 nginx-access.log.0.bz2 -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 77 Jul 16 12:41 nginx-error.log -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 37552 Jul 16 12:41 nginx-error.log.0.bz2
Links
This entry was written by , posted on July 17, 2008 at 7:15 am, filed under Logs and tagged FreeBSD, newsyslog, nginx. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.