The Amanda backup system is a great resource for backing up your Linux system. One of the things I noticed with the latest version is that the exclusion list has been breaking. For instance, Amanda backups are now backing up the /tmp folder, which causes it complain with the PHP session lock files. All was needed to fix was adding a leading dot in front of each folder.

I was helping one of the staff today with their Debian setup. KDE somehow broke after they did an apt-get update. Turns out there must have been like 40-50 packages that must have been in the update and thus one of them broke during the upgrade.

Upon startup, there was a unique error message that came up with KDE during the startup phase — “No greeter widget plugin loaded. Check the configuration.” with an OK box. Clicking the OK box would lead to KDE exiting to shell. Reinstalling kdm had no effect. The fix? Read the article to see…

The fastest way to trim down large web log files is through UNIX/Linux shell. Large files exceeding 1 GB (millions of lines of logs) are not easily editable using a GUI interface, so the fastest way is to parse them is via command line. You can trim them down according to a time range, remove internal requests from within the company, and remove bots/crawlers data from the log files.

For instance, I have a 4GB log file with about two years worth of info (2007-2009) in there. What if I just wanted the logs from 2008? First, run the “head -10″ command …

Installing awstats in Debian with GeoIP caching

First, use apt-get to get the software:

apt-get install awstats

Configure awstats:
Instead of using the awstats configure tool (written in Perl), manually add in the awstats Apache configuration. Using the tutorial from debuntu, make a file inside your apache config folder called awstats.conf with the following lines.

Alias /awstatsclasses "/usr/share/awstats/lib/"
Alias /awstats-icon/ "/usr/share/awstats/icon/"
Alias /awstatscss "/usr/share/doc/awstats/examples/css"
Options ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch

Inside the Apache2.conf file (or virtual host conf file inside the sites-available folder) add this to the end of the file:

Include /etc/apache2/awstats.conf

Next, copy the /usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats.pl file to the apache cgi-bin folder. If you have virtual hosts enabled, copy it to …

If you ssh into your server and the text is stuck at 80 characters per line, you will need to check the sshd setting in /etc/ssh/sshd_config (Debian)

Make sure the X11 setting is set to yes. This will allow you to expand your terminal window to beyond 80 characters per line.  Otherwise, it will be limited to the display settings in console.

X11Forwarding yes