[cheerios]

Ok, I'm in my schools chapter of ACM. I'm helping hte server admin install Debian on our server, but we're having problems. If one of y'all could help out, it'd make life very nice. here's a good description of the current problems:

Greetings All,

Well, this being my first post, my name is Mark Lappin, a native of Baton Rouge, LA, going to school at UOP out here on the Lef Cloast. Well I'm in charge of the acm server which is a Sparc Ultra 10 Workstation machine which was previously running Suse. We got rooted twice in the last two weeks by somebody who graduated and used to be in charge of the machine (I took his place). So yesterday we wiped SuSe 7.3 off of the machine and put Debian on.

Debian is up and running but I'm having a couple of problems I'm hoping ya'll can provide some advice on.

Problem 1 maybe...might be a client problem)
after everthing was up and running with the OS itself, I used apt-get to install sshd which downloaded and installed (and updated) a bunch of libraries on the box. SSH worked fine no problems, the perosn who was working with me ssh'd in from one of the sunray workstations, and I ssh'd in from my laptop, no sweat, warnings that host keys had changed but no problem there it obvivously was not the same. So a while later we rebooted the machine and ssh stopped working with any degree of reliability, some clients can connect, some can't, some can at some times and others can't. From another server on the school network, we could not ssh, but we could from my laptop and another sparc machine in the lab where the server is. Later last night, I could not ssh from my laptop but could from my desktop. I goto bed I get up and I can't ssh back to the box from either PC this morning, I can ssh out to darkshadows.org where I have a shell account, and ssh from that machine to the server --- as far as errors, I don't get any, my ssh client (using SecureCRT, putting and Secure SSH) I can't connect. My friend whose trying to connect from off campus via OS X, gets to a password prompt then gets kicked out (we can both go and login as our selves and as root at the console in the lab however). Now if ssh does not work, I can use apt-get and uninstall ssh, then use apt-get again reinstall it and no problem, everything is all cool from most clients until the server gets rebooted. Is this a client or a server problem?


Problem 2)
Mysql setup --- here I just need some help (i'm no linux expert by far and *ducks* I'd put Win 2k on the box if I could, I muddle my way around. I downloaded the mysql binary distribution for sparc, got it put in the right place, got my password set and all; but I can't get it to fire automatically when the server boots, but I just don't understand what I need to do. At one point it says to move or copy the mysql.server script to the place wither other startup scritps are located. I can't find any .server scripts on the machine --- this has to be a smple thing, i'm just msising something about how to automatically start mysql when the server boots.

Problem 3 & 4)
Ok, I used apt-get to setup apache, didn't have any problems there. I then use apt-get to try and get php4 going --- that did not work, so I went and edited httpd.conf and uncommented out the line to load the php modules; restarted apache and it did not restart, I checked my error log and it couldn't load the php4 module. So I downloaded the php4 source and started the configure process on it; got an error that bison and lex weren't installed, used apt-get to install those. Rerun configure and it went a whole heck of a lot farther, and stopped way at the end that apxs wasn't installed or could not be found, I did a locate on apxs and found nothing --- tried updatedb then redid locate and still did not find it. apache -l shows me the modules required for DSO support; but nothing else. So I'm guessing the reason that I can't install php is because of apache, so I'm taking a shot here that to install php4 I need to get apache configured for dynamic support of modules. Can I do this with apt-get or should I unisntall apache and then download the source andn compile it myself?

So, we're both kinda out of our depths, and some help would be HUGELY appreciated. Thanks in advance!!

[int69h]

1) Sounds like a server problem to me, and an odd one at that. Wish I had more to offer.

2) Probably should have apt-get installed mysql. Evil SysV style startup scripts are located in /etc/init.d

3 4) Uninstall apache and php, apt-get install apache && apt-get install php4

5) Learn the layout of http://www.debian.org.

[int69h]

6) Don't give out your host's address in the same post that you say you have no idea what you're doing.

[Christopher Flynn]

1) Sounds like an odd server problem since it starts after you reboot the server. Check the ssh config files. Also are you trying to log in as root?

2) Debian uses SysV style booting... that said, go into /etc/rcX.d where X is the # of the runlevel you boot into. (If you don't know check /etc/inittab and you should see a line like "id:2:initdefault:" where 2 is the runlevel.

Once in /etc/rc2.d (for example) there should be a link called K20mysql (or something like it) Just type mv K20mysql to S20mysql (or whatever the number may be) This should start mysql at boot.

3&4) I have php and apache (and mysql) working nicely on my linux box... took a bit to get it to work though...

First, edit /etc/apache/httpd.conf and make sure the line:
LoadModule php4_module /usr/lib/apache/1.3/libphp4.so
(make sure there is no # in front of it)

Then just make sure you have libphp4.so

I used the dselect installed version of apache.

Hope this helps some.
-Chris

p.s. Hope you formatted before you installed otherwise there may still be a backdoor that the previous sysadmin left.