I see everyday as an opportunity to learn something new. Today, I spent some time with my lovely web server which is connected to the internet from home.

Today, I was adding a video card (VisionTek Radeon 4350 PCIe 512MB SFF DDR2 B2 Retail (w/ CFI HDMI dongle)) and updated the operating system and moved to using a new monitor (hence the new graphics card).

The card arrives as seen below and in no way fits in my server. But there is some more metal work in the box and after getting some pliers the lugs for the dvi port, the original brace comes off and a longer one with a VGA port attached is attached the right way round.

There are no physical instructions on how the VGA connector should be attached, via ribbon cable, to the card. Thank you ebay for supplying a picture of the orientation!

Card suitably attached, I boot the machine up and check it works – success!

Put in all the peripheral cards and cables and resit the machine and reboot. It still works fundamentally so I finally swap the monitors.

I am now in high grade graphics.

Sounds like a good day.

It did look that way. I launch a web browser and found that my OS update had wiped my network settings. When using a router to perform a hand shake to the internet and map my domain name to the correct machine on our network, that’s not trivial to fix!

Started with resetting the IPV4 on my Centos 7 box.

Checked I could get out to the internet, my usual is to verify I can get to google which I could. I could not reach anything else. Finally three reboots down, some bridging to our other broadband account and some shear bloodymindedness, it finally seemed to have a proper internet connection.  Phew!

OK…

My websites still weren’t functioning properly.  Update to symvers-3.10.0-862.2.3.el7.x86_64 or Centos 7.5.1804 to you and me, locked down some permissions.  Sorting out a couple of overly rigorous ones meant Tomcat popped up nicely.

Some changes in Apache meant a little work on the security side.  It was trying to use nss on the same port I use for my Tomcat.  Finally sorted that out and the majority of the Apache sites sprang back to life.

Except this blog.  Dx#!.

You got me, so what was next?

mod_security was working well with WordPress, the blog engine I use on my site.  Was being the operative phrase.  Disabling one of the rules meant it served the web pages well.

Saving became an issue.

I now have a protocol where I disable mod_security until my blog is written then re-enable it.

You see the results here.

Success!

Well, for a while I have wanted to get VNC working on my machine.  As this seemed to be a day devoted to the Linux box…

Suffice to say there was a little fiddling on the firewall front.  While incoming and outgoing were limited to TCP 443 and 8443, we now have a UDP just for RealVNC.

I am now moving mod_ssl.conf back where it needs to be, saving this blog and calling it a day.

Having a great evening 🙂