I do have the latest firmware version so no help there. I browsed a bit around and I found out that others share my issues including owners of the more expensive e4200.

Somebody was brave enough to fight tech support until escalated and got a useful response (I’m pasting the relevant part here):

If you have the DDNS server active, every time you hit the save settings button on ANY page of the router GUI, it refreshes all of the settings – which includes re-updating DynDNS even if the IP address hasn’t changed.

That’s not nice of them, I really hope this will be fixed in a future firmware update. I fiddle with my configuration from time to time and I’m sure next time I’ll forget to disable dyndns before changing settings.

I know that I’m just quoting from a forum but I want a copy of the sollution here, otherwise next time I change the settings I won’t know why my host gets blocked

Long storry short, I changed the DNS and expected the problem to go away. Next day I was happy to find out that it didn’t. I pinged akismet.com from the console, tried http connection to it with links everything was fine. For good measure I tried other DNS entries, tried a mtr to akismet.com but still everything was fine and the key in Akismet Configuration refused to work.

Than, after a slap on my forehead I remembered THIS. Right, after

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# service httpd stop
# service httpd start

Everything went back to normal.

I have installed the Bandwithd monitoring software on a machine. I noticed that the monitoring data kept being erased between start/stop or reboot. There actually are two configuration settings which are false by default that allows BandwidthD to keep it’s data across restart’s (or system reboots) and those are

(in /etc/bandwidthd.conf)

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#Log data to cdf file htdocs/log.cdf
output_cdf true
 
#Read back the cdf file on startup
recover_cdf true

(they are false by default, you need to set them true like above)

Like this:

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[root@18969_1_490528 tmp]# mysql -u test_user -puser_pass
ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'test_user'@'localhost' (using password: YES)
 
[root@18969_1_490528 tmp]# mysql -u test_user -puser_pass -h yourhost.com
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 55
Server version: 5.0.77 Source distribution
 
Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.
 
mysql> quit
Bye

The problem are the anonymous users created by mysql_install_db on initial setup of mysql. Those take precedence. So either you create your user both as ‘test_user’@'%’ and ‘test_user’@localhost either erase those users. I erase them like this as I don’t need two set’s of users for every user I need:

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mysql> select Host,User from user;
+----------------+--------------+
| Host           | User         |
+----------------+--------------+
| %              | test_user    |
| 127.0.0.1      | root         |
| 18969_1_490528 |              |
| 18969_1_490528 | root         |
| localhost      |              |
| localhost      | root         |
+----------------+--------------+
6 rows in set (0.00 sec)
 
mysql> delete from user where User='';
Query OK, 2 rows affected (0.00 sec)
 
mysql> flush privileges;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)
 
mysql> select Host,User from user;
+----------------+--------------+
| Host           | User         |
+----------------+--------------+
| %              | test_user    |
| 127.0.0.1      | root         |
| 18969_1_490528 | root         |
| localhost      | root         |
+----------------+--------------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)
 
mysql>

That was funny as I was sure that I did configure, make and make install the latest version. Well, by default, on slackware at least rrdtool installs in /opt !

I added /opt/rrdtool-x.x/lib in /etc/ld.so.conf  (check to see what is the exact path in your case) and rerun ldconfig. Sure enough everything worked fine.

This is the error log I received:

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[Tue Oct 05 14:24:11 2010] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Premature end of
script headers: show.cgi
[Tue Oct 05 14:28:04 2010] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Can't load
'/usr/lib64/perl5/site_perl/5.10.1/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/auto/RRDs/RRDs.so'
for module RRDs: librrd.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such
file or directory at
/usr/lib64/perl5/5.10.1/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/DynaLoader.pm line
200.
[Tue Oct 05 14:28:04 2010] [error] [client 127.0.0.1]  at
/usr/local/nagiosgraph/etc/ngshared.pm line 27
[Tue Oct 05 14:28:04 2010] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Compilation
failed in require at /usr/local/nagiosgraph/etc/ngshared.pm line 27.
[Tue Oct 05 14:28:04 2010] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] BEGIN
failed--compilation aborted at /usr/local/nagiosgraph/etc/ngshared.pm
line 27.
[Tue Oct 05 14:28:04 2010] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Compilation
failed in require at /usr/local/nagios/sbin/show.cgi line 13.
[Tue Oct 05 14:28:04 2010] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] BEGIN
failed--compilation aborted at /usr/local/nagios/sbin/show.cgi line
13.
[Tue Oct 05 14:28:04 2010] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Premature end of
script headers: show.cgi
[Tue Oct 05 14:28:06 2010] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Can't load
'/usr/lib64/perl5/site_perl/5.10.1/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/auto/RRDs/RRDs.so'
for module RRDs: librrd.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such
file or directory at
/usr/lib64/perl5/5.10.1/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/DynaLoader.pm line
200.
[Tue Oct 05 14:28:06 2010] [error] [client 127.0.0.1]  at
/usr/local/nagiosgraph/etc/ngshared.pm line 27
[Tue Oct 05 14:28:06 2010] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Compilation
failed in require at /usr/local/nagiosgraph/etc/ngshared.pm line 27.
[Tue Oct 05 14:28:06 2010] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] BEGIN
failed--compilation aborted at /usr/local/nagiosgraph/etc/ngshared.pm
line 27.
[Tue Oct 05 14:28:06 2010] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Compilation
failed in require at /usr/local/nagios/sbin/show.cgi line 13.
[Tue Oct 05 14:28:06 2010] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] BEGIN
failed--compilation aborted at /usr/local/nagios/sbin/show.cgi line
13.
[Tue Oct 05 14:28:06 2010] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Premature end of
script headers: show.cgi

And this is where the fun started!

The folders and files appear correctly, I can navigate and I can download them. Only that the files, even if apparently having the same size are corrupted. I checked the FollowSymLinks and as expected was set as required. I tried wget in the command prompt to see if I could find some enlightment but I got the following errors:

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# wget http://192.xxx.xxx.xxx/windowsshare/folder/file.jpg
 --09:18:00--  http://192.xxx.xxx.xxx/windowsshare/folder/file.jpg
 => `file.jpg'
 Connecting to 127.0.0.1:80... connected.
 HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
 Length: 763,685 (746K) [image/jpeg]
 
 0%
 [                                                                  ]
 0             --.--K/s
 
 09:18:00 (0.00 B/s) - Connection closed at byte 0. Retrying.
 
 --09:18:01--  http://192.xxx.xxx.xxx/windowsshare/folder/file.jpg
 (try: 2) => `file.jpg'
 Connecting to 127.0.0.1:80... connected.
 HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
 Length: 763,685 (746K) [image/jpeg]
 file.jpg has sprung into existence.
 Retrying.
 
 --09:18:03--  http://192.xxx.xxx.xxx/windowsshare/folder/file.jpg
 (try: 3) => `file.jpg.1'
 Connecting to 127.0.0.1:80... connected.
 HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
 Length: 763,685 (746K) [image/jpeg]
 
 0%
 [                                                                  ]
 0             --.--K/s

and it will continue like this creating empty files.

Especial the has sprung into existence baffled me. Also note that symlinking any other folder, even mounted as smbfs instead of cifs worked perfectly. At this point changing the mount to smbfs would have solved my problem but curiosity was stronger.

As it turns either apache or (more likely) the cifs driver has a bug. You can work around it by setting the following inside your apache configuration.

EnableSendfile off

Further upgrades will probably eradicate this problem.

What is network bonding?

Bonding is the same as port trunking. It means that two (ore more) physical network connections are combine to form one virtual network connection. The added benefit is that bandwidth adds too.  So theoretically this could offer multi gigabit capabilities.

How is it configured

First you need a small utility that comes with the linux kernel: ifenslave. So we must compile it. After that it should be moved somewhere more apropriate.

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cd /usr/src/linux/Documentation/networking
gcc -Wall -O -I/usr/src/linux/include ifenslave.c  -o ifenslave
cp ifenslave /sbin/ifenslave

Then we need some scripts that will set up bonding on boot. So we go to /etc/rc.d and create a new file called rc.bond

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cd /etc/rc.d
touch rc.bond

Edit the file you just created to contain the following:

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#!/bin/sh
 
        case "$1" in
          'start')
            echo "start bond0"
            modprobe bonding mode=balance-rr miimon=100
            modprobe tg3
            ifconfig bond0 up
            ifenslave bond0 eth0
            ifenslave bond0 eth1
            #You don't necesarily need to change the hardware address
            #It will take it from the first hardware interface
            #ifconfig bond0 hw ether 00:16:3e:aa:aa:aa
          ;;
          'stop')
            ifconfig bond0 down
            rmmod bonding
            rmmod tg3
          ;;
          *)
            echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop}"
          ;;
        esac

Save this file and make it executable

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chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.bond

We need to start this on boot. So edit rc.M You need to find the line containing #Initialize the networking hardware and insert this after it

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# If script rc.bond is executeable then start it
if [ -x /etc/rc.d/rc.bond ]; then
  . /etc/rc.d/rc.bond start
fi

Finally we must configure rc.inet1.conf to set our bond interface and to make sure the physical interfaces are not configured. Add the following:

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IFNAME[4]="bond0"
IPADDR[4]="XXX.XX.XX.XX"
NETMASK[4]="255.255.255.0"
USE_DHCP[4]=""
DHCP_HOSTNAME[4]=""

Make sure that the physical interfaces, like 0, 1 and so on are NOT configured.
Reboot, and everything will be set.

For your reference those are the bonding modes available:

mode=0 (balance-rr)
Round-robin policy: Transmit packets in sequential order from the first available slave through the last. This mode provides load balancing and fault tolerance.

mode=1 (active-backup)
Active-backup policy: Only one slave in the bond is active. A different slave becomes active if, and only if, the active slave fails. The bond’s MAC address is externally visible on only one port (network adapter) to avoid confusing the switch. This mode provides fault tolerance. The primary option affects the behavior of this mode.

mode=2 (balance-xor)
XOR policy: Transmit based on [(source MAC address XOR'd with destination MAC address) modulo slave count]. This selects the same slave for each destination MAC address. This mode provides load balancing and fault tolerance.

mode=3 (broadcast)
Broadcast policy: transmits everything on all slave interfaces. This mode provides fault tolerance.

mode=4 (802.3ad)
IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link aggregation. Creates aggregation groups that share the same speed and duplex settings. Utilizes all slaves in the active aggregator according to the 802.3ad specification.

	Pre-requisites:
	1. Ethtool support in the base drivers for retrieving
	the speed and duplex of each slave.
	2. A switch that supports IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link
	aggregation.
	Most switches will require some type of configuration
	to enable 802.3ad mode.

mode=5 (balance-tlb)
Adaptive transmit load balancing: channel bonding that does not require any special switch support. The outgoing traffic is distributed according to the current load (computed relative to the speed) on each slave. Incoming traffic is received by the current slave. If the receiving slave fails, another slave takes over the MAC address of the failed receiving slave.

	Prerequisite:
	Ethtool support in the base drivers for retrieving the
	speed of each slave.

mode=6 (balance-alb)
Adaptive load balancing: includes balance-tlb plus receive load balancing (rlb) for IPV4 traffic, and does not require any special switch support. The receive load balancing is achieved by ARP negotiation. The bonding driver intercepts the ARP Replies sent by the local system on their way out and overwrites the source hardware address with the unique hardware address of one of the slaves in the bond such that different peers use different hardware addresses for the server.

[source: http://www.linuxhorizon.ro/bonding.html]

The most used are the first four mode types…

The mail didn’t get delivered because sendmail complained about this error.

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Domain of sender address user@old.domain.com does not exist

Now this is weird – I just want to have the mails delivered locally. Well, since spam is such a big problem sendmail likes to check that the domain from which the message originated is real.

In my case this fails of course since some of the old emails we have in this accounts are from addresses that no longer exists and so sendmail refused to deliver them. So we just have to tell email to accept email coming from nonexistent domains.

Note: that this is not safe or recommended in anyway if the sendmail is running on a live email server. (Why are you running sendmail on  live machine anyway?) It’s acceptable in this case since this sendmail will only get messages downloaded by fetchmail from a few google GMail accounts.

So the setting to change in order to allow messages from nonexistent domains is found in

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/usr/share/sendmail/cf/cf/sendmail-slackware.mc

and it’s this one:

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dnl# Turn this feature on if you don't always have DNS, or enjoy junk mail:
dnl FEATURE(`accept_unresolvable_domains')dnl

and after changing it should read:

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FEATURE(`accept_unresolvable_domains')dnl

After changing it you must run:

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cd /usr/share/sendmail/cf/cf
cp sendmail-slackware.mc config.mc
 m4 /usr/share/sendmail/cf/m4/cf.m4 config.mc > /etc/mail/sendmail.cf

When I did the above again after reinstalling running simply this also worked:

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m4 sendmail-slackware.mc > /etc/mail/sendmail.cf

Please note that you’ll need to know the following:

• Windows username and password (the ones needed to access the share)
• The machine and share name. Something like //xpdesktop/pictures
• Have root access on the linux machine

Login on your linux machine as root. Type the following command to mount your remote windows share:

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mkdir /mnt/share_name
mount -t cifs //xpdesktop/pictures -o username=john, password=johnspass /mnt/share_name

Where:

• xpdesktop is the network name of the Windows machine
• john is the username on  the windows machine
• johnspass is the password used to access the windows share
• /mnt/share_name is the target folder where the partition will be mounted (the folder you just created above)

You can now cd and ls the remote windows share as any other folder on the linux machine:

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cd /mnt/share_name
ls  -l

I’ll show you in a following article how you can automatically mount a remote Windows share at boot time.

The short answer: it’s possible … maybe. Your headless machine should already be set to boot of cd if one is present, otherwise it will not work.

Here are the steps needed to start you off:

1. Download the netinst cd image

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wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian-cd/5.0.3/i386/iso-cd/debian-503-i386-netinst.iso

2. Mount the ISO to a folder, let’s call it isoorig

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mkdir isoorig
mount -o loop -t iso9660 debian-503-i386-netinst.iso isoorig

3. Extract to new folder called isonew

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mkdir isonew
rsync -a -H –exclude=TRANS.TBL isoorig/ isonew

4. Change the menu to load SSH on boot by default

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/isonew# nano isolinux/txt.cfg

DELETE:
remove “menu default” from “label install”

ADD:

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label netinstall
menu label ^Install Over SSH
menu default
kernel /install.386/vmlinuz
append auto=true vga=normal file=/cdrom/preseed.cfg initrd=/install.386/initrd.gz locale=en_US console-keymaps-at/keymap=us

CHANGE:
“default install” to “default netinstall”

EDIT: both files below and change “timeout 0″ to “timeout 4″ to make it auto select netinstall

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nano isolinux/isolinux.cfg
nano isolinux/prompt.cfg

5. Create preseed.cfg file

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nano isonew/preseed.cfg

6. PASTE this to the preseed file:

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#### Contents of the preconfiguration file
### Localization
# Locale sets language and country.
d-i debian-installer/locale select en_US
# Keyboard selection.
d-i console-keymaps-at/keymap select us
### Network configuration
# netcfg will choose an interface that has link if possible. This makes it
# skip displaying a list if there is more than one interface.
d-i netcfg/choose_interface select auto
# Any hostname and domain names assigned from dhcp take precedence over
# values set here. However, setting the values still prevents the questions
# from being shown, even if values come from dhcp.
d-i netcfg/get_hostname string newdebian
d-i netcfg/get_domain string local
# Disable that annoying WEP key dialog.
d-i netcfg/wireless_wep string
# The wacky dhcp hostname that some ISPs use as a password of sorts.
#d-i netcfg/dhcp_hostname string radish
d-i preseed/early_command string anna-install network-console
# Setup ssh password
d-i network-console/password password install
d-i network-console/password-again password install

7. Recreate md5sum.txt file

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md5sum `find -follow -type f` > md5sum.txt

8. Create your new iso image

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mkisofs -o ../custom_install.iso -r -J -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat ../isonew

The image you just obtained is ready to burn. This loads everything automatically and goes to the SSH screen.

Thanks go to people on various debian forums, this information was collected via trial and error and by combining info found around. Have fun with your shiny new headless debian box.