Starting spamd: child process [22173] exited or timed out without signaling production of a PID file

I upgraded spamassassin and encountered an error when trying to start it.

[root@nelsoncli Mail-SpamAssassin-3.4.0]# /etc/init.d/spamassassin start
Starting spamd: child process [22173] exited or timed out without signaling production of a PID file: exit 255 at /usr/bin/spamd line 2960.
                                                           [FAILED]

Solution: Run sa-update.

httpd: apr_sockaddr_info_get() failed for

Error:

[root@kraken htdocs]# /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start
httpd: apr_sockaddr_info_get() failed for kraken
httpd: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName
[root@kraken htdocs]#

Solution:

Edit your httpd.conf and check the line

ServerName

You may put ServerName <hostname> or Server localhost

gvfs Permission denied

I'm trying to delete a certain file using inum because I could not delete it using the filename. To my surprise, I could not delete it either. The file I'm trying to delete is:

 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Aug 6 2012 ./?}>L1]?b1?}9?R?#?M???M@ 

 It has an inum of 3932293 so I execute find . -inum 3932293 -exec ls -l {} \; but still could not delete either.

[root@nelsoncli admin]# find . -inum 3932293 -exec ls -l {} \;          
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Aug  6  2012 ./?}>L1]?b1?}9?R?#?M???M@
find: `./.gvfs': Permission denied

So what the heck is gvfs. I have no time to do a research just that my goal is to delete this file. So I search the web and the solution was to unmount it.

root@nelsoncli admin]# umount /home/admin/.gvfs

After that, I was able now to delete the file.

passwd permission denied even for root on solaris

I tried to reset the password of the local account but encountered an error.

root@foo # passwd 
New Password: 
Re-enter new Password: Permission denied 

I'm a bit confused because I was login as root. I checked /etc/nsswitch.conf and passwd was configured on ldap.

passwd: compat
passwd_compat: ldap

I found out I need to use -r to point passwd to files instead of ldap. So basically, my problem resolved by using passwd -r. If you are wandering what is -r, visit man passwd :-) 

How to manually rotate pacct

If your file /var/adm/pacct is growing rapidly and you want to rotate it manually, you may use either of the below.

1. Use the command /usr/lib/acct/ckpacct. After you execute it, a file pacct1 will be created and an empty pacct.

2. If you have logadm command, you may just execute logadm -p now /var/adm/pacct

Changing permission of /dev/ttyS0 permanently

I've been setting up the Serial Connection of my server to be used for Virtualization. It seems that my Serial Port is not detected on my guest vms. One thing I notice is that /dev/ttyS0 has a permission of

crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 64 Jan 6 2013 /dev/ttyS0 

I added the user on the dialout group and since I'm using CentOS 6, I need to modify files in udev which is /etc/udev/rules.d/40-permissions.rules. and put the content below

KERNEL=="ttyS[0-9]", GROUP="dialout", MODE="0770" 

In case it doesn't exists, you need to create one. Once done, restart udev.

[root@nelsoncli rules.d]# /etc/init.d/udev-post stop 
[root@nelsoncli rules.d]# /etc/init.d/udev-post start Retrigger failed udev events [ OK ] 

Reboot your server to confirm if everything went ok.

_default_ virtualhost overlap on port 443

I'll be setting up a web server where there pages includes authentication. We don't want to use http in logging in some sort of authentication, right? So I enabled virtual hosting on apache on port 80 and 443. However, I'm getting a warning whenever I'm starting apache.

 [warn] _default_ virtualhost overlap on port 443, the first has precedence 

To fix the issue, edit httpd-ssl and put the line below:

NameVirtualHost *:443 

You need to restart or reload apache to take effect the new settings.