Admins eHow SysAdmin Tips & Tricks

August 30, 2014

Backup cPanel accounts to DropBox

Filed under: cPanel,linux — Tags: , , , — admin @ 7:30 pm

Notice : You need root access to cPanel server to be able to use this method.
DropBox is my favorite cloud space provider. Their recent price adjustment (1TB for $10/mo) has made using it a no brainer IMO. It is specially very good for backup purposes because it keeps different versions of your files without using any extra space. The retention period for free accounts is 30 days and for pro accounts is 1 year.
So lets say you take a backup of your website and upload it to DropBox everyday and size of your backup is 100MB. if you keep doing it for 1 year, in fact DropBox is keeping 365 x 100MB of your files which you can retrieve any of them while only 100MB of your space is used! it is crazy good, I know.
In order to be able to backup cPanel accounts directly to DropBox, first we need a method to upload files to DropBox from Linux command line. Fortunately there is a very good solution out there to do it : https://github.com/andreafabrizi/Dropbox-Uploader
Please refer to script documentation on how to install it on your server and link it to your DropBox account. it is fairly easy.
After you linked the script to your DropBox Account, move it to /usr/bin folder.
If you want to test it, run the following command and it should show your DropBox account info :

root@X:[~]: dropbox_uploader.sh info
Dropbox Uploader v0.14

 > Getting info...

Name:   X X
UID:    012345
Email:  email@domain.com
Quota:  1021760 Mb
Used:   2611 Mb
Free:   1019148 Mb

Now create /usr/bin/backup2db with following content and make it executable :

#!/bin/bash
for fn in $1; do
/scripts/pkgacct $fn
/usr/bin/dropbox_uploader.sh upload /home/cpmove-$fn.tar.gz /cpanel-backup/cpmove-$fn.tar.gz
rm /home/cpmove-$fn.tar.gz
done

Thats it ! We are good to go.
Command to backup cPanel account acct1 :

backup2db 'acct1'

It even support multiple account backup :

backup2db 'acct1 acct2 acct3'

If you need daily backups, you can put it in cron :

0 0 * * * /usr/bin/backup2db 'acct1 acct2 acct3' > /dev/null 2>&1

August 22, 2014

Kill a process with high CPU usage in Linux

Filed under: linux — Tags: , , , , , — admin @ 5:19 pm

Sometimes you may need to kill hanged processes with high CPU usage automatically. the following script can help you to do it :

#!/bin/bash
PROCESSNAME=''
HL=10

IFS=$'\n'
L=$(ps aux | grep $PROCESSNAME)
for fn in $L; do
        PID=$(echo $fn | awk '{print $2'})
        LOAD=$(echo $fn | awk '{print $3'})
        if [ $(echo "$LOAD > $HL" | bc -l ) -eq 1 ]
        then
                kill -9 $PID
                echo "Killed $PID"
        fi
done

Set PROCESSNAME to the process name which you want to be checked and HL to high load threshold.
Please note the load is based what ‘ps’ command reports and not what you see inside ‘top’.

August 20, 2014

Force public key authentication on SSH daemon (disable password authentication)

Filed under: Debian,linux,Security — Tags: , , , , , , — admin @ 2:18 pm

It is a very good security practice to completely disable password authentication on your Linux server and use public key authentication method.
In order to do that you need to create your own public/private key pair and put the public key in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

mkdir -p ~/.ssh
echo 'ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQDHV80zPWjPAwKo8Be0k1ypBRMdYDC0H2eQchu3MFsEp8av2F/18GNuHsbyMWp0p1uovP5LGZ/oPZ1ISJxLxxOBiqv0fOyb8uTDYWUUITgGvq9Fppj3BNYTjnLCUAVMKdP3VJ7IPk69ygYR1nhAXiv3dSfeG74f2eo3ZYhrylsVS2G84DUh47FuEFOsfn5s2wXVjwAgqdKBhiVQZWrptf6TEK3fZTVg4rCiRJ+YiIwTZr/CfFHbdqOiwDlGR5fWo0PHHq31lrQXzkASfi3C+ahQFnHsy4+8LdCq+TjzC3J6PbuXP1wpLdm1iP35f61hU1wX2hwhyxdvE+SBXT/PpSVB' >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

DISCLAIMER : The above key is my public key, if you put it on your server, I will be able to login into your server 😀
Now add/change the following config to the BEGINNING of /etc/ssh/sshd_config

ChallengeResponseAuthentication no
PasswordAuthentication no
UsePAM no
PubkeyAuthentication yes

and restart ssh service :

service ssh restart

In order to check that only public key authentication is available run the following command on the server :

ssh -o PreferredAuthentications=none -o NoHostAuthenticationForLocalhost=yes localhost -p 22

and you should get this error :

Permission denied (publickey).

Note : Before closing your current SSH session, I highly recommend you to test that actually you can login into your server by new method. otherwise you may be locked out of your server.

August 9, 2014

Exim Remove All messages From the Mail Queue

Filed under: linux — Tags: , , — admin @ 9:49 pm 
exim -bp | exiqgrep -i | xargs exim -Mrm

August 7, 2014

Send email alerts if PERC H200 raid fails in Linux

Filed under: Debian,linux — Tags: , , — admin @ 11:18 pm

Recently I have bought a Dell PowerEdge R210 server which is equipped by PERC H200 raid controller.
As I have setup a raid 1 on this server, I needed to monitor its raid status, Here is what I did :
First you need “sas2ircu” utility which can be found on following website :
http://hwraid.le-vert.net/wiki/DebianPackages
Running “sas2ircu 0 STATUS” give you following output :

root@x:/# sas2ircu 0 STATUS
LSI Corporation SAS2 IR Configuration Utility.
Version 16.00.00.00 (2013.03.01)
Copyright (c) 2009-2013 LSI Corporation. All rights reserved.

Background command progress status for controller 0...
IR Volume 1
  Volume ID                               : 79
  Current operation                       : None
  Volume status                           : Enabled
  Volume state                            : Optimal
  Volume wwid                             : xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  Physical disk I/Os                      : Not quiesced
SAS2IRCU: Command STATUS Completed Successfully.
SAS2IRCU: Utility Completed Successfully.

What we are interested in is “Optimal” status. so if Optimal changes to anything, we want to be notified.
You can use the following script to do that (change MAIL variable to your own email address) :

#!/bin/bash
MAIL=mail@domain.com
RESULT=`sas2ircu 0 STATUS | grep Optimal`
if [ -z "$RESULT" ]; then
    echo "RAID ERROR ON SERVER" | mail -s 'Raid Error' "$MAIL"
    else echo "Raid is OK"
fi

as always do not forget to test if your server is actually able to send mails and you receive them.
Finally save the script in a file and put it in cronjob. I have chosen to run it every 12 hours :

0 */12 * * * /usr/bin/raidcheck

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