KerbyServer

I have been a happy user of BackupPC for at least a couple years now. It makes backing up my various servers quite painless and worry free. Recently, an RPM for BackupPC version 3.0.0 was added to the Fedora 7 updates repository. Since Fedora 7's launch, version 2.1.2 of BackupPC was the only option. Personally, I was thinking the upgrade to BackupPC version 3 would be one of the sticky points when I upgrade to Fedora 8 in a couple months. Fortunately, the BackupPC package maintainer has been testing version 3 for some time now and just deployed it as stable to the updates repo.

For those of you who don't know, the router and gateway for my home's internal network is a computer running Fedora 7. It also acts as the DNS server for the computers on the network to provide hostname resolution for each of the machines, which keeps me from having to type IP addresses all day long. Up to now, though, I did not have this router computer configured to query its own DNS server, so I still had to use IP addresses when using it. Here is what I did to have the router query its own DNS server.

First, edit the resolv.conf file:
sudo vim /etc/resolv.conf

Steps used to setup an OpenLDAP server on KerbsFedora (based on walkthrough at http://www.linux.com/articles/114010 ):

sudo yum install openldap-servers openldap-clients

Generate the admin user's password (enter it twice when asked):
/usr/sbin/slappasswd

Edit /etc/openldap/slapd.conf:
(most comments trimmed)
include /etc/openldap/schema/core.schema
include /etc/openldap/schema/cosine.schema
include /etc/openldap/schema/inetorgperson.schema
include /etc/openldap/schema/nis.schema

When using ps with Ubuntu and Debian, the output is organized by the start time of the process. On Fedora, the output defaults to sorting by PID. This approach differs because PIDs eventually wrap around and no longer represent the processes in chronological order.

I finally found that the following ps command on Fedora systems will sort the same as Ubuntu/Debian:

ps -e --sort=start_time


Well, this little gem just wasted several hours of my life. For future reference, if a strange problem occurs that involves file or network access or modification, be sure to consider SELinux as the source of the issue.

With the recent upgrades to Fedora 7 I have done on several systems, I have become more aware of the terrible state of VNC clients on Mac OS X. The issue arose when I set up Remote Desktop (vino) preferences on the Fedora 7 systems. The VNC client on other Fedora 7 systems and the Tight VNC viewer on Windows have no problem connecting to Fedora 7's vino server. I have found that the VNC viewer in Fedora Core 6 and any VNC client on Mac OS X throw back an "Authentication failure" when connecting. After typing in the target computer's hostname, the password prompt appears as usual.

On multiple occasions I have had to modify a broken file on a Fedora system that was preventing me from booting. More recently this has been the /etc/fstab file. If any lines in that file have issues, Fedora will stop booting and throw you into a recovery console. Unfortunately, that console has the root partition mounted read only, so good luck fixing that file :)

The best way I have found to enable NFS on a Fedora system that has a firewall is to manually assign some of the NFS ports that are usually auto-negotiated and open just those ports in the firewall.

To do this, you can use Fedora's gui tool: system-config-nfs. In that interface, you can adjust the Server Settings as in the following screenshot:

...or just edit /etc/sysconfig/nfs to read:
LOCKD_TCPPORT=4001
LOCKD_UDPPORT=4001
MOUNTD_PORT=4002
STATD_PORT=4000


To set up grub to boot Fedora 7 from the master ATA hard drive (hda) and Windows XP Pro from the slave ATA hard drive (hdb) in a computer, I included the following lines at the end of the /boot/grub/grub.conf file:

title Windows XP Pro

rootnoverify (hd1,0)
map (hd1) (hd0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
chainloader +1

Pretty easy stuff...that's why when installing both Linux and Windows on a system, I go with a multiple hard drive approach. A lot less bothersome than dealing with partitioning a single disk.