Free Secondary DNS and Online DNS Tools

July 26th, 2008

These free tools have been designed to validate and check the health of your public DNS servers.

How is my DNS

Network Tools

Free Secondary DNS for your domains. If your looking for another DNS to put your domain in, this is for you. Providing additional secondary servers can greatly improve the reliability and accessibility of your domain. Should your primary DNS become unavailable due to network problems, your secondary DNS entries come into play, the more DNS servers you have, the greater the resilience to errors.

Free Secondary DNS

How to Create Database and Add User To It

July 25th, 2008

Here are the SQL commands:

create database newdb;

grant CREATE,INSERT,DELETE,UPDATE,SELECT on newdb.* to newuser@localhost;

SET PASSWORD FOR 'newuser'@'localhost' = password(’newuserpass’);
– or –
SET PASSWORD FOR 'newuser'@'localhost' = old_password(’newuserpass’);

flush privileges;

How to setup a primary nameservers on a dedicated server

July 25th, 2008

Here are the steps:

  1. Locate named.conf and go to that folder.
  2. Add DNS entries for your nameserver.
  3. Edit the pri.yourname.com file for the domain you are adding nameservers for.
    Add these two lines at the bottom of the file:
    ns1 IN A 10.10.10.10 (replace with your nameserver IP)
    ns2 IN A 10.10.10.10
    By the way, you can host your website and nameservers on the same IP.

  4. Reload the nameserver daemon.
    $ sudo /etc/init.d/bind9 reload
  5. Ping the nameservers, and they should resolve to the correct IP.
    If they do not, edit /etc/resolv.conf and add the following line above all other lines beginning with “nameserver”, add:
    nameserver 127.0.0.1
  6. Go to your registrar of your domain name, and register the nameservers to point to the your nameserver IP.

Keeping the Root Hints Current

July 25th, 2008

To keep the root hints file current, use the following command.

$ dig @a.root-servers.net . ns > db.cache

How to check your DNS configuration and zone files

July 25th, 2008

If you are running BIND 9, you have handy new tools to help maintain your nameserver files: named-checkconf and named-checkzone. These tools reside in /usr/sbin or /usr/local/sbin.

named-checkconf checks the configuration file for syntax errors.
$ /usr/sbin/named-checkconf zonename db.local
zone zonename/IN: loaded serial 1
OK

named-checkzone checks a zone file for syntax errors.
$ /usr/sbin/named-checkzone zonename pri.108.10.20.in-addr.arpa
zone zonename/IN: loaded serial 2004071902
OK

Installing your own DNS Server

July 23rd, 2008

This how-to assumes a Debian-type Linux server. 

1)  Install BIND

$ sudo apt-get install bind9

2)  Run BIND chrooted.  For security reasons we want to run BIND chrooted so we have to do the following:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/bind9 stop

Edit the file /etc/default/bind9 so that the daemon will run as the unprivileged user bind, chrooted to /var/lib/named. Modify the line: OPTIONS=”-u bind” so that it reads OPTIONS=”-u bind -t /var/lib/named”:

$ sudo vi /etc/default/bind9

OPTIONS="-u bind -t /var/lib/named"
# Set RESOLVCONF=no to not run resolvconf
RESOLVCONF=yes

3)  Create the necessary directories under /var/lib:

$ sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/named/etc
$ sudo mkdir /var/lib/named/dev
$ sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/named/var/cache/bind
$ sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/named/var/run/bind/run

4)  Then move the config directory from /etc to /var/lib/named/etc:

$ sudo mv /etc/bind /var/lib/named/etc

5)  Create a symlink to the new config directory from the old location (to avoid problems when bind gets updated in the future):

$ sudo ln -s /var/lib/named/etc/bind /etc/bind

6)  Make null and random devices, and fix permissions of the directories:

$ sudo mknod /var/lib/named/dev/null c 1 3
$ sudo mknod /var/lib/named/dev/random c 1 8
$ sudo chmod 666 /var/lib/named/dev/null /var/lib/named/dev/random
$ sudo chown -R bind:bind /var/lib/named/var/*
$ sudo chown -R bind:bind /var/lib/named/etc/bind

7)  We need to modify /etc/default/syslogd so that we can still get important messages logged to the system logs. Modify the line: SYSLOGD=”" so that it reads: SYSLOGD=”-a /var/lib/named/dev/log”:

$ sudo vi /etc/default/syslogd

## Top configuration file for syslogd
##
# Full documentation of possible arguments are found in the manpage
# syslogd(8).
#
#
# For remote UDP logging use SYSLOGD="-r"
#
SYSLOGD="-a /var/lib/named/dev/log"

9)  Restart the logging daemon:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/sysklogd restart

10)  Start up BIND, and check /var/log/syslog for errors:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/bind9 start

How to check if nameserver is valid (NS1.example.com, NS2.example.com)

July 23rd, 2008

A.  How to check if nameserver is valid

$ dig ns com
;; ANSWER SECTION:
com. 93009 IN NS a.gtld-servers.net.
com. 93009 IN NS b.gtld-servers.net.
com. 93009 IN NS c.gtld-servers.net.
com. 93009 IN NS d.gtld-servers.net.
com. 93009 IN NS e.gtld-servers.net.
com. 93009 IN NS f.gtld-servers.net.
com. 93009 IN NS g.gtld-servers.net.
com. 93009 IN NS h.gtld-servers.net.
com. 93009 IN NS i.gtld-servers.net.
com. 93009 IN NS j.gtld-servers.net.
com. 93009 IN NS k.gtld-servers.net.
com. 93009 IN NS l.gtld-servers.net.
com. 93009 IN NS m.gtld-servers.net.

$ host NS1.example.com i.gtld-servers.net
Using domain server:
Name: i.gtld-servers.net
Address: 192.10.10.10#53
Aliases:

NS1.example.com has address 69.10.10.180

If the nameserver is invalid, you will not have the last line above.

B.  To check nameserver configuration of a site, do this:

$ nslookup -q=any example.com

Create thumbnails from image in one command

July 9th, 2008

In Linux, issue this command

$ convert -thumbnail 200 INPUT_FILE.png OUTPUT_FILE.png

To convert into another image type, just change the output file extension — as simple as that!

$ convert -thumbnail 200 INPUT_FILE.png OUTPUT_FILE.jpg

For more information please visit Cyberciti.biz Tips on How to create image thumbnails.

How to remove .svn folder

March 30th, 2008

Windows:

Save the following to the folder to clean to a filename with a .cmd extension (cleansvn.cmd).  After that issue the command, eg., C:\www>cleansvn

for /f "tokens=* delims=" %%i in ('dir /s /b /a:d *svn') do ( rd /s /q "%%i" )

Linux: 

Cleaning a svn folder:

find . -name .svn -exec rm -rf {} \;

Using svn export:
Export from your working copy (doesn’t print every file and directory):

$ svn export a-wc my-export
Export complete.

Export directly from the repository (prints every file and directory):

$ svn export file:///var/svn/repos my-export
A my-export/test
A my-export/quiz

Exported revision 15.

Pligg used in Pinoy Entrepreneur News website

March 30th, 2008

A little explanation here: Pinoy is a demonym used by Filipinos for their compatriots in the Philippines and around the world.

Pinoy entrepreneur news site is now live and offers a Digg style service to entrepreneurs and businessmen of the Philippines.