After properly configuring postfix on the Proxmox hosts to send email, emails to root were noticed daily:
/etc/cron.daily/mlocate:
/usr/bin/updatedb.mlocate: `/var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db' is locked (probably by an earlier updatedb)
run-parts: /etc/cron.daily/mlocate exited with return code 1
After logging on to one of the boxes, killing (-9) the updatedb process and running it with verbose on:
The output indicated it was hanging on one of the /mnt directories. Looking at the output of mount a couple of old nfs shares were noticed, that should have been deleted (and didn’t appear in the GUI). Unmounting these shares made updatedb run happily.
Read more...
Proxmox uses postfix as its MTA. To configure this to send email via smarthost run
For general type we want Satellite
SMTP server - usual
Mailbox size – could use the suggested 51200000 here – should be more than big enough seeing as nothing should be ending up in the system mailbox anyway.
Once this is done, edit /etc/aliases. It should look like:
postmaster: root
nobody: root
hostmaster: root
webmaster: root
www: root
Add a line at the end:
Read more...
Some of the older debian servers are firewalled using a command in the /etc/network/interfaces file to load the iptables rules. For some reason this breaks the file on upgrade to Debian wheezy and the network interfaces don’t come up on boot. To fix, comment or remove the line:
pre-up iptables-restore < /etc/iptables.conf
and use the iptables-persistent package instead.
Also gives an error on
INPUT -i ! lo
Need to change to
Read more...
Often the Windows update shield in the system tray won’t appear when you RDP into systems. A fairly reliable trick seems to be the following:
- Stop the Automatic Update service (
net stop wuauserv from the command line ).
- Set the
NextFeaturedUpdatesNotificationTime key ( located at HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\Auto Update\ ) to a date and time slightly ahead (say a minute or two) of the present.
- Start the Automatic Update service (
net start wuauserv ).
Or use this script (save as .vbs):
Read more...
OSX Mountain Lion (10.8) seems to change the order of the MAC addresses presented to flexlm licence processes. There is a page about various problems at the Mathworks website:
Why am I unable to launch MATLAB after upgrading to Mountain Lion?
At the bottom of the page it gives the command to run to determine which address the licence process is seeing:
/Applications/MATLAB_.app/etc/maci64/lmutil lmhostid