Before you begin your compilation you should need additional header files and libraries required, please use the following code to install pre-requisities, don’t delete them as you would definitely need them when you upgrade to new releases also:

yum install make gcc automake zlib-devel bison cmake libtool wget gcc-c++ unzip ncurses-devel openssl-devel pcre-devel libxml2-devel curl-devel gd-devel libxslt-devel

Building & Installing Apache prefork

download the latest release of Apache Web Server and unpack:

wget http://ftp.itu.edu.tr/Mirror/Apache//httpd/httpd-2.2.25.tar.gz
tar zxvf httpd-2.2.25.tar.gz 
cd httpd-2.2.25

We advise you to configure with the options below as this form is widely used:

./configure \
        "--prefix=/etc/httpd" \
        "--exec-prefix=/etc/httpd" \
        "--bindir=/usr/bin" \
        "--sbindir=/usr/sbin" \
        "--sysconfdir=/etc/httpd/conf" \
        "--enable-so" \
        "--enable-dav" \
        "--enable-dav-fs" \
        "--enable-dav-lock" \
        "--enable-suexec" \
        "--enable-deflate" \
        "--enable-unique-id" \
        "--enable-mods-static=most" \
        "--enable-reqtimeout" \
        "--with-mpm=prefork" \
        "--with-suexec-caller=apache" \
        "--with-suexec-docroot=/" \
        "--with-suexec-gidmin=100" \
        "--with-suexec-logfile=/var/log/httpd/suexec_log" \
        "--with-suexec-uidmin=100" \
        "--with-suexec-userdir=public_html" \
        "--with-suexec-bin=/usr/sbin/suexec" \
        "--with-included-apr" \
        "--with-pcre=/usr" \
        "--includedir=/usr/include/apache" \
        "--libexecdir=/usr/lib/apache" \
        "--datadir=/var/www" \
        "--localstatedir=/var" \
        "--enable-logio" \
        "--enable-ssl" \
        "--enable-rewrite" \
        "--enable-proxy" \
        "--enable-expires" \
        "--with-ssl=/usr" \
        "--enable-headers"

to build and install source distro, type:

make
make install

Build & Install MySQL

Since we need headers and libraries of mysql for compiling PHP, we will first install MySQL server before PHP compilation.

wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.6/mysql-5.6.14.tar.gz/from/http://cdn.mysql.com/
tar zxvf mysql-5.6.14.tar.gz 
cd mysql-5.6.14
groupadd mysql
useradd -g mysql mysql
cmake .  -DMYSQL_UNIX_ADDR=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock
make
make install

If you encounter problems while running cmake, you have to delete CmakeCache.txt before re-compiling with cmake

#log in to newly created mysql dir
cd /usr/local/mysql/
#change owner and group
chown -R mysql:mysql .
scripts/mysql_install_db --user=mysql --datadir=/var/lib/mysql
#add service command
cp support-files/mysql.server /etc/init.d/mysqld
chkconfig --add mysqld
chkconfig mysqld on
#start mysql server
service mysqld start

change your mysql password by typing:

./bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'new-password' 
./bin/mysqladmin -u root -h change.this.hostname password 'new-password'

Build libmcrypt from the source

libmcypt repo is not included in the main yum repo, so better install it from the source:

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/mcrypt/files/Libmcrypt/2.5.8/libmcrypt-2.5.8.tar.gz/download?use_mirror=garr
tar zxvf libmcrypt-2.5.8.tar.gz
cd libmcrypt-2.5.8
./configure
make
make install

Building PHP-5.5.5 from the source

PHP configuration is also given with the mostly used modules & functionality, download unpack & configure as stated below:

wget http://us2.php.net/get/php-5.5.5.tar.gz/from/this/mirror
tar zxvf php-5.5.5.tar.gz
cd php-5.5.5
./configure \
        --with-apxs2 \
        --with-curl=/usr \
        --with-gd \
        --with-gettext \
        --with-jpeg-dir=/usr \
        --with-freetype-dir=/usr \
        --with-kerberos \
        --with-openssl \
        --with-mcrypt=/usr/local/lib \
        --with-mhash \
        --with-mysql=mysqlnd \
        --with-mysqli=mysqlnd \
        --with-pcre-regex \
        --with-pear \
        --with-png-dir=/usr \
        --with-xsl \
        --with-zlib \
        --with-zlib-dir=/usr \
        --with-iconv \
        --enable-bcmath \
        --enable-calendar \
        --enable-exif \
        --enable-ftp \
        --enable-gd-native-ttf \
        --enable-soap \
        --enable-sockets \
        --enable-mbstring \
        --enable-zip \
        --enable-wddx
make
make install
libtool --finish /root/php-5.5.5/libs
cp php.ini-production /usr/local/lib/php.ini
sed -i 's/;date.timezone =.*/  date.timezone \= "Europe\/Istanbul"/' /usr/local/lib/php.ini

Download phpMyAdmin and install it to webroot:

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/phpmyadmin/phpMyAdmin/4.0.8/phpMyAdmin-4.0.8-all-languages.tar.gz
tar zxvf phpMyAdmin-4.0.8-all-languages.tar.gz 
mv phpMyAdmin-4.0.8-all-languages /var/www/
mv /var/www/phpMyAdmin-4.0.8-all-languages/ /var/www/phpMyAdmin

create a test page to see if everything went well:

echo "<?PHP phpInfo();?>" > /var/www/index.php

If you cannot see a PHP info page, you need to add httpd directives to your httpd.conf:

echo "AddType application/x-httpd-php .php" >> /etc/httpd/conf/extra/httpd-php.conf
echo "AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps" >> /etc/httpd/conf/extra/httpd-php.conf

echo "Include conf/extra/httpd-php.conf" >> /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

restart apache by typing: apachectl restart

The post Compile and build Apache + MySQL + PHP from the source appeared first on VeriTeknik.

After a fresh install of CentOS, we will need the wget binary, if you don’t already have it, get it with yum.

yum install wget -y

For some of the dependencies to get installed, we’ll need the rpmforge repository, so let’s add it.

wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
rpm --import http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
rpm -K rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.*.rpm
rpm -i rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.*.rpm

Now let’s install the dependencies for our PHP compilation. Keep in mind that these are only for the configuration I’ll describe below, if you use a different compilation, you’ll need to get different packages. Also keep in mind that here I’ll only download the x86_64 packages, if you’re using a different architecture, just delete the x86_64 on every package name that contains it. The reason I specifically used that notation is to avoid downloading i386 packages, which is unnecessary but yum insists on downloading anyway.

yum install gcc make automake autoconf perl.x86_64 httpd-devel.x86_64 libxml2-devel.x86_64 openssl-devel.x86_64 pcre-devel.x86_64 bzip2-devel.x86_64 curl-devel.x86_64 enchant-devel.x86_64 libjpeg-devel.x86_64 libpng-devel.x86_64 libXpm-devel.x86_64 freetype-devel.x86_64 gmp-devel.x86_64 libicu-devel.x86_64 gcc-c++ libmcrypt-devel.x86_64 postgresql-devel.x86_64 aspell-devel.x86_64 libedit-devel.x86_64 recode-devel.x86_64 net-snmp-devel.x86_64 libtidy-devel.x86_64 libxslt-devel.x86_64 libcurl-devel.x86_64 libtool-ltdl-devel.x86_64 -y

Now let’s download the php 5.4.3 source code.

wget http://tr.php.net/get/php-5.4.3.tar.gz/from/this/mirror
tar xvzf php-5.4.3.tar.gz
cd php-5.4.3

We can start the configure-make-make install trio now.

./configure  --with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs --build=x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu --host=x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu --target=x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu --program-prefix= --prefix=/usr --exec-prefix=/usr --bindir=/usr/bin --sbindir=/usr/sbin --sysconfdir=/etc --datadir=/usr/share --includedir=/usr/include --libdir=/usr/lib64 --libexecdir=/usr/libexec --localstatedir=/var --sharedstatedir=/var/lib --mandir=/usr/share/man --infodir=/usr/share/info --cache-file=../config.cache --with-libdir=lib64 --with-config-file-path=/etc --with-config-file-scan-dir=/etc/php.d --disable-debug --with-pic --disable-rpath --with-bz2 --with-freetype-dir=/usr --with-png-dir=/usr --with-xpm-dir=/usr --enable-gd-native-ttf --without-gdbm --with-gettext --with-gmp --with-iconv --with-jpeg-dir=/usr --with-openssl --with-pcre-regex=/usr --with-zlib --with-layout=GNU --enable-exif --enable-ftp --enable-sockets --enable-sysvsem --enable-sysvshm --enable-sysvmsg --with-kerberos --enable-shmop --enable-calendar --with-libxml-dir=/usr --enable-xml --enable-pcntl --with-imap-ssl --enable-mbregex --enable-bcmath=shared --enable-dba=shared --with-db4=/usr --with-xmlrpc=shared --with-mysql --with-mysqli --enable-dom=shared --with-pgsql --enable-wddx=shared --with-snmp=shared,/usr --enable-soap=shared --with-xsl=shared,/usr --enable-xmlreader=shared --enable-xmlwriter=shared --with-curl --enable-json --enable-zip=shared --without-readline --with-libedit --with-pspell=shared --enable-phar=shared --with-tidy=shared,/usr --enable-sysvmsg=shared --enable-sysvshm=shared --enable-sysvsem=shared --enable-posix=shared --enable-fileinfo=shared --enable-intl=shared --with-icu-dir=/usr --with-enchant=shared,/usr --with-recode=shared,/usr --enable-mbstring --with-mcrypt --with-gd
make
make install

Now we have php installed.

Further we can configure the basic steps of Apache.
Edit your httpd.conf file : /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
Find the line that says AddType application/x-tar .tgz Append these two lines below it.

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

Also we should tell apache that index.php is an index file (or whatever index you want), so update your DirectoryIndex as following :

DirectoryIndex index.html index.html.var index.php index.htm

copy php.ini-production to /etc/php.ini and edit the file based on your performance requirements, please have a look at our security pages to secure your php configuration from the link.

Some suggestions: Increase upload limit, raise memory_limit to 256M and set date.timezone to your location, in our case it is:

date.timezone = Europe/Istanbul

After saving and exiting the httpd.conf file, restart your Apache services. ( service httpd restart )

Now you have /var/www/html as your default web home root, and PHP 5.4.3 running on it.

The post Building PHP 5.4.3 on CentOS appeared first on VeriTeknik.

While using Python as a system scripting tool, it’s essential to keep using the standard gnu tools if possible, since these tools are reliable, fast and have been tested for years by thousands of other system administrators as well.

The best way to keep using your good old fashioned gnu tools via Python is opening pipes to such tools. Even though it is possible to use the os module to do such tasks, the subprocess module is more reliable and you have more control over the tasks.

Below you’ll see two different methods to approach the “echo” tool via Python.

>>> import os, subprocess
>>> os.system("echo bla")
bla
0
>>> subprocess.Popen(["echo","bla"],stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]
'bla\n'

As you can see, both give us more or less the same output, but the subprocess module gives us a lot more control. First of all it has pipe support, universal newline support, better handling of exceptions etc.

Below is a method I use to determine the number of processor on the system. Using this, you can find out if you have multiple cores on the system.

cpu_num=subprocess.Popen(["grep","-c","processor","/proc/cpuinfo"],stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]

As you can see, what is does is very very simple, it just counts the number of word “processor” in the /proc/cpuinfo file using grep.

Don’t forget that it is very easy to pipe commands through each other with popen, here’s an example.

>>> import subprocess
>>> p1=subprocess.Popen(["cat","/proc/cpuinfo"],stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
>>> p2=subprocess.Popen(["grep","-B","2","-A","2","processor"],stdin=p1.stdout,stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
>>> output = p2.communicate()[0]
>>> print output
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15

Using the popen, it is very easy to get information on processes via the pgrep and ps tools. Below is a script when run with the valid parameters, checks if any of it’s processes uses more (or equal) to the percentage of the CPU specified, if true, kills the process and tries to send a message to the affiliated terminal window.

To accomplish this, we get the pid’s of the processes via pgrep, send it to ps so to check the cpu percentage and which tty (or pts) it’s running on. After the check, if necessary, the PID is killed and a message is sent to the terminal it was running on.

#!/usr/bin/python
import subprocess, sys, string

if len(sys.argv) != 3 :
    print "Usage : cpukiller.py <process-to-kill> <max-cpu-percentage>"
    raise SystemExit

proc_to_kill = sys.argv[1]
cpu_to_kill = sys.argv[2]

for i in cpu_to_kill :
    if i not in string.digits :
        print "max-cpu-percentage must consist of only digits."
        raise SystemExit

cpu_to_kill = int(cpu_to_kill)

try :
	a=subprocess.Popen(["pgrep",proc_to_kill],stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]
	if a == '' :
		raise SystemExit
	else :
		procc = subprocess.Popen(["ps --no-headers -o pid,pcpu,tname -p $(pgrep %s)"%proc_to_kill],shell=True,stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]
		procc=procc.strip()
except : raise SystemExit 
for lines in procc.split('\n') :
    if lines != '' :
        l=lines.split()
        if int(l[1].split('.')[0]) >= cpu_to_kill :
            if l[2] != '?' :
                try :
                    terminal = open('/dev/'+l[2],'a')
                    subprocess.Popen(["echo","You have exceeded your CPU limit, process with PID %s will be terminated"%l[0]],stdout=terminal).communicate()[0]
                except :
                    print "Couldn't tell the user."
                    pass
            try :
                killer = subprocess.Popen(["kill","-9",l[0]],stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]
            except :
                print "Couldn't kill the process."
                pass
        else : pass

Try to use it, understand it, and expand it!

The post System Control Over Python With Pipes appeared first on VeriTeknik.

Most of the Linux distros released as CD or DVD media for installing and if you install Linux with defualy options you get a nice user interface and a bunch of applications that you will never use in a server environment. Also default installation will require second, third CDs or all of seven CDs in one installation. But Linux, especially CentOS could be install with the first CD and the rest of the packages could be install with the installer “YUM”.  For more security and reservation of resources the system must be installed with only base packages described below.

You don’t need to select the services that you will use in a server at the installation. The best choice is to unselect all the ticks you see on the installation screen as follows, we will install the necessay packages after the installation.

CentOS Install first step

You won’t need any GUI in server mode or you should better get used to using terminal for better performance & security. Click Next when you done in this step and uncheck all prechecked items on all tabs. This way you should be able to install the OS with only one CD.

Install base packages after the reboot, most of the packages install dependencies, never mind installing them alone

yum install vixie-cron bind-utils jwhois which

If you need other packages instal them also. If you know the application but not the package containing it, you can always search it with the following command. For example, to install locate, you should.

yum whatprovides */locate

Yum will find the package (mlocate) for you easily.

Close IPv6 if you don’t use it (depreciated)

echo “alias net-pf-10 off” >> /etc/modprobe.conf
echo “alias ipv6 off” >> /etc/modprobe.conf

If you have your own log files in your custom directory and you want to rotate them daily, follow the directions below to create a custom logrotate script. In our example we will rotate the log files in folder /home/user/logs/ ending with *log:

vi /etc/logrotate.d/custom

and add the lines below to keep 8 days of log and compress them

/hsphere/user/logs/*log {
daily
rotate 8
missingok
compress
delaycompress
postrotate
/usr/sbin/apachectl graceful
endscript
}

For better performance you should use SSD disks, but you must take into account that SSD disks could be damaged if written all the time. Since EXT3 file system makes more utilization on disks more than EXT2, your disks might have a shorten life than expected. EXT3 makes journal of disks and some kind of defragmentation that you will never need in SSDs. Also Linux default file system uses atime to store last access time to a file, thus every read on a file makes a write and we will close this option as you rearly use it or you can find severeal other ways to see last access time if you need so. Also note that, do not try to convert EXT3 to EXT2 on a production server, edit /etc/fstab to disable atime:

/dev/sda1 / ext2 defaults 0 0

add noatime after all defaults:

/dev/sda1 / ext2 defaults,noatime 0 0

You can remount the disks by typing “mount -o remount,rw,noatime /dev/sda1” (sda1: replace with your appropriate disks) without writing to fstab (the changes will be lost on any reboot if you don’t write to fstab). To test the disk speeds you can call:

hdparm -tT /dev/sda1 # use df to see your disks instead of sda1

If you get less than 30 MB/s in “Timing buffered disk reads” part try to enable DMA or simply dispose your old disk and buy a new one.
Set 32 bit transfers and Interrupt mask in your disk.

New SATA disks, while promising huge speeds they came with minimum speed configurations in order to work on all type of systems including new and legacy. Such SATA3 devices promise to reach up to 6 Gbps (715 MB/s) but you can never see those results in your server. To see what your disk can do type the following command:

hdparm -I /dev/sda # use “df” to see your disks instead of sda

Commands/Features part of the result shows the options of your disk. the ones marked with (*) shows the options that you can set/unset. We will only show 32 bit transfers and interrupt masking here as an example, it is your own risk to set these features:

hdparm -tT /dev/sda # test speed before applying
hdparm -u1 -c3 /dev/sda
hdparm -tT /dev/sda

The post Linux Optimization from the scratch appeared first on VeriTeknik.

/tmp & /var/tmp runs faster from RAM, to do so:

vi /etc/fstab

tmpfs                   /tmp                    tmpfs   defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs                   /var/tmp                tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

save the file by pressing ESC and SHIFT ZZ or ESC + wq and type “mount -a” to apply the changes immediately. You can check the results by typing “df -h” and you will see something similar to below one:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hdb5              50G  5.0G   43G  11% /
/dev/hdb1              99M   24M   71M  25% /boot
tmpfs                 1.5G     0  1.5G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                 1.5G     0  1.5G   0% /tmp
tmpfs                 1.5G     0  1.5G   0% /var/tmp

The post Run /tmp from memory for faster performance appeared first on VeriTeknik.