Install Webmin on Ubuntu 8.04
I installed Ubuntu on a second machine earlier this week as a small file server as I’m gearing up to format and reinstall my main computer. As normal with my Linux servers it will run headless with just a power cord and a network cable attached.
One thing I cheat with on my headless machines (at home, never on a production server) is installing Webmin. It is great if you know what you are doing since Webmin gives you an incredible amount of power. I SSHed into the box and fired off the aptitude command to install Webmin.
There is no Webmin package in the Ubuntu repositories. I have no idea why, but it is not there. So, who do you get it installed?
Subversion Backups and Restores
One thing that a lot of developers don’t even think about is backing up their source control repository. If, like me, your code is stored in Subversion then backing up and subsequently restoring the data is easy.
Backing Up
svnadmin has an option to do a dump which is a full command history of your repository. Because of this the file can end up quite large if you have a repository with a lot of changes. A quick way to back up and compress the repository is:
1 | $ svnadmin dump /path/to/repo | gzip -9 -c > archivename.gz |
This dumps the repository straight into gzip to compress it down to then write it to a file. With a little bit of shell scripting this can be turned into a very nice backup script.
Restoring
What happens when you need to restore your repository? You load the information back in! You can take the backup we made above and reload it into the repository with:
1 | $ gzcat archive.gz | svnadmin load /path/to/repo |
This will dump your backup into a fresh repository so that it looks exactly like it did when you took the backup.
Reset a Lost root Password
What happens when that server that was always humming along nicely all of a sudden needs you to log in as root to check something or install something new. What was the root password? Didn’t it just get changed? All of a sudden, the cold sweat starts - the root password is unknown.
What do you do?
Reset it! Thankfully there are a few ways to do this.
Managing your bandwidth - iftop
Coming off a series of articles on installing and configuring IPCop (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), my attention now turns to actually monitoring and managing the network. One of the issues that will come up is ‘Where did all my bandwidth go?’ IPCop, as well as other *nix distros, include a program called iftop, which displays the bandwidth being used on an interface. While on individual machines this can be useful, it really shines on a router or gateway machine.
Where Did All My Space Go?
Just about anyone who uses a computer has come across one inevitable question - where did all my hard drive space go to? Sure, applications (especially games) get larger every day, but what accounts for all the missing space after you clear out programs you no longer use. What about when you’re not installing anything, but the space is still getting gobbled up? What if you’re on Windows and bereft of Disk Usage Analyzer? Read on for the answer.