Archive May 2009

My virtual host administration

2009/05/31 in Blog - Leave a reply

For more than a year I have been running my own virtual host (thanks to Tom for helping with the setup of the mail system). Before I had almost no skills regarding Linux administration. Meanwhile I’m kindof able to maintain it and add this and that. For a while a few tasks have been pending

1. Frequent logging file reports
2. Monthly backup
3. Moving backup files to some external storage service

Due to my pretty constrained time budget only now I was able to spend some hours on getting some task done.

For Frequent logging file reports I added logwatch to my system, customized it in /etc/logwatch/conf/logwatch.conf.

# Default person to mail reports to.  Can be a local account or a
# complete email address.
MailTo = recipient@domain
# Default person to mail reports from.  Can be a local account or a
# complete email address.
MailFrom = Logwatch

# If set to 'Yes', the report will be sent to stdout instead of being
# mailed to above person.
Print = No

I added logwatch to my daily cron jobs in /etc/cron.daily/logwatch

test -x /usr/share/logwatch/scripts/logwatch.pl || exit 0
/usr/share/logwatch/scripts/logwatch.pl

I added a /etc/cron.monthly/backup script for performing monthly backups of important system files

outputFolder=/var/tmp/backup
now=`date +%Y%m%d%H%M`
hostname=`hostname`
outputFolder=$outputFolder/$hostname/$now

if [ -d $outputFolder ]
then
        echo "Backup has alread run on '$hostname'  for '$now'"
        exit 1
else
        mkdir --parents --verbose $outputFolder
fi

echo backup...
options=-cvvz
tar $options --file=$outputFolder/backup.tar.gz --exclude=/var/cache/* --exclude=/var/spool/* --exclude=/var/lock/* --exclude=/var/run/* --exclude=/var/tmp/* --exclude=/var/log/* /var /etc /home 1>$outputFolder/backup.log

echo "Backup for $hostname ready at $outputFolder/backup.tar.gz" | mail -s "Backup completed for $hostname `date`" recipient@domain