Category Archives: Fedora

CentOS, Fail2Ban, Fedora, Fedora 19, FirewallD, Linux, RedHat

Firewalld, firewall-cmd and Fail2Ban

1 Comment

Basically I’ve been looking at upgrading a web-server to the latest version of Fedora 19, or when it’s released later this year CentOS 7.0 (providing it’s easy for them when RHEL 7.0 is released), however knowing that iptables is now becoming redundant in favour of firewalld in Fedora I started looking at updating my web-server install script to work with firewalld.  Knowing part of that is Fail2Ban and that uses iptables my first port of call was finding a way of getting these two working together.

My first obvious search for “firewalld fail2ban” returned nothing helpful whatsoever, just people wanting a conf file to get it working with no actually helpful response, however once I found that firewalld uses firewall-cmd on the command line to control the rules I searched for that. This turned up a current bug posted on RedHat’s BugZilla: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=979622 , where it turns out a very helpful soul, Edgar Hoch, has created an action.d conf file to get it all working: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=791126

Fedora, Fedora 19, Linux, Linux Graphics Drivers, nVidia, RedHat

Fedora 19, GNOME 3 and nVidia graphics

Leave a comment

After upgrading to the latest version of Fedora a few months ago I was terribly un-impressed. The box in question had been upgraded every 6 months (-ish, thanks to Fedora 18) since Fedora 14 and I’d never had any issues, but then came Fedora 19.

To be fair it wasn’t Fedora’s fault per say, it was GNOME 3 and the open source nVidia graphics drivers. The desktop looked ok when you booted the box, but if you tried to use the Activities section, none of the transparency worked, and a lot of the Favourite icons in the dock had a luminous green behind them when you hovered over them.  What was worse was trying to launch a non-favourite application, click to do that and you could see the first 6 frequently used ones, but no others, and none under the “all” tab. This obviously made the whole experience pretty much unusable.

I went through the obvious investigations, straight away looking for some better nVidia graphics drivers.  I didn’t expect to find any official nvidia drivers after Linus’ hilarious rant last year. However, it turned out there was. I first tried downloading them from nVidia but their installers were less than helpful, and none wanted to install on my system regardless of fulfilling their dependencies. I then tried looking elsewhere and remembered the trusty basic linux guide site If !1 0. I found a guide on there for Fedora 18, and adapted it for Fedora 19, but unfortunately that wouldn’t work due to a mass amount of package conflicts.  I’d been meaning to wipe the system for a while and start again, so backed up the /etc/ folder to another drive, wiped the partitions, then installed Fedora 19 and used the guide again and all was fine and dandy.  The boot screen is the basic plymouth one rather than the more graphical splash one, but apart from that everything works and I don’t have awful un-usable graphics anymore.

If you want the latest guide, which is for Fedora 19, go here: http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2013/fedora-19-nvidia-guide/

Fedora, Fedora 18, Linux

Fedora 18 – non-graphical boot and ifconfig

Leave a comment

After downloading Fedora 18 and creating a minimal install virtual machine I went straight to doing the default I always do.  As I was creating a test server I need to be able to see what’s happening during boot so I disable the graphical boot.

Previously (at-least up to Fedora 15) I’d used the plymouth commands to switch the graphical boot to details which had worked.

[root@localhost ~]# plymouth-set-default-plugin details
[root@localhost ~]# /usr/libexec/plymouth/plymouth-update-initrd

However, when I tried this with Fedora 18, nope, not working, the community to the rescue. Another individual  (Nigel Smith) had had the same issue and found the solution in editing the default grub configuration file. So if you need the same visit here:

http://nwsmith.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/customizing-grub2-boot-options-in.html

While I was at it I also noticed that ifconfig produced a “Command not found”. Erm … wha? Where did that go? Isn’t that like a basic linux command? Turns out in Fedora 18 it’s been removed due to the alternative and replacement iproute package being in place for “many years”. So you’ve now got 2 choices:

1. use the ip command:

ip addr

2. install the net-tools package:

yum -y install net-tools

Fedora, Fedora 15, Linux, MongoDB, RedHat, Shell Scripting, SystemD

Installing MongoDB on a Linux distro using SystemD instead of inittab

1 Comment

While trying to get MongoDB working on a Fedora 15 test server I found that there was no way of installing the latest version with SystemD control due to a pre-existing known bug.

To Mongo’s credit there is a file provided in the source under rpm/init.d-mongod, however when it comes to this being used by SystemD, well it just errors.

This was frustrating, but as I was doing it on a VM, I did what any logical person would do. Installed Mongo from the package manager, took a copy of the required SystemD files, reverted to a snapshot, then installed the latest version of Mongo from source.

After this I adapted the mongod.service file to use the correct locations, ensured all the required directories, files and users were present on the system then started the service et voila, working latest version of MongoDB on Fedora 15 with SystemD

the two required files are:
/lib/systemd/system/mongod.service

[Unit]
Description=High-performance, schema-free document-oriented database
After=syslog.target network.target
 
[Service]
Type=forking
User=mongod
Group=mongod
PIDFile=/var/run/mongodb/mongod.pid
EnvironmentFile=/etc/sysconfig/mongod
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/mongod $OPTIONS run
 
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

/etc/sysconfig/mongod

Or you can just use the RedHat distro based install script I created:

#!/bin/sh

# MongoDB Version
MONGODB_VER='2.2.2'

# Get all the dependencies up to date
yum -y update
yum -y install scons gcc-c++ glibc-devel

# Get the source
cd /usr/local/src/
wget http://downloads.mongodb.org/src/mongodb-src-r$MONGODB_VER.tar.gz
tar xfz mongodb-src-r$MONGODB_VER.tar.gz
cd mongodb-src-r$MONGODB_VER

# Compile and Install
scons all
scons install

# Create the SystemD dependant files
echo '[Unit]
Description=High-performance, schema-free document-oriented database
After=syslog.target network.target
 
[Service]
Type=forking
User=mongod
Group=mongod
PIDFile=/var/run/mongodb/mongod.pid
EnvironmentFile=/etc/sysconfig/mongod
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/mongod $OPTIONS run
 
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target' > /lib/systemd/system/mongod.service

echo 'OPTIONS="--quiet -f /etc/mongod.conf"' > /etc/sysconfig/mongod

# Setup the required user and group
useradd -r -U mongod

# Setup the required directories
mkdir -p /var/run/mongodb/
mkdir -p /var/log/mongo/
mkdir -p /var/lib/mongo/
chown mongod:mongod /var/run/mongodb/
chown mongod:mongod /var/log/mongo/
chown mongod:mongod /var/lib/mongo/
chmod 0755 /var/log/mongo/
chmod 0755 /var/run/mongodb/
chmod 0755 /var/lib/mongo

# Start the new service and enable it on boot
systemctl --system daemon-reload
systemctl start mongod.service
systemctl enable mongod.service