Amckeowncit's Blog

Finished Group Project

amckeowncit — Mon, 04 May 2009 20:04:13 +0000

I worked throughout the week on my group project. As said in a previous post I was working on the DHCP side of the project. I got it going after a hard slog but at least now I can demonstrate DHCP failover in action. All my testing has been done on VMware as we did not get a chance to use the router setup in the Lab. To test I made sure that while both DHCP servers where running the client received an IP address from the Primary DHCP server. I released that IP address then and took down the Primary DHCP server to see if the secondary DHCP server allocated an address. It did, thus proving my setup worked. To finish I spent a number of hours writing up my report. We present it next Tuesday so hopefully all will come together and work on the night.

Group Project

amckeowncit — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 23:20:03 +0000

I have eventually got around in the last week to workng on the group project. I am working along side Ger for this project. I have taken on building the two DHCP servers, the primary and the failover servers. It is a lot more difficult than I first thought it would be. I setup my primary dhcp server, which was to allocate address’s that are from a different subnet than the server itself. I got it working after many hours research and testing. I moved on to the failover server next. My first thought was to just get it alloctaing address’s from its subnet pool, the same as the primary server. I got he dhcp service to start but it would not allocate address’s eventhough it has the same setup as the primary. When I went back to the primary server, it too started but this time it would not allocate address’s. Yes I had turned off dhcp on the failover server before testing the primary again!!

I’m begining to think it is something to do with VMware. It works one minute but not the next. How strange?Anyway back to the grind!

Installing a BIND nameserver

amckeowncit — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:59:11 +0000

This week we took BIND one step further from the BIND Caching server. We built a full BIND DNS server.From the outset this was going to be a tricky lab. We started off by removing last weeks caching server and then installing a fresh version of BIND. We configured a server and a client with static IP address’s, for testing purposes later. We went on to configure the BIND server with a number of commands outlined in the Lab notes. The input into the configuration files took a lot of time and patience. Unfortuantely though my input didn’t seem to give the right output. Each time I tried to run the DNS service I was getting configuation errors. I checked and doubled checked the input and all seemed right. At the end of the Lab, after much moaning from a number of students, the lecturer publish the format in which he inputted the data. We all copied the format, but in my case I still did not get it completed correctly in the lab.

Also, we spoke about the group project in the lecture. We where informed what was expected of us and a deadline was set to the start of May. My partner and I agreed to split the project in two to simplify for ourselves. More discussion will have to take place before we go any further.

Installing Caching Server

amckeowncit — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 19:49:16 +0000

“Abbreviated as BIND, Berkeley Internet Name Domain is the most common implementation of the DNS protocol on the Internet. It’s freely available under the BSD License. BIND DNS servers are believed to be providing about 80 percent of all DNS services. BIND was developed by the University of California at Berkeley. The most current release is BIND 9.4.2, and from Version 9 onwards it supports DNS SEC, TSIG, IPv6 and other DNS protocol enhancements. ” Ref: www.webopedia.com.

We installed BIND to create a caching DNS server. The following steps where taken.

yum updates # downloads whatever updates the server needed before installing BIND

yum install caching-nameserver # downloads BIND and Caching name server

We edited the following file

/etc/named.caching-name.conf

We added “any” to the line “listen on port 53 {127.0.0.1;any;}

and

We added “any” to the line “allow query {local;any;}

The service was started by using the command

service named start

To view the named servers configured on the server use the following

vi /etc/resolv.conf

Note: Forwarding address’s can be added to the caching server, to forward queries to an ISP domain name server to resolve queries it cannot resolve.

DNS Lab

amckeowncit — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 19:36:32 +0000

This weeks lab was all about DNS. To quote from the old reliable www.webopedia.com, DNS is “Short for Domain Name System (or Service or Server), an Internet service that translates domain names into IP addresses. Because domain names are alphabetic, they’re easier to remember. The Internet however, is really based on IP addresses. Every time you use a domain name, therefore, a DNS service must translate the name into the corresponding IP address. For example, the domain name www.example.com might translate to 198.105.232.4. The DNS system is, in fact, its own network. If one DNS server doesn’t know how to translate a particular domain name, it asks another one, and so on, until the correct IP address is returned”

We started off looking at some basic DNS commands in a windows dos prompt screen. The first was ipconfig/displaydns. This will display all the dns cache on your PC. The second command was ipconfig/flushdns. This command will flush the dns cache on the PC. We went on to discuss the dig command.The di command is used to route out the dns path to a web address. Firstly by using the dig command you can display the 13 root dns servers that exist. By simply adding |more to the command, more information about the root servers is displayed. We used the dig command to resolve both the www.yahoo.com and www.ucc.ie web names. The following is an example of yahoo.com.

dig # displays root servers

dig @f.root-servers.net yahoo.com ns # we picked one of the root servers to query yahoo.com. A list of .com servers was produced.

dig @b.gtld-servers.net yahoo.com # we picked one of the .com servers and a list of the yahoo.com servers was produced.

dig @ns1.yahoo.com www.yahoo.com # we searched one of the yahoo dns servers for the address and it gave us the www.yahoo.com server.

What was interesting is that www.yahoo.com is actually an alias name rather than the name of box.

We performed the above, step by step for ucc.ie.

Individual Project -Drupal Part 2

amckeowncit — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 09:38:50 +0000

Well I finished the project eventaully at 1.00am this morning. I put the finishing touches to the report and up loaded my on-line presentaion. The online presentation is very basic but I was under enormous pressure to get it done so it is the best I can produce for now.

http://www.slideshare.net/amckeowncit/anthony-mckeown-drupal-presentation

This was an extemely time consuming project. No other subject has had a look in during the past few weeks. The course recommends giving 2 hours study/assignment time to each subject outside of college time per week. I did a rough calculation that I spent 28 hours working on the project outside of college.Thank God I had built the server and client in college. This in theory means that I have used up this modules ”out of college study time” on one assignment. Now I know this can’t be right! However I am not the only one in this situation as some colleagues have given even more time than myself. Are we doing something wrong or is it just down to this modularisation thing working itself out.

Anyway, there is no need to be too negative. It’s in the can now, done and dusted.

Individual Project – Drupal

amckeowncit — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:29:07 +0000

We had no class or lab this week on account of St Patrick’s day. To be honest it was a welcome break as I had so much work to do on my individual project. I have put at least 20 hours into the project at this stage, between creating the Lamp server, installing Drupal on top of it and designing Drupal to look the way I want it to look. I haven’t begun writing up the report yet. No doubt there will be a few long evenings before its finished.

Anyway after all the hard work I have to say that I am impressed with the layout of Drupal. Once installed it was easy enough to design the layout of the website. I have decided that I am going to setup my Drupal installation as a social networking site. It will allow users to log in using their own account, create blogs, participate in forums, create web pages and story pages. All accounts are setup with strict priviledges so users can’t abuse the site. I won’t tell ye much more as it will all be in my report. Talking of reports I need to get started.

Samba install

amckeowncit — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:27:22 +0000

In tonights lab I installed the Samba service onto my CentOS server. Once again I referred to the old reliable www.webopedia.com for a very good explanation of Samba.

” An open source implementation of the SMB file sharing protocol that provides file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients. Samba allows a non-Windows server to communicate with the same networking protocol as the Windows products. Samba was originally developed for UNIX but can now run on Linux, FreeBSD and other UNIX variants. It is freely available under the GNU General Public License. The name Samba is a variant of SMB, the protocol from which it stems.”

After the installation I created a directory called Samba_share in the Root Home directory so we could share it out to users.. We then had to edit the Samba config file – “smf.conf” - adding details such as the share folder name, permissions and write access. Once this file was edited I started the samba service.

I went on to create an XP virtual machine as part of my original team. I got connectivity between the 3 machines in the team working correctly. I tried to map a drive to the Samba_share directory on the CentOS Server. I got as far as a login screen but it would not connect. It was recommended that I take the Linux server, Linux client and XP client out of the team, set the network cards to NAT, thus getting an IP address from the VMware dhcp server ( something I never knew existed ). I took the 3 devices out of the team, set the NIC’s to receive dynamic address’s and was able to ping between machines. I once again tried to map a drive from the XP client to the Samba_share directory.Unfortunaetly I got the same result as before, a login screen which would let me go no further. I tried to smb from the Linux client but it also was looking for a password and couldn’t connect.

Ultimately we where not 100% sure why we could not connect from the XP client to the Linux Server. One theory is that we have to setup usernames and passwords on the Samba server and match those with usernames and passwords on the XP box . More research is needed!!!

Apache server Virtual Hosting

amckeowncit — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:17:27 +0000

Tonights lab was very interesting. The lab and lecture was devoted to learning more about the Apache Web Server. I knew very little about web servers before this, but after tonight I feel I have a good grip on the theory behind the service.

We where introduced to the concept of virtual hosting. This is where an Apache Server is able to host multiple websites using the one IP address. Of course a web server can assign an IP address per website, but by using virtual hosting you cut down on overheads. Apparently virtual hosting is the reason you see so many sites advertising cheap web hosting. Have a read of the article below. It gives a good explanation on virtual hosting as well as some configuration details.

http://servers.digitaldaze.com/extensions/virtualhost/configure.html

Having installed Apache last week we made sure the service was still running. After this, we modified the httpd.conf file, adding the two domains that we want to host. Details such as the domain name, domain directory and error logging where entered here. As the DNS server was not up and running yet we had to add the web domains to the /etc/hosts file. This was so we could check the service later. The lab asked us to use the loopback address for this but I went a step further. I added the domain names with the IP address of the server, so I could browse to the websites from Firefox on my client. Again as the DNS server is not up and running I had to add the details of the domains with their IP address to the /etc/hosts file on the client.

The final piece of configuration I performed was to create two directories in the /var/www directory called “mycompany” and “linuxsoftware”. This is where html files related the the website would be stored. For the lab I just created an index.html file for each website through the vi editor and entered a “welcome script”. To test the webpages on the server I used e-links and it worked fine. The next test was to try browse from Firefox on the client but this didn’t work. I turned off the firewall on the server and tried to browse again and it worked fine except for the way it looked on screen.

Unfortuantely the script I had put into the index.html files appeared unformatted. I hadn’t realised that you could use html scripting in the vi editor. I went back to the index.html files and formatted them using html scripting. I browsed once again and the webpages appeared formatted.

FTP/LAMP Lab

amckeowncit — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 21:03:08 +0000

During this lab I installed FTP on the server we had built last week. I successfully was able to ftp to the server from the client, using both a web browser and the command line. After installing FTP I went on to install Apache, PHP and mySQL. Before I knew it we had our LAMP server complete. This will be the base for my individual project. The install was a relatively easy one, once Tims lab notes where followed. The only obstructive part of the lab was having the change the IP address each time I wanted to yum download. Because the server I had built was part of a Virtual lan team I could not gain access to the internet. I needed to put the virtual devices network cards into bridging and then get the card to acquire an IP address dynamically. But once we got over this the lab went well.

One thing I will have to clear up on Tuesday night is what content is expected in the blogs. I had started out writing more or less what we had done in the class, but from my discussions with Tim, I don’t think thats what we he is looking for. After discusssing it with class colleagues on Wednesday night I am even more confused. My believe is that Tim is looking for a brief discussion on what we did in class/lab with further expansion using some resarch that we undertook???? Any feedback would be appreciated.