A Script to Install & Configure ifplugd on Debian

The default configuration on some older Linux systems is to only send a DHCP request while booting up. This means if the network cable gets unplugged, or if the router is powered off, the system may lose its IP configuration. To restore the network connection, the system may need to be manually rebooted or have someone at the local console run the dhclient command to request a DHCP lease.

For systems that are only accessed remotely via SSH, such a scenario can be painful. What is needed is a daemon that watches the link status of the Ethernet jack and reconfigures the network (or sends out another DHCP request) when it detects a cable is plugged in (or the power to the router is restored).

ifplugd does exactly that:

ifplugd is a Linux daemon which will automatically configure your ethernet device when a cable is plugged in and automatically unconfigure it if the cable is pulled.

On a Debian system, installing and configuring ifplugd is relatively simple using apt-get install ifplugd. Once its been installed, it needs to be configured by editing /etc/default/ifplugd. The most basic configuration is to simply set INTERFACES="auto" and HOTPLUG_INTERFACES="all". This configuration tells ifplugd to watch all network interfaces for a new link status and automatically reconfigure them using the Debian network configuration defined in /etc/network/interfaces.

I recently needed to automate the install and configuration of ifplugd on many remote Linux systems, so I wrote this simple script.

Download: install-ifplugd.tar.gz

[sourcecode lang="bash"]
#!/bin/sh

#########################################
# Author: Raam Dev
#
# This script installs ifplugd and configures
# it to automatically attempt to restore any
# lost connections.
#
# Must be run as root!
#########################################

# Check if we're running this as root
if [ $EUID -ne 0 ]; then
echo "This script must be run as root" 1>&2
exit 1
fi

# Files used when configuring ifplugd
OUTFILE=/tmp/outfile.$$
CONFIG_FILE=/etc/default/ifplugd

# Update package list and install ifplugd, assuming yes to any questions asked
# (to insure the script runs without requiring manual intervention)
apt-get update --assume-yes ; apt-get install --assume-yes ifplugd

# Configure ifplugd to watch all interfaces and automatically attempt configuration
sed 's/INTERFACES=""/INTERFACES="auto"/g' < $CONFIG_FILE > $OUTFILE
mv $OUTFILE $CONFIG_FILE

sed 's/HOTPLUG_INTERFACES="auto"/HOTPLUG_INTERFACES="all"/g' < $CONFIG_FILE > $OUTFILE
mv $OUTFILE $CONFIG_FILE

[/sourcecode]

If you're interested in doing more with ifplugd, check out this article.

Configuring Static DNS with DHCP on Debian/Ubuntu

Note: This article is outdated as of Ubuntu 12.04. Please see this article if you're using Ubuntu 12.04 or later.

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is a commonly used method of obtaining IP and DNS information automatically from the network. In some cases, you may wish to statically define the DNS servers instead of using the ones provided by the DHCP server. For example if your ISP commonly experiences DNS outages, you might want to use the DNS servers provided by OpenDNS instead of the ones provided by your ISP.

When using a static IP configuration on Linux, you normally add the DNS servers to the /etc/resolv.conf. However, if you try to add a DNS server to /etc/resolv.conf under a DHCP configuration, you'll notice that your static entry disappears as soon as the DHCP client runs (usually on boot). To prevent this, you need to tell the DHCP client to prepend the static DNS server(s) to /etc/resolv.conf before adding the ones provided from the DHCP server (if any).

The configuration file you'll need to edit is the same on both Debian and Ubuntu, however depending on your setup the location of the file may vary. Here are the two common places I've found the file:

Debian: /etc/dhclient.conf
Ubuntu: /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf

Open the file in your favorite editor and add one of two lines at the top, separating multiple DNS servers with a comma and ending the entry with a semi-colon:

If you simply want to add static DNS servers to be used in addition to the ones provided by DHCP, use a prepend entry:

prepend domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220;

If you want to override the DNS servers provided by DHCP entirely and force the system to use the ones you provide, use the supersede entry:

supersede domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220;

Before these static DNS servers will to be appended to your /etc/resolv.conf file, you'll need to re-run the DHCP client. The easiest way to do this is by running /etc/init.d/networking restart (sudo required) or you can try running the dhclient command.

After re-running the DHCP client, check your /etc/resolv.conf file to confirm the static DNS servers have been added.

Mounting HFS+ with Write Access in Debian

When I decided to reformat and install my Mac Mini with the latest testing version of Debian (lenny, at the time of this writing) I discovered that I couldn't mount my HFS+ OS X backup drive with write access:

erin:/# mount -t hfsplus /dev/sda /osx-backup
[ 630.769804] hfs: write access to a journaled filesystem is not supported, use the force option at your own risk, mounting read-only.

This warning puzzled me because I was able to mount fine before the reinstall and, since the external drive is to be used as the bootable backup for my MBP, anything with "at your own risk" was unacceptable.

I had already erased my previous Linux installation so I had no way of checking what might have previously given me write access to the HFS+ drive. A quick apt-cache search hfs revealed a bunch of packages related to the HFS filesystem. I installed the two that looked relevant to what I was trying to do:

hfsplus - Tools to access HFS+ formatted volumes
hfsutils - Tools for reading and writing Macintosh volumes

No dice. I still couldn't get write access without that warning. I tried loading the hfsplus module and then adding it to /etc/modules to see if that would make a difference. As I expected, it didn't. I was almost ready to give up but there was another HFS package in the list that, even though it seemed unrelated to what was trying to do, seemed worth a shot:

hfsprogs - mkfs and fsck for HFS and HFS+ file systems

It worked! I have no idea how or why (and I'm not interested enough to figure it out), but after installing the hfsprogs package I was able to mount my HFS+ partition with write access.

Update:

As Massimiliano and Matthias have confirmed in the comments below, the following solution seems to work with Ubuntu 8.04:

From Linux, after installing the tools suggested before, you must run:
mount -o force /dev/sdx /mnt/blabla

Otherwise, in my fstab, I have an entry like this:
UUID=489276e8-7f9b-3ae6-8c73-69b99ccaab9c /media/Leopard hfsplus defaults,force 0 0


Installing Apache 1.3 on Debian Etch

I few days ago I setup a new Linux box to use for testing my web development work. The production environment for the site is hosted on a Linux machine, so I wanted to test it in a Linux environment, not a Windows environment (which is where I currently do my development work). So, I decided to setup a Linux box with Samba, map a network drive, and simply work on my site files directly from the Linux server. This way I can just save my changed file, press refresh in my browser, and see the changes. I'll explain more about my actual staging setup in a future post.

I did not find very much, if any, information about how to easily setup Apache 1.3 on a Debian 4.0 (Etch) system. Why do I want Apache 1.3 instead of Apache 2? Because I'd like to replicate the production environment as closely as possible. My web host uses Apache 1.3.37, PHP 4.4.3, and MySQL 4.1.21.

I documented the steps I took to get everything setup here on my Wiki. This is the first time I've used the Wiki to store information that I would normally post here in my blog, and I'm still trying to figure out how I will decide what information goes on the Wiki and what goes on the blog.

The quick answer to getting Apache 1.3 installed on an Etch system is to edit /etc/apt/sources and change etch to sarge. Then run apt-get update and apt-get install apache. You can make sure you’re going to install Apache 1.3.X beforehand by running the following command: apt-cache showpkg apache and checking which version it displays. It should show something like this:

Package: apache
Versions:
1.3.34-4.1(/var/lib/apt/lists/debian.lcs.mit.edu_debian_dists_etch_main_binary-i386_Packages) (/var/lib/dpkg/status)