codeshining - Developer IT

Amazon EC2 root defaults on EBS

- by CodeShining

I'm trying to understand why when launching a new instance Amazon defaults to EBS (8gb root) instead of instance storage. Why do they sell instance storage then if it's not used also to boot the base system? Is it safe to uncheck delete on termination, make it bigger (~50GiB) and keep all files on that EBS instead of creating a new one to make sure data will persist and it will also be usable by another instance?

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Set postfix to send email but not to receive them

- by CodeShining

I'm using Google Apps to handle personal email addresses for my domain name, and I set up the DNS as Google suggests. All works fine. Now since I need a SMTP to send emails from my e-commerce I installed Postfix on the server. It works fine when I send emails to any email address but it doesn't send to the same domain name, so let's say my domain is example.com, I set postfix using example.com, if I try to reset a password using [email protected] postfix doesn't send and instead reports on the mail.log Sep 20 01:09:52 ip-10-54-26-162 postfix/pickup[6809]: B09A3415D8: uid=33 from=<www-data> Sep 20 01:09:52 ip-10-54-26-162 postfix/cleanup[6854]: B09A3415D8: message-id=<20120920010952.B09A3415D8@ip-10-54-26-162.eu-west-1.compute.internal> Sep 20 01:09:52 ip-10-54-26-162 postfix/qmgr[30978]: B09A3415D8: from=<[email protected]>, size=4234, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Sep 20 01:09:52 ip-10-54-26-162 postfix/local[6856]: B09A3415D8: to=<[email protected]>, relay=local, delay=0.01, delays=0.01/0/0/0, dsn=5.1.1, status=bounced (unknown user: "myaccount") Of course it cannot find a local user "myaccount" since that account is on Google Apps... How can I tell Postfix to send the email and do not search for a local user?

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FTP account ownership on vhost directory makes Apache not run website correctly

- by CodeShining

I've purchased a virtual server, where I'm given of a non-root sudo-enabled user. Actually I do need to create an FTP account that's not that sudo-able account, so I created a no-login account just for that purpose. I've set up VSFTPd correctly, also enabling the "userlist" feature, to specify which user are permitted to use FTP. Then I created an empty directory under my sudo-able account, and I gave ownership permissions to the second account, so to make it more easy to understand, let's say the main account (the one I do use to manage my VPS) is called ubuntu and the FTP-user is named ftpuser, I created a directory /home/ubuntu/mywebsite giving the ownership to ftpuser:ftpuser. Then I uploaded a worpdress website, whose default permissions are 755 and 644. The issue is that Apache is not given of any privilege to run the website. How can I make the website run properly, and which is the most secure? Should I run that virtualhost with another user (if it's possible)? Should I force the FTP user to use the www-data group (if that's possible) and run with permissions like 775 and 664? How can I solve this issue? Any help is appreciated, I'd like to run it using the default permissions, so any update won't break up anything (because of permissions reset).

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Store system passwords with easy and secure access

- by CodeShining

I'm having to handle several VPS/services and I always set passwords to be different and random. What kind of storage do you suggest to keep these passwords safe and let me access them easily? These passwords are used for services like databases, webserver user and so on that run customers' services, so it's really important to keep them in a safe place and strong. I'm actually storing them in a google drive spreadsheet file, describing user, password, role, service. Do you know of better solutions? I'd like to keep them on a remote service to make sure I don't have to make backup copies (in case my hdd would fail somehow). I do work on *nix platforms (so windows specific solutions are not a choice here).

Developer IT