Tag: ubuntu

backup2l troubleshooting – skipcond not ignoring paths

Something to watch out for…

backup2l, the popular Unix backup software, has a setting in /etc/backup2l.conf called skipcond that lets you ignore files/paths.  It uses find syntax.

You might have written something like this if you don’t want to both backing up old logs, say:

SKIPCOND=(-path /var/www/mysite/system/cms/logs/log*" -o -name "*.o")

But when you run backup2l -e to simulate the backup, it says:

856 / 43210 file(s), 13 / 5003 dir(s), 2.2GB / 4.3GB (uncompressed)
skipping: 0 file(s), 0 dir(s), 0 B (uncompressed)

You know this is wrong for two reasons, the overall size is too big and it’s not skipping anything.

This could be because of symlinks.  To debug, run a real backup (with the -b switch), and use backup2l -l [pattern] (where pattern is some file(s) you know are in the directory you want to exclude) to see what’s there.

You may find it’s actually backing up /usr/share/nginx/mysite, because /var/www is symlinked to it:

lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root    17 Aug  2  2015 www -> /usr/share/nginx/

Remember backup2l has a purge (-p) option that lets you remove individual differential or incremental backups by specifying the number. So if you’ve just run all.1375, say, you can delete that with -p 1375 and when you run it again it’ll reuse the number.

 

Fix: WordPress blank admin screen on VVV

If you do sudo apt-get upgrade on a Ubuntu box (e.g. a local VVV development environment) and suddenly find your WordPress Dashboard and admin screens are blank (entirely empty grey background except for the admin bar and left hand navigation – because nothing is being printed below the header), you might well need to do:

sudo apt-get install php7.0-xml

This can be triggered by certain plugins, such as JetPack, needing the xml_parser_create() function, which doesn’t exist without that package.

But the error:

PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function xml_parser_create() in /srv/www/example-project/htdocs/wp-includes/class-IXR.php:264

…won’t be visible, and you might start removing plugins unnecessarily (because wiping the plugins will seem to cure the problem…)  So I hope that helps.

P.S. when you have something like this, running wp plugin status at the command line (install WP-CLI) is a good idea, as you’ll see all the errors.

Patching servers for glibc (CVE-2015-7547) – remember to reboot!

This is a significant (though we’re not sure yet realistically how dangerous) buffer overflow bug in the Linux C library, glibc. The library handles system calls, for example, reading/writing to files.

The bug is with gethostbyname (used to find the DNS entry for a domain name).  Full explanation (Google)

Security updates have been available since 16 Feb 2016.

It’s easy to update but… remember to reboot afterwards! That’s the main reason I wrote this up – there’s a note to this effect in the security advisories, but utilities like aptitude won’t remind you. All sorts of services could be using glibc and remain vulnerable until they’ve restarted. Dan Kaminsky, at length, on how bad it could be

Much as it’s nice to accumulate a large uptime value, a forced reboot is also a useful opportunity to check the relevant services on your machine will come up after a power outage and, for example, your firewall settings are being loaded correctly.

Recommendation: check your existing version before you update, so you can verify it’s changed afterwards:

sudo aptitude show libc6 (Debian)
or execute the library itself, e.g.
/lib64/libc.so.6
(look for the line: Compiled on a Linux 2.6.32 system on [date])

How To:

Use your usual update procedure (e.g. apt-get update/upgrade on Debian/Ubuntu, yum update on CentOS/RedHat) then reboot the server.

Remember to do your VMs (e.g. Vagrant boxes) too.

Note packages are backported, so for Debian you pay attention to the uxx after the version number, not the version itself.

Does it affect Mac OS X?

No. (OS X doesn’t have glibc.)