Archive for the ‘Distributions’ Category

How to use a custom php.ini with suphp

Monday, October 19, 2009 posted by Till

To use a custom php.ini file with SuPHP for a website, you can define the path to the php.ini file in a .htaccess file or in the apache vhost like this:

suPHP_ConfigPath /home/websites/domain.tld/

Then add a php.ini file in the directory /home/websites/domain.tld/ which may be a copy of the global php.ini were you just changed a few settings or an empty file were you add only the settings that shall be overridden in the global PHP configuration.

If you use ISPConfig 2 or 3, you can add the suPHP_ConfigPath setting also in the apache directives field of the website  in ISPConfig.

If you want to redirect a subdomain like sub.domain.tld into a subdirectory of the website and keep the original URL in the browser location bar, you may use the following apache directives.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^sub.domain.tld [NC]
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /sub/$1 [L]

This rewrite rule can be added into a .htaccess file in the website root or inside the vhost file. If you use ISPConfig 2 or 3, you can add this also into the apache directives field in the website settings.

Replace sub.domain.tld with the subdomain that shall be redirected and /sub/ with the path to the directory were the pages for this subdomain are located.

If all your visitors shall access your website with a URL like www.domain.com and not without www, use the following apache rewrite rule for redirecting them.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}$1 [L,R]

The apache rewrite rule can be added in a .htaccess file in the website root directory or if you use ISPConfig 2 or 3, you can also add the rwrite rule into the apache directives field of the website.

If you run a firewall on your Linux server and want to use passive FTP connections, you have to define the passive port range in pure-ftpd and your firewall to ensure that the connections dont get blocked. The following example is for pure-ftpd on Debian or Ubuntu Linux and ISPConfig 3:

1) Configure pure-ftpd

echo “40110 40210″ > /etc/pure-ftpd/conf/PassivePortRange
/etc/init.d/pure-ftpd-mysql restart

2) Configure the firewall. If you use ISPConfig 3 on my server to configure the bastille firewall, you can add the nescessera port range in the ISPConfig firewall settings.

Change the list of Open TCP ports from:

20,21,22,25,53,80,110,143,443,3306,8080,10000

to:

20,21,22,25,53,80,110,143,443,3306,8080,10000,40110:40210

and then click on “Save”.

Is there a recommended Linux distribution for ISPConfig 3?

Monday, October 5, 2009 posted by Till

ISPconfig 3 is developed on Debian Linux, this means that Debian is the most tested Linux distribution for ISPConfig. Additionally, Debian has almost all required software packages for ISPConfig in its main repositories without the need to compile them manually and Debian has proven to be very stable in Server enviroments.

This leads to my personal recommendation to use Debian Linux for ISPConfig.

Sometimes you need a specific file from a Debian .deb package e.g. because you deleted a file from your system or the installation of a package is broken in that way that it can not be reinstalled without adding the missing file first. This FAQ shows you how to download the .deb file from the Debian or Ubuntu repository and then exctract its contents.

Download the dpkg file. In this example, I will download the courier-athlib:

cd /tmp
aptitude download courier-authlib

Now extract the .deb package into the directory /tmp/extract/:

dpkg-deb -x *.deb /tmp/extract/

How to enable the query log in MySQL

Wednesday, September 30, 2009 posted by Till

To debug applications which use a mysql database, it comes in handy to enable the query log to get all SQL queries that were sent to the database.  Open the MySQL configuration file (my.cnf)

vi /etc/mysql/my.cnf

and add the line:

log=/var/log/mysql.log

in the [mysql] section of the file. Depending on the Linux distribution that you use, the my.cnf file can be /etc/my.cnf or /etc/mysql/my.cnf.

Afterwards restart mysql to apply the new the configuration:

/etc/init.d/mysql restart

After running a system upgrade on your Ubuntu based ISPConfig 3 server, it might happen that aptitude overwrites some config files from postfix especially the main.cf file. To fix this, download the latest ISPConfig 3 installer, unpack it and run the update.php script. Choose “yes” when the updater asks if the services shall be reconfigured. ISPConfig will replace the configuration files that had been modified by the ubuntu upgrade.

cd /tmp
wget http://www.ispconfig.org/downloads/ISPConfig-3-stable.tar.gz
tar xvfz ISPConfig-3-stable.tar.gz
cd ispconfig3_install/install
php -q update.php

The language of the generated webslizer statistics is statically compiled into the webalizer binary. To change the language, webalizer has to be recompiled. In the following example, I will recompile webalizer to change the language to german.

Uninstall webalizer and install the GD library:

apt-get remove webalizer
apt-get install libgd2-xpm-dev

Download the latest webalizer sources and uncompress the tar archive:

cd /tmp
wget http://archive.mgm51.com/mirrors/webalizer-files/webalizer-2.01-10-src.tgz
tar xzf webalizer-2.01-10-src.tgz
cd webalizer-2.01-10

Reconfigure and compile webalizer

./configure –with-language=german
make
make install

Create a symlink so that other applications find the webalizer binary in the common place

ln -s /usr/local/bin/webalizer /usr/bin/webalizer

Cleanup

rm -f /tmp/webalizer-2.01-10-src.tgz
rm -rf /tmp/webalizer-2.01-10

Thanks to planet_fox for this FAQ.

How to enable DKIM email signatures in amavisd-new and ISPConfig 3

Thursday, September 3, 2009 posted by admin

DKIM is a system to verify the sender and integrity of emails. ISPConfig 3 uses amavisd-new as content filter for spam and virus scanning and amavisd-new is also able to sign messages with DKIM. The next steps explain how to configure amavisd-new to sign messages for a domain named “example.com” with DKIM. The steps below should work with any amavisd-new setup even if you do not use ISPConfig.

1) Create the domain key:

mkdir /var/db/dkim/
amavisd genrsa /var/db/dkim/example-foo.key.pem

2) Configure amavisd to use this key for the domain example.com. Edit the amavisd configuration file

vi /etc/amavisd/amavisd.conf

and add the following lines:

$enable_dkim_verification = 1;
$enable_dkim_signing = 1;
dkim_key(‘example.com’, ‘foo’, ‘/var/db/dkim/example-foo.key.pem’);
@dkim_signature_options_bysender_maps = (
{ ‘.’ => { ttl => 21*24*3600, c => ‘relaxed/simple’ } } );
@mynetworks = qw(0.0.0.0/8 127.0.0.0/8 10.0.0.0/8 172.16.0.0/12
192.168.0.0/16);  # list your internal networks

3) Run the command:

amavisd showkeys

to get the public key that has to be added as TXT record in the DNS server of the example.com DNS server.

4) Thest the setup with the command:

amavisd testkeys

and if it works properly, restart amavisd:

/etc/init.d/amavis restart

Here is a more detailed description in the amavisd-new manual on how to setup DKIM in amavisd-new:

http://www.ijs.si/software/amavisd/amavisd-new-docs.html#dkim