Paul's blog

I decided to host a public mirror for test-ipv6.com, you can find my mirror at test-ipv6.websters-computers.com.
You can find out about becoming a mirror on there wiki and they have some setup instructions but was missing a few steps, so here's how i did it.
Note: This works for me on linux centos 5.x may not work the same on other systems.

What is World IPv6 day? - It is a trial period where a number of major web sites will provide their content on both IPv4 and IPv6. This is being sponsored by the Internet Society (ISOC) more information is posted on their World IPv6 Day page.

What is the point? - The goal is to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 addresses run out.

Recently i rented a new server to replace my main server, since i original posted the basic server setup blog i have found a much easier and quicker way to setup everything including webmin and virtualmin.

As my server is hosted in a Data centre they install the base operating system (CentOS 5.x) for me but if you have physical access you can do this yourself, you just need to grab the dvd(s) or cd(s) images mirror list here

Once you have the base operating system installed its time to setup everything.

In the last blog i said about a script to auto-start and stop your virtual machines with easy, you can download the script and find out more about it VBox Tool

Its very easy to install and setup, here's how i did it (same as the readme basically)

Download the script and as "root" do the following

Upload the main script "script/vboxtool" to "/usr/local/bin"
make vboxtool executable

chmod +x /usr/local/bin/vboxtool

Then upload the init script "script/vboxtoolinit" to "/etc/init.d"
and make vboxtoolinit executable

I have recently been playing with virtual machines and heres a quick guide to how i got started.

What is VirtualBox
VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License(GPL).

up until now i have been manually blocking ip's that attack my server but by the time i see them the attacks have normally finished but after the last big attack on my email server (some 35,000 attempts) i decided to find a way to automate the blocking. After a bit of research i decided to setup Fail2ban and here's how i did it.

As i use a 3rd party repostories - EPEL (how to add repositories) i can just use yum to install it

yum install fail2ban

Following on from postfix - blocking spam before it enters the server i setup a whitelist and SPF filtering.

The whitelist will allow me to manually allow any mail servers to bypass the spf filtering and RBL(Real-time Blacklists) lists.

As you should know by now CentOS uses Yum to install and update packages but sometime you need packages that are not available as standard, one way to get these packages is to use 3rd party repositories which is what i do.

A note on CentOS packages