My new site is more or less up, and I’ve migrated all my post over to it.
From now on, I’ll be blogging from Brainfart.SG and this blog will be mothballed.

See ya at the other side!

I will be sharing the steps I’ve done to setup the LNMP stack on a later date, but first, I’d like share an issue I’ve encountered after getting WordPress up and running.

After running the install.php script and doing up the settings of my WordPress site, I tried to upload a free theme pack from WooThemes. (Typebased, if you are wondering which one)

The first problem I hit was the server giving me a “Connection Reset” everytime I tried to upload the theme. In the Nginx error log, this was recorded:

2011/09/24 07:34:58 [error] 30097#0: *70 client intended to send too large body: 2617076 bytes, client: 202.156.8.11, server: www.brainfart.sg, request: "POST /wp-admin/update.php?action=upload-theme HTTP/1.1", host: "www.brainfart.sg", referrer: "http://www.brainfart.sg/wp-admin/theme-install.php?tab=upload"

The “client intended to send too large body” tells us that Nginx was rejecting the theme zip file as it was too big (it’s 2.49MB in size). A check on the Nginx Wiki shows that the default maximum size accepted by Nginx is 1MB, and Nginx resets the connection whenever a browser tries to send or request a file greater than 1MB. So we’ll have to update the nginx.conf file with the “client_max_body_size” directive to get Nginx to send and receive a bigger file. I’ve changed mine to a value of 3MB and you may adjust yours accordingly. Note that the directive is placed in the “http” section.

...
http {
...
client_max_body_size 3M;
...
}

I tried to upload the theme file again, and this time the file was accepted by Nginx without a problem. However, WordPress threw an error, “The uploaded file could not be move to …/wp-content/uploads.” Not a very intuitive error, seems like it is a permission issue with WordPress trying to write to the uploads directory… The logs weren’t showing any error and a Google search resulted in quite a few people having the same problem.

Most of the resolution are to do with setting the correct permission for the uploads directory. A check with my uploads directory shows that the permissions are correct  and I even tried to give full 777 permission to the directory! But error still persist… It took me quite a while, trying to figure out what’s wrong and then it suddenly hit me! It could be related to the Nginx size error, but at the PHP layer. A quick Google shows that PHP has a “upload_max_filesize” and “post_max_size” directive, so I updated my php.ini to include the two directives:

...
upload_max_filesize = 3M
post_max_size = 3M
...

Bingo!  The theme file went through and was installed in WordPress.

Basically, the VPS has the following specs:

• BuyVM-256MB
• 256MB RAM (Burstable to 512MB)
• 2 Core CPU
• 30GB of HDD
• 1000GB of data transfer
• 1 US based IP

The VPS was first setup with BuyVM’s Centos 6 template (selected during the VPS ordering page). However, the memory usage  seems to be a little bit on the high side, roughly 30mb idling after I cleaned up the unnecessary services and unused packages. No good… Still too much memory for running nothing…

So the next thing I tried was to reinstall to their ”centos-5-i386-minimal”. After reinstalling, I can’t even ssh or console into the VPS… Resintalled again, still the same… Seems like that template is broken… No go.

Reinstalled to “CentOS 5 32bit”, the idling memory shows ~14mb.
Sweet! We are good to go!

The first thing I did, was to gather some baseline info from the VPS, to record down the state of the VPS basically. The commands I ran were:

uname -a
cat /etc/*release*
cat /etc/hosts
ifconfig -a
ps fauxwww
netstat -tulpn

The first 4 command are pretty self explanatory.
The forth one, “ps fauxwww”, list down the various processes in a tree form and shows the memory usage of each process. Very useful to determine what process is hogging memory.
The last one, “netstat -tulpn”, list down the ports that the server is currently listening on and the process that is binding to the port. A useful tool to help secure your box.

[root@server ~]# ps fauxwww
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 1 0.0 0.1 2156 664 ? Ss Sep09 0:00 init [3]
root 1249 0.0 0.1 2260 556 ? S<s Sep09 0:00 /sbin/udevd -d
root 1895 0.0 0.1 1812 572 ? Ss Sep09 0:00 syslogd -m 0
root 1932 0.0 0.1 2832 852 ? Ss Sep09 0:00 xinetd -stayalive -pidfile /var/run/xinetd.pid
root 1976 0.0 0.2 4492 1100 ? Ss Sep09 0:00 crond
root 1984 0.0 0.1 5680 700 ? Ss Sep09 0:00 /usr/sbin/saslauthd -m /var/run/saslauthd -a pam -n 2
root 1985 0.0 0.0 5680 440 ? S Sep09 0:00 \_ /usr/sbin/saslauthd -m /var/run/saslauthd -a pam -n 2
root 3483 0.0 0.2 7200 1060 ? Ss Sep09 0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd
root 3863 0.1 0.5 10036 2836 ? Ss 08:02 0:00 \_ sshd: keewee [priv]
keewee 3865 0.0 0.3 10036 1672 ? S 08:03 0:00 \_ sshd: keewee@pts/0
keewee 3866 0.0 0.2 3712 1500 pts/0 Ss 08:03 0:00 \_ -bash
root 3883 0.0 0.2 4092 1316 pts/0 S 08:03 0:00 \_ su -
root 3884 0.1 0.2 3712 1488 pts/0 S 08:03 0:00 \_ -bash
root 3903 0.0 0.1 2528 848 pts/0 R+ 08:03 0:00 \_ ps fauxwww

[root@server ~]# netstat -tulpn
Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State PID/Program name
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:25 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 1949/sendmail: acce
tcp 0 0 :::80 :::* LISTEN 1967/httpd
tcp 0 0 :::22 :::* LISTEN 1923/sshd

Combined, these two command can also help you determine what services to disable and what packages to uninstall.

After gathering the information, I started setting up the server.
I started off with some basic server security, creating a non-root user for logging in and securing SSH.

#Create Nonroot User
[root@server ~]# groupadd keewee
[root@server ~]# useradd -d /home/keewee -s /bin/bash -g keewee -m keewee

#Secure SSH
[root@server ~]# vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
#Uncomment the following
LoginGraceTime 5m
PermitRootLogin no
StrictModes yes
MaxAuthTries 6
UsePrivilegeSeparation yes

[root@server ~]# service sshd restart

The next thing was to remove all the unnecessary packages, packages that I didn’t need or don’t use and is not essential to the operation of the box.
For this, I referred to to the “ps fauxwww” and “netstat -tulpn” output. I didn’t need sendmail and apache (httpd), so I chucked those.
I also went through the list of installed package by issuing “yum list installed” and picking out the packages I don’t want.
I ended up with the following packages to remove:

• bind
• fetchmail
• finger-server
• httpd
• lynx
• portmap
• procmail
• samba
• sendmail
• talk-server

Now I gonna start cleaning up my VPS and setup the LNMP stack and Postfix mail server I have in mind.
Will update my progress here. :)

I’ve let this blog sitting here that long? So much things have changed in the WordPress Dashboard, I’m almost lost there… Hah!

Anyway, I hope to start afresh on this blog. Just bought a .sg domain from Instra and now I’m looking for a VPS to host the blog and maybe an email server.
Looking at BuyVM or SpotVPS, that is, if I can get a coveted slot on BuyVM, if not, most likely I’ll go SpotVPS. Or does anyone have any recommendation?

Collected the Gift Pack today.

It consist of:

• Class95 FM T-Shirt
• Class95 FM Jacket with “The Flying Dutchman” embossed on the chest
• Class95 FM Pen (A gel pen!)
• Class95 FM Fridge Magnet
• Class95 FM Lanyard

Neat!

Been a while since I posted something eh. Well, in my defense, I’ve been kinda busy with work, it’s been 5 months since I’ve join this company, and boy, have I been learning lots of new stuff!

Anyway, this post is not about work.

Last Saturday, me and the fine folks at Mensa went for a little trek at MacRitchie Reservoir up to the HSBC TreeTop Walk suspension bridge. It was wonderful! Except for the heavy downpour in the morning at the beginning of the trek… But that didn’t hinder us, we carried on after the rain has subsided.

The view at the suspension bridge was great!

More photos can be found on my flickr photostream

I should do this more often! ^^

Will be joining another company on Tuesday, Azimuth Labs, as an IT Specialist.

Hope everything would go well. =)

Dogster Stickers

My Laptop Lid

And to add to my sticker collection, GMail gave out their own free stickers. Same procedure as the Dogster one, send a SASE (self address, stamped envelope) to them and they will send you back the stickers.

So… Not being in the land of the free, I sent in an International Reply Coupon (IRC), a self addressed envelope and a note to the GMail team back in mid December and waited. And a long wait it was. I didn’t receive it back until this week. (Opened the mailbox and wonder who sent me a mail from the USA)

So here it is, the GMail Stickers.

Gmail Stickers

And the deadline for the free stickers is… Today… Sorry for posting so late…

PS: I find those IRC thingy to be quite interesting. And it would be great if I could collect them from all over the world! So if you are not from Singapore and would like to collect Singapore IRC, we could do an exchange! Drop me a comment below and I’ll contact you from there. :) (Just make sure you enter your own email when you submit the comment.

Quite a lot has happened since the last time I posted here. Graduated, found a job, got my first pay check. Well.. Ok.. Not so yesterday…

Anyway, now I’m working as a Database Administrator for NCS Pte Ltd, attached to the Ministry of Education site office. It’s on a contract term with limited benefits. But with this economic climate, I should feel lucky to find a job. A job that pays quite well.

Since now I no longer have anymore academic commitments (it’s a wonder how school work can take up so much of your time…), I should be able update this blog more often. (Yea, yea… I know, I know… I’ve said this a couple of times before…)