Recently I have been running into some strange issues with Mandrake 10.
So I created this 'Hints" file.

Swap

Swap partition errors
Can't really do anything about this unless you rebuild the swap.

# swapoff /dev/sda1
# mkswap -c /dev/sda1
# swapon /dev/sda1

Make sure you change sda1 with your swap partitiion.

Drak Tools

Drakconf or any drak tool gives the error - 'Can't locate auto/Gtk2/croak_exece.al'
Just comment out line 52 at /usr/lib/libDrakX/ugtk2.pm
These errors are because of the autoload and autosplit perl modules.
Maybe the new perl and perl-base are with modified runtime switches.???

Hint from.....

name: PhobosK
e-mail: (Private)

Thanks!!!

Apache & Apache2 - Hints

Error - failed to acquire semaphore (No space left on device)
and/or
Error2 - (No space left on device)

Fix - You can increase the number of semaphores by setting a parameter in /proc.
Under Mandrake, add the following to /etc/sysctl.conf
kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 256

The last number is the number of semaphore arrays (default is 128).
After editing /etc/sysctl.conf run
sysctl -p

------------

IIS attacks (WEBdav) - This doesn't affect Apache at all, it's just annoying and fills the logs up. This just stops logging them.

Error --

- - [30/May/2004:02:45:28 -0400] "SEARCH /\x90\x02\xb1\x02\xb1\x02\xb1\x02\xb1\x02\xb1\
x02\xb1\x02\xb1\x02\xb1\x02\xb1\x02\xb1

etc - and it goes on for about 1200 bytes.

Been getting an annoying number of these in my httpd logs today - it botches up my log analyser program.

Fix --

I just installed the following in my apache configs to get rid of it:

# control logging
SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/default.ida?" dontlog
SetEnvIf Request_Method "SEARCH" dontlog

and then add...

CustomLog /var/log/httpd/access_log combined env=!dontlog

Delete rpmnew/save files

This one even I like !
You can use this for almost anything... but beware!!!! Using this as root can really !$#@!$#!%!# your system up...
So becarefull...

Want to delete all those stray rpmnew and rpmsave files Mandrake likes to leave around?

Use these commands:
find / -noleaf -name *.rpmsave -print -exec rm -f {} \;
find / -noleaf -name *.rpmnew -print -exec rm -f {} \;
find / -noleaf -name *.rpmorg -print -exec rm -f {} \;

-print will print each file that matches that pattern
-exec executes rm -f for each of those files

Now you can use this for anything but if you want to confirm each delete
manually then don't use the 'rm -f' and just use 'rm'

It will ask you to confirm each delete.

Sendmail hints

If you don't want/need incoming mail, edit your sendmail startup script and look for:

daemon /usr/sbin/sendmail.sendmail ${DAEMONOPTIONS:-} -bd \
                $([ -n "$QUEUE" ] && echo -q$QUEUE)

and change that to:

daemon /usr/sbin/sendmail.sendmail ${DAEMONOPTIONS:-} -q5m \
                $([ -n "$QUEUE" ] && echo -q$QUEUE)

This will prevent sendmail from starting up as a listening deamon.

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If you have any hints for Mandrake 10 and you want to pass them along.
Email sgrayban@borgnet.us with the error and the fix.

Thanks everyone !!