Etch vs Lenny Install (falko tutorials)

[Done_Fishin]

Back at the beginning of August my daughter told me that she was starting her "practical" working for a company that uses a Debian Etch server, and she (nor I) have any hands-on experience working with Linux servers. She's been given a few projects using Joomla to help update the site (from what I gather) only to find that she was experiencing problems handling the linux side of it. I have a very small amount of experience with knoppix, ubuntu, fedora and a few others so I am not scared about getting my feet wet on yet one more distro. I said I would build a Debian server for her, so that she could dig and discover It also gives me the motivation to dig & discover too!

I have some old PC's that are ideal for the purpose and around beginning August started to follow the The Perfect Setup - Debian Etch (Debian 4.0) tutorial not getting much farther than Page 3 until I found a vi cheat sheet .. apart from lack of time, forgetting the passwords used, not understanding what was to be done etc and getting myself out of trouble, I also had visitors that kept me away from my project from 15th Sept until 4th October.
Whilst I was getting ahead though I must have re-installed the basic system some 20 times. I also tried to make files on my CD2USB Ubuntu HDD installation which I used to copy said files over to the Debian installed HDD. All good fun and a great learning experience for a noob like me .

to get to the point though .. by the time I returned to my project on 5th October I had managed to get the vi cheat sheet and proceeded a bit farther into the installation and arriving at a point where to the point where I had proceeded to

vi /etc/default/syslogd

only I just couldn't find the file to edit !!

it was after several repeat installs that I realised that I was no longer installing ETCH but in fact LENNY!!

On another forum I am member of, one of the linux guys pointed me at the
The Perfect Server - Debian Lenny (Debian 5.0) tutorial and I downloaded the latest 5.03 Netinst CD then followed instructions.

Only point is that things haven't gone quite the same way as they had earlier although I don't know if I am to blame for that by jumping a step and then going back over my tracks !!

This part of installing ETCH was working well but the same "equivalent" part for LENNY seems to bring an error finding the hostname .

ETCH

vi /etc/hosts

Now run

echo server1.example.com > /etc/hostname

and reboot the system:

shutdown -r now

Afterwards, run

hostname
hostname -f

Both should show server1.example.com.

The above works ..

This bit below doesn't !! ( I am using 192.168.1.100 and by accident I missed the apt-get install ssh openssh-server step and installed it after this failed first time.. running the loop again didn't seem to help at all ..

LENNY

http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-se...-ispconfig2-p3

vi /etc/hosts

Now run

echo server1.example.com > /etc/hostname
/etc/init.d/hostname.sh start

Afterwards, run

hostname
hostname -f

Both should show server1.example.com.

What I get at this pooint is this

hostname -f 
hostname: hostname look up failure

when I first got the error I checked that I had given all the correct commands in vi & CLI .. no typos and no accidents. I realised that I had forgotten to install openssh-server, installed it, tried hostname -f again, re-ran all the instructions again but each time came back to the same error .. and now I am wondering .. do I start over again ( no problem , the more the better, I'll become an expert ) or is there something that shoukld have been mentioned but wasn't !!

your help and expertise will be gratefully appreciated

Thanks
I have tried the missing "reboot" instruction but that didn't help either

[falko]

What are the outputs of

ifconfig

and

cat /etc/hosts

?

[Done_Fishin]

ifconfig

eth0
Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:00:b4:5c:a8:43
inet address 192.168.1.100 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr:fe80::200:b4ff:fe5c:a843/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU1500 Metric:1
RX packets:1 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:6 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisons:0 txqueulen:1000
RX bytes:60 (60.0 B) TX bytes:468 (468.0 B)
Interrupt:5 Base address 0xd800

lo
Link encap: Local loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask 255.0.0.0
inet addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:8 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:8 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisons:0 txqueulen:0
RX bytes:560 (560.0 B) TX bytes:560 (560.0 B)

cat /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
192.168.1.100 freekie.webreak freekie

#The following lines are desirable for IPV^ capable hosts
::1 localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts

My sincerest apologies .. I had made a typo, missing out the "f" in webfreak!
I have repaired the damage and it's working now ..

Thanks for helping me to see the light .. and sorry for wasting your time. I should have seen that last night

[Done_Fishin]

when rebooting the my last attempted installation, it seems that something had gone wrong with the system booting very slowly, I would say that it looked as though it may have crashed too and was trying to make some sort of recovery .. I then hit the power off button as it was trying to boot the kernel and "not getting anywhere fast".

I decided to make yet another installation, making sure this time that I followed instructions to the letter and didn't make the same mistake like last time (caused within vi I had unwittingingly gone into overwrite mode and not seen my typo).

However at around the same point where I had problems following the Etch instructions I now have a similar problem following the Lenny Instructions.

http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-se...-ispconfig2-p3

We need to open /etc/rsyslog.d/bind-chroot.conf...

vi /etc/rsyslog.d/bind-chroot.conf

... and add the following line so that we can still get important messages logged to the system logs:

When issuing the command

vi /etc/rsyslog.d/bind-chroot.conf

I find I am creating a new file !!

using

dir /etc/rsyslog.d/bind-chroot.conf

I am getting a response

dir: cannot access  /etc/rsyslog.d/bind-chroot.conf: no such file or directory

whilst

dir /etc/rsyslog.d/

brings no error message so I assume that the directory exists.

My question is whether we are opening a new file at this point or have I made another error somewhere?

I have noticed that your instructions are probably aimed at those who know what they are doing or manage to guess what they must do, due to prior experience. I also had an error message when installing quota and running "quotacheck -avugm" however I took this to be because it was the first time being run, a second run brought me no error messages. This is not a criticism so please do not take it as one .. I have been in the electronics business (repairs, production and commissioning) for 40 years and I know only too well how easy it is to assume that the reader either "knows" or "has been down this road before" then gets confused when things don't go the way expected (Murphys Law in action)

By the way, Thanks for the great tutorial, without it I would never even have gotten this far

[falko]

Originally Posted by Done_Fishin

My question is whether we are opening a new file at this point

No, the file should already exist on your system. Are you sure you followed all instructions?

[Done_Fishin]

as far as I can tell , yes .. I went back through each step on CLI and verified that all was OK, no typo's and nothing missing .. I added the file thinking I might have to create from new then progressed .. I now get

postconf: fatal: missing '='

when I try to write

postconf -e 'smtpd sasl_local_domain ='

Should I just start over .. (no problem .. the more I do it the easier it becomes and the more I get used to using "vi")

[Done_Fishin]

I shall start over .. I see that there are a lot of problems associated with "missing '=' " from searches I hqav done on the net. Also I note from the postfix manual that "postconf -e" only has two entries, neither of which seems to help me ..

[Done_Fishin]

It happened again

10 BIND9 DNS Server

Run

apt-get install bind9

to install BIND9.

For security reasons we want to run BIND chrooted so we have to do the following steps:

/etc/init.d/bind9 stop

Edit the file /etc/default/bind9 so that the daemon will run as the unprivileged user bind, chrooted to /var/lib/named. Modify the line: OPTIONS="-u bind" so that it reads OPTIONS="-u bind -t /var/lib/named":

vi /etc/default/bind9

Create the necessary directories under /var/lib:

mkdir -p /var/lib/named/etc
mkdir /var/lib/named/dev
mkdir -p /var/lib/named/var/cache/bind
mkdir -p /var/lib/named/var/run/bind/run

Then move the config directory from /etc to /var/lib/named/etc:

mv /etc/bind /var/lib/named/etc

Create a symlink to the new config directory from the old location (to avoid problems when BIND gets updated in the future):

ln -s /var/lib/named/etc/bind /etc/bind

Make null and random devices, and fix permissions of the directories:

mknod /var/lib/named/dev/null c 1 3
mknod /var/lib/named/dev/random c 1 8
chmod 666 /var/lib/named/dev/null /var/lib/named/dev/random
chown -R bind:bind /var/lib/named/var/*
chown -R bind:bind /var/lib/named/etc/bind

We need to open /etc/rsyslog.d/bind-chroot.conf...

vi /etc/rsyslog.d/bind-chroot.conf

it would appear at this stage that /etc/rsyslog.d/ is an empty folder.

ls /etc/rsylog.d display no content , neither does ls -a /etc/rsyslog.d/

I have followed the instructions carefully only to come back with the same error as before .. it wants to create a new file /etc/rsyslog.d/bind-chroot.conf

I had a quick search around but couldn't find a file with that name anywhere.

Am I doing something wrong ??