Tag Archives: linux

Manage PDF files

Merge multiple files into single PDF

I’m sure that we all had the need to send a single PDF file, maybe a signed contract. Yes, those 20 or more pages that you need to return, probably with just two of them filled up and signed.

Some PDF give you the ability to digitally sign them. But in my experience, most of them aren’t so modern.

So, what do I do?

I print ONLY the pages that I need to sign, scan them and here I am, with the need to “rebuild” the PDF, replacing the pages signed.

Example.
You have the file contract.pdf, with 20 pages and you need to sign page 10 and page 20.
The scan has a different resolution (or, even worse, it’s a different format, like jpg).

Here the command to make the magic happen:

The bit before -resize is pretty self explanatory. The bit after is a way to have the size of all pages fitting an A4 format, with a good printable resolution.

Of course, to make this happen, you need Linux (or WSL on Windows 10) and imagemagick installed.

Another way is using ghostscript.

A simple Ghostscript command to merge two PDFs in a single file is shown below:

What about a quick onliner to reduce and convert to grayscale your pdf?

PDF size reduce

Sometimes instead, you need to reduce the size of an existing PDF. Here a handy oneliner, using ghostscript:

Other options for PDFSETTINGS:

  • /screen selects low-resolution output similar to the Acrobat Distiller “Screen Optimized” setting.
  • /ebook selects medium-resolution output similar to the Acrobat Distiller “eBook” setting.
  • /printer selects output similar to the Acrobat Distiller “Print Optimized” setting.
  • /prepress selects output similar to Acrobat Distiller “Prepress Optimized” setting.
  • /default selects output intended to be useful across a wide variety of uses, possibly at the expense of a larger output file.

Happy PDF’ing 🙂


Sources:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23214617/imagemagick-convert-image-to-pdf-with-a4-page-size-and-image-fit-to-page
https://www.shellhacks.com/merge-pdf-files-linux-command-line/

https://gist.github.com/firstdoit/6390547

Migrate Linux Subsystem from one PC to another

Are you enjoying your favorite Linux distro running within the Windows 10 Linux Subsystem?

Have you configured all nicely?

What happened if you get a new pc and you’d like to migrate your VM across?

This is what happened to me. And looking around, I found this post that gave me this kinda-dirty way, but did work!

After that, I decided to review the steps, and I’ve added these directories in the exclude’s list, to make clearer the process of export/import:

Of course, if you have important data in these folders and you want to move across too, just update the one-liner below accordingly. 😉

On your OLD PC

  • Open your Linux VM
  • Get inside your Downloads directory (replace <user> with your username): cd /mnt/c/Users/<user>/Dowloads
  • Make sure to be root (sudo su -)
  • Run:
    tar -cvpzf backup.tar.gz --exclude=/backup.tar.gz --exclude=/dev --exclude=/proc --exclude=/sys --exclude=/run --exclude=/tmp --exclude=/media --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/var/cache --exclude=/var/run --one-file-system /
    NOTE: you could achieve the same using the option --exclude-from=file.txt, and having the list of exclusions in this file. I used a one-liner as it’s quicker to copy and paste.
  • Once done, close your Linux VM
  • Verify that you have a new file called backup.tar.bz in Dowloads

On your NEW PC

  • Install from Microsoft Store the same Linux VM (or reinstall in the same way you have done originally on your old pc)
  • Copy across your backup.tar.bz within your new Downloads folder
  • Open the VM that you’ve just installed (minimal setup – this will be completely overwritten, so don’t be bothered too much)
  • Once you’re inside and your backup.tar.bz is in Download, run the following (replace <user> with your username):
    sudo tar -xpzf /mnt/c/Users/<user>/Dowloads/backup.tar.gz -C / --numeric-owner
  • Ignore the errors
  • Close and re-open the VM: DONE! 🙂

Happy migration! 😉

Bridge / Bond interfaces CentOS/RedHat

Just few notes about how to bridge or bond network interfaces in CentOS/RedHat systems

 

Sources:

Banana Pi Pro – WLAN configuration

Add ‘ap6210‘ to /etc/modules to enable WiFi, and use modprobe ap6210 to force load the module.

Check dmesg to see if all has been loaded correctly. If not, reboot and check again.

Install the required packages:

Modify /etc/network/interfaces

Bring the interface up:

Source: http://oyox.de/882-wlan-auf-bananian-banana-pi-einrichten/

Nagios3 and Lighttpd

This guide will explain how to install Nagios3 on a machine with Debian and Lighttpd webserver.

If you haven’t installed Lighttpd yet, please follow this tutorial.

Install Nagios server

Now, let’s install Nagios.

This will automatically install all the required dependencies.

Enable check_external_commands in /etc/nagios3/nagios.cfg

Add www-data in nagios’ group:

And fix some permission issues to avoid some errors like “error: Could not stat() command file”

Let’s configure a bit Lighttpd.
Make sure cgi and php modules are enabled.

Then, create a new conf file and enable it:

Let’s apply the changes:

We need to setup the “nagiosadmin” password:

Now, open your browser and digit http://yourserver/nagios3
Insert username: nagiosadmin and the password you’ve just chosen… and voila`… 🙂

And now we have installed our nagios server. As you can see, it’s currently monitoring itself.

But what about the other hosts in the network?

Adding hosts

Host configuration

To let our Nagios server to monitor other hosts, we need to follow these steps on any client we want to add:

Once completed, we need to add the IP of our monitoring host in /etc/nagios/nrpe.cfg under allowed_hosts=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.

Also, add this line in /etc/nagios/nrpe_local.cfg:

This will be used from our monitor server to query nrpe and provide info about ALL the disks.
You can use also -I flag to exclude a specific path. For example on my Time Capsule Pi, I’ve used the following line, to exclude the mount point “TimeMachine” from the checks:

Monitoring configuration for new host

Now back to our Nagios monitoring machine
In /etc/nagios3/conf.d create a file called for example host1_nagios2.cfg and add the following basic services (add/remove/modify based on your local configuration):

Also, you can add the new host host1 to be part of any related groups, modifying /etc/nagios3/conf.d/hostgroups_nagios2.cfg

For example, we can add it to debian-servers and ssh-servers groups. This will automatically get some checks like SSH.

Sources:
http://zeldor.biz/2010/11/nagios3-with-lighttpd/comment-page-1/
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-nagios-on-ubuntu-12-10
http://cloud101.eu/blog/2012/03/01/setting-up-nagios-on-debian-or-ubuntu/
http://technosophos.com/2010/01/13/nagios-fixing-error-could-not-stat-command-file-debian.html

Lighttpd and virtualhosts

Here a quick how to, about how to configure Lighttpd to run with Virtualhosts.
This has been installed and tested on a Raspberry Pi.

Enable modules:

Content of /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

To easily manage virtual hosts, edit /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/10-simple-vhost.conf

This configuration above will allow you to manage your virutalhosts simply storing them in a folder under /var/www/vhost
No extra configuration is needed from the server side.
Simply go into /var/www/vhost and create a folder named as the virtualhost you would like to manage.
In this particular case, please make sure to have a folder called error.default.loc with a page inside which will be displayed in case of ANY error.
For example, if you want to manage mysite.example.com, simply do the following:

…and put the html/php files inside that new folder! 🙂

To test if our webserver works, you can always use curl command as explained here.

Puppet – Let’s start

Puppet is a quite powerful configuration manager tool which allows you to configure automatically hosts and keep configurations consistence.

I did some tests using 3 VMs:

  • puppetmaster (server)
  • puppetagent01 (client)
  • puppetagent02 (client)

Of course, most of the work is done on puppetmaster server. On the last two machines you will simply see the outcome of the configurations that you’re going do set on puppetmaster.

Important: all the machines have to be able to communicate between each others. Please make sure DNS is working or set local names/IPs in /etc/hosts file, and do some ping tests before proceeding.

Client setup

On each puppetagent machine, just install the package puppet

By default, the client will look for a host called “puppet” on the network.
If your DNS/hosts file doesn’t have this entry, and it can’t be resolved, you can manually set the name of the puppetmaster in /etc/puppet/puppet.conf file, adding this line under [main] section:

Now, no more configuration is required from the client side. Just edit /etc/default/puppet to start at boot time and start the service.

 

Starting the service, will make automatically a request to the server to be added under his control.

If you want to do some tests, you can eventually use the following command to run puppet only once. This will also force the polling updates, which by default runs every 30 minutes.

You can repeat all these steps on the second client machine.

Server setup

Check if the service is running, otherwise, start it up.

Sign clients’ certificates on the server side

Puppet uses this client/server certificate sign system to add/remove hosts from being managed by the server.

To see who has requested to be “controlled” use this command:

This will show all the hosts waiting to be added under puppetmaster server.

This command will add the host.

Puppetmaster configuration files

The main configuration file is /etc/puppet/manifests/site.pp

Inside manifests folder, I’ve created a subfolder called classes with extra definitions (content of these files is showed later in this post).

/etc/puppet/manifests/site.pp

Here the content of the single files .pp in classes folder:

 

 

 

 

It’s important to remember to NOT duplicate entries.
For example, in this case, we have a specific file where we have setup ntp service, including the required package. This means that we do NOT have to add this package in the list into packages.pp, otherwise you will get an error and configs won’t get pushed.

As I’m sure you’ve noted, there are references to some “files”.
Yes, we need some extra configuration, to tell puppet to run as file server as well and where files are located.

In our example we are storing our files in here:

Now we need to add the following in /etc/puppet/fileserver.conf

Last bit, is creating the subfolders and place the files required for our configuration:

Inside mysite create mysite_apache.conf and index.html files.

Example mysite_apache.conf

For index.html, you can simply have some text, just for testing purposes.

In this example, we have also setup ntp to be installed and to have a custom ntp.conf file pushed.
For this reason, we need to make sure to have this file present into /etc/puppet/files/etc as declared into our .pp file.

After doing all these changes, you should restart your puppetmaster service on the server.

If all went well, you should have the following:

  • puppetagent02 host with screen, dselect, vim (installed and with syntax on), ntp (installed, running with custom ntp.conf file)
  • puppetagent01: with the same as puppetagent02 PLUS apache with a running website

Of course this is just a raw example and you can use template and other super features.
But I think it’s a good start 😉

 

Sources:


https://forge.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs/stdlib
http://finninday.net/wiki/index.php/Zero_to_puppet_in_one_day
http://www.puppetcookbook.com/
http://foaa.de/old-blog/2010/07/playing-with-puppets-on-debian/trackback/index.html
http://www.harker.com/puppet/BayLISA100715.html
http://docs.puppetlabs.com/puppet/latest/reference/lang_relationships.html

DNS updated via DHCP: BIND9 and ISC-DHCP on Linux

Linux: Debian stable (currently version 7)

Packages:

Create a key required for DHCP server to update the DNS zones:

This will create /etc/bind/rndc.key, whose contents will look something like this:

BIND configuration

Configuration files:

 

/etc/hosts

 

/etc/bind/named.conf.local

 

/etc/bind/named.conf.options

(just to setup the external forwarders)

 

/etc/bind/db.lab.loc

 

/etc/bind/db.10.0.60

 

DHCP configuration

Here there is just one file that has to be modified: dhcpd.conf

/etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf

Here we need to enter the key in plain text.

 

Once everything is configured, just restart bind and dhcp:

 

Sources:

https://www.centos.org/docs/4/html/rhel-rg-en-4/s1-bind-zone.html

Minimal X server – Less then 1.2GB

Packages required:

Full list of packages installed (including dependencies):

I personally needed a light editor, possibly not related to KDE or Gnome (which generally means plenty of packages installed).
I found Leafpad, which does the job. So, I generally install it as well:

With these packages, you should have a very light X environment, with xterm, a basic text editor and a basic bar with workspaces and current time.
Super basic. Super light. Super Functional. 🙂

I liked also to customise the menu, because the default one was too messy for me.

To do this, create a .blackboxrc file if not present in your home directory.
After, just add the following:

Of course, make sure to have also a folder called .blackboxand the file blackbox-menu customised like this one:

Otherwise, you can always start using a copy of the default one:

Here you go! Enjoy! 😉