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Linux (Probably Unix-Compatible) Projects

As the network administrator of a sizable home office (7 servers, 3 workstations, Cisco routing, LinkSys wireless, 3 subnets), you sometimes find that you create tools that just might be generally useful, as in, by other people. William shares his efforts here in the spirit of Free Open Source. Please remember to give credit to William if you use or redistribute any of this material!

William's collection of Linux projects:

• NIGHTLY BACKUP SCRIPT (v.1.4): There are about as many solutions for automated nightly server backups as there are people running servers. This is just one more. William took this opportunity to learn Linux shell scripting on RHEL4/CentOS4. He bought a book (ISBN: 0- 596-00595-4) and cranked this solution out after reading the first hundred, or so, pages in just two days. The result is an automation script which archives your system critical files to an off-host share, while preserving the integrity of those files by stopping and restarting system services that may have those files open. William used to run very primitive interdependent shell scripts to do this work in the past (which did little more than copy files to alternative directories, then compress the result) and he decided to levy his professional programming experience to the task in order to produce a more dynamic solution. There are two files involved:
  • The ZZbackup script file which should live in /etc/cron.daily/. This beastly script file is fed by user preferences (edit within the head of the source) and the following external list file.
  • The backup file and directory list which should live in /etc/ (as /etc/backuplist and not /etc/backuplist.txt). This is the bottle that feeds the ZZbackup script. Whatever file and directory names you put in this file will get backed up. This is a sample file. You must tailor this file to your own specific needs for this solution to provide maximum benefit to you.
• SERVICE CONTROL SCRIPT (v.1.0): This script compliments ZZbackup.cron and (as of version 1.3) is mentioned in the documentation for the RUN_*_BACKUP options. If you have services that are not hooked by /sbin/service (i.e.: you have to manually configure them to start at boot by editing your /etc/rc.d/rc.local file), or you don't have /sbin/service (Debian users) take a look at this sample script. The version here illustrates how you might use it for enabling service-like control over my popAuth3 or Frank Denis' pure-ftpd. Save this script file as /usr/local/sbin/service-control. Note that the presense of this file does not negate the need to keep those entries in your rc.local file, although you could change those entries to call this script instead of the deamons directly. :)
• MTA HARDENING AGENT, popAuth3 (v.3.0.1): (the following text was copied from William's http://popauth.kimballstuff.com/ ) In summary, popAuth3 is a derivative of popauther -- a simple POP-before-SMTP utility adapted by William R. Thomas of a concept by John Levine -- and an extension of your MTA for a stronger anti-UCE stance. popAuth3 is a complete rewrite of Harlann Stenn's adaptation of William R. Thomas' popauther source and it does MUCH more than just POP-before-SMTP relay authentication. In essence, popauther's core is a log watching utility that triggers actions based on events identified in the real-time maillog facility. From this vantage point, popauther takes action based on any activity exposed in the maillog, which could original from disparate sources (SMTP, POP3, IMAP, etc).
  • There is a dedicated web site for this project.