Denying interactive logins for an account
On a Linux system, you can change the designated shell for an account
to "nologin" to prevent user's from interactive logons. For instance,
if an account is only used for email, then you might wish to block the
user from logging in and obtaining a shell prompt, so that should anyone
else obtain the password for the account the person whould not be able
to do anything other than send and receive email for the account. If the
user's account was jasmith, you could use the command below:
# usermod --shell /sbin/nologin jasmith
[/os/unix/linux/sysmgmt]
permanent link
Installing Yum on a RedHat 9 System
For a RedHat Linux 9 system,
I wanted to install
Yum,
which is an automatic updater and package installer/remover for Linux systems
that use
RPMs to manage
installed software.
I checked to see if
Yum was already installed, but it was not installed.
# rpm -qa | grep -i yum
The Yum Download
webpage listed the requirements for the latest version of Yum, version 3.2.0,
as python 2.4+ and rpm 4.3 and above. I checked the version of the python and
rpm packages on the system, but found they were not at the required versions.
# rpm -q --last rpm python
rpm-4.2-0.69 Sat 08 Nov 2003 02:37:24 PM EST
python-2.2.2-26 Sat 08 Nov 2003 02:37:22 PM EST
Instead I needed to get a much earlier version,
2.0.8,
which only required python 2.1+ and rpm 4.1.1-4.3.1. After downloading the rpm
file, I installed it with rpm --install yum-2.0.8-1.noarch.rpm.
I then checked for updates for the system with yum check-update.
An update was available for tcpdump among other utilities. An
rpm -q --last tcpdump command showed the following information for
the version already installed on the system:
tcpdump-3.7.2-1.9.1 Sat 08 Nov 2003 08:39:55 PM EST
I tried updating tcpdump with
yum install tcpdump, but received
the error message below:
# yum install tcpdump
Gathering header information file(s) from server(s)
Server: Red Hat Linux 9 - i386 - Base
Server: Red Hat Linux 9 - Updates
Finding updated packages
Downloading needed headers
Resolving dependencies
Dependencies resolved
I will do the following:
[update: tcpdump 14:3.7.2-7.9.1.i386]
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages
Getting tcpdump-3.7.2-7.9.1.i386.rpm
retrygrab() failed for:
http://mirror.dulug.duke.edu/pub/yum-repository/redhat/updates/9//x86/i386/tcpdump-3.7.2-7.9.1.i386.rpm
Executing failover method
failover: out of servers to try
Error getting file http://mirror.dulug.duke.edu/pub/yum-repository/redhat/updates/9//x86/i386/tcpdump-3.7.2-7.9.1.i386.rpm
[Errno 4] IOError: HTTP Error 404: Not Found
When I checked the Duke University wepage at
http://mirror.dulug.duke.edu/pub/yum-repository/redhat/updates/9/x86/,
I found it had only one file in that directory. So I needed to add another
repository for updates to software for RedHat 9 systems. I found a list of
such sites at
http://fedoralegacy.org/download/fedoralegacy-mirrors.php. Many of those
I checked in the US also no longer had the files available for download. But
the DataPipe one at
http://mirror.datapipe.net/fedoralegacy/ did still have files available.
I added the following line to the updates section of /etc/yum.conf
baseurl=http://mirror.datapipe.net/fedoralegacy/redhat/9/updates/i386/
The yum.conf file now has the following information in it:
[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum
debuglevel=2
logfile=/var/log/yum.log
pkgpolicy=newest
distroverpkg=redhat-release
tolerant=1
exactarch=1
[base]
name=Red Hat Linux $releasever - $basearch - Base
baseurl=http://mirror.dulug.duke.edu/pub/yum-repository/redhat/$releasever/$basearch/
[updates]
name=Red Hat Linux $releasever - Updates
baseurl=http://mirror.dulug.duke.edu/pub/yum-repository/redhat/updates/$releasever/
baseurl=http://mirror.datapipe.net/fedoralegacy/redhat/9/updates/i386/
I then ran yum install tcpdump again and this time was able
to update tcpdump. Checking the version of the rpm installed afterwards,
I saw the following:
# rpm -q --last tcpdump
tcpdump-3.7.2-7.9.4.legacy Sat 09 Jun 2007 05:08:22 PM EDT
References:
-
Yellow Dog Updater (YUM)
Linux@DUKE
-
RPM Package
Manager
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
-
RedHat 9 Updates - Using Fedora Legacy
-
Mirror sites by country
The Fedora Legacy Project
[/os/unix/linux/sysmgmt]
permanent link
Logrotate PPP Error
After first setting up a Linux server with
Fedora Core 2 Linux, I received the following error message in an email
message sent to root:
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2004 19:00:42 -0400
From: root@mail.somewhere001.us (Anacron)
To: root@mail.somewhere001.us
Subject: Anacron job 'cron.daily'
/etc/cron.daily/logrotate:
error: stat of /var/log/ppp/connect-errors failed: No such file or directory
According to
Bugzilla Bug 126771: logrotate error because of non-existent
/var/log/ppp/connect-errors this error can be prevented by adding
a missingok to /etc/logrotate.d/ppp. The problem occurs
if PPP isn't used, which means there won't be a log file for it in
/var/log/ppp. By adding the missingok to
/etc/logrotate.d/ppp, you indicate that an error message shouldn't
be produced if the log file is missing and so can't be rotated.
According to
Bug 122911 - Logrotate problem if ppp isn't used and there isn't a logfile in
/var/log, the problem is present in version 2.4.2 release 2 of the ppp
package. I didn't add the missingok line, but instead upgraded the
ppp package (use up2date --install ppp). I now have
version 2.4.2 release 3.FC2.1 of ppp, which added the missingok
line.
# Logrotate file for ppp RPM
/var/log/ppp/connect-errors {
missingok
compress
notifempty
daily
rotate 5
create 0600 root root
}
[/os/unix/linux/sysmgmt]
permanent link
