Category Archives: Linux

Installing and using ioping

ioping – a simple tool for monitoring disk I/O delays in real time, similar to ping showing network latency.

You can install in Ubuntu / Debian using the command:

sudo apt-get install ioping

Here is an example of a run with 10 requests for a delay test to the / tmp directory:

ioping -c 10 /tmp

An example of a query with an interval of 0.2ms and an increased query size:

ioping -i 0.2 -c 10 -s 1M -S 5M /tmp

Test to disk:

ioping -R /dev/sda
ioping -RL /dev/sda

I’ll describe the possible startup options:
-c count (stop after the specified number of requests)
-w deadline (stop after the specified amount of time)
-p period (display raw statistics after each specified number of requests)
-P period (display raw statistics after each specified number of seconds)
-i interval (the interval between requests in seconds)
-s size (request size (4k))
-S size (size of the working set)
-k (after the command is finished, leave (do not delete) the working file ioping.tmp)
-L (sequential operations instead of random ones, this will also set the query size to 256k (like -s 256k))
-A (asynchronous I/O)
-C (cached I/O)
-D (straight I/O)
-B (do not display execution information, it will only appear when the command is finished in raw format)
-q (do not display execution information, it will be displayed only when the command completes)
-h (display help)
-v (view version)

How to enable SMTP without SSL on port 25 in iRedMail / Postfix

To allow the sending of messages on the mail server without encryption via port 25, you need to open the Postfix configuration file, for example, in the nano editor (in which Ctrl+X to exit, y/n to save or cancel changes):

sudo nano /etc/postfix/main.cf

And uncomment two lines:

smtpd_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtpd_sasl_security_options = noanonymous

And leave the commented line:

#smtpd_tls_auth_only=yes

Reload Postfix to apply the changes:

sudo service postfix restart

After that it will be possible to send messages via SMTP through port 25 without SSL, and as usual through 587 with SSL.

See also:
Allow insecure connections to POP3 / IMAP iRedMail

How to fix error “host NAME greeted me with my own hostname NAME”

I noticed once on one server that Postfix does not always send mail, the logs had the following error:

warning: host NAME[192.168.5.5]:25 greeted me with my own hostname NAME

After seeing the host name:

hostname -f

Found that it is not correct and coincides with that on which the mail is sent!

Changed the host name to the correct one in the following files (in the nano editor Ctrl+X to exit, y/n to save or cancel changes):

sudo nano /etc/hostname
sudo nano /etc/postfix/main.cf
sudo nano /etc/hosts

Done, after that the error did not appear and the mail was successfully delivered.

Redmine Backup

Create a script (in the text editor nano Ctrl+X to exit, y/n to save or cancel changes):

sudo nano /etc/cron.daily/redmine

Sample script content:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/mysqldump -u root -p<password> redmine_default | gzip > /path/to/backups/redmine_db_`date +%y_%m_%d`.gz
rsync -a /var/lib/redmine/default/files /path/to/backups/files

Let’s make the script executable:

chmod +x /etc/cron.daily/redmine

In the script, you can also add the command to delete old files or directories so that the disk does not overflow, see my article – Script to delete old files

See also other my articles about backup – Backup

How to fix error “dhcpd self-test failed. Please fix the config file”

I noticed once in the syslog:

dhcpd self-test failed. Please fix the config file

Isc-dhcp-server was installed on the server.

To check the correctness of the configuration file, use the command:

dhcpd -t
dhcpd -t -cf /dir/dhcpd.conf
/usr/sbin/dhcpd -t

The command should tell which line the error is, but noted that if it is not critical, it may not.
The key “t” executes the configuration test, and “cf” allows you to specify the path to the configuration file if it is not standard.

In my case, in the configuration file /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf, someone made a typo, in the line below (there was an extra letter):

authorivtative;

Because of this, an error occurred, but despite the error dhcp worked.
Although there were also some critical errors, such as an incorrectly written mac address, DHCP did not start because of this error.