Had to install this for a client and ran into some “gotchas” so I thought I would make a post about it on the web just in case some other people might have questions. I went to the IRC chat to get some answers and got alot more which I’ll mention here.
Looking at the requirements of ASL, one important thing to note is requirements. DA uses mysql rpms from mysql.com which is supported by ASL. Make note that as of this moment, they aren’t supporting mysql 5.6 yet so I went with mysql 5.5. Even though the DA mysql is supported by ASL, I prefer to use the free repo by Atomic (called atomic, paid is called ASL), because of a promised release of compatible mariadb 5.5.32. As of now, mariadb isn’t compatible with OSSEC yet so its recommended to just use mysql first til a month or 2 down the line. Of course all this is unnecessary if you aren’t interested in this. I just want to move to mariadb and leave mysql in the dust (eventually).
So we start off with a fresh DirectAdmin install on centOS 6 64bit.
Here’s the steps.
1.) If you are interested in using the free atomic repo and replacing mysql of DA do the following (if not just skip this step).
First modify /etc/yum.conf and find the “exclude=” and remove the “mysql” and “MySQL” otherwise you won’t be able to update.
install the atomic repo
wget -q -O - https://www.atomicorp.com/installers/atomic | sh
install new mysql binaries
yum install mysql mysql-server
Note that the original MySQL-shared should not be removed as DA uses some of the binaries from it. Just keep it there.
2.) install ASL. I did find a bug which there is an easily solution for. During the installation, even though ASL detected a DirectAdmin environment, it ends up using the paths of cpanel’s apache and and not DA’s default paths. Because of this mod_evasive fails. Even though you do some scary messages, ASL fixes the paths afterward which makes it possible to run ASL. But in order to be a perfect install, putting in the symlink ahead does the trick.
ln -s /usr/lib/apache /etc/httpd/modules
ln -s /var/log/httpd /etc/httpd/logs
Note that this is listed as a bug and will probably be fixed very soon so this creating of symlinks maybe unnecessary soon.
Install ASL
wget -q -O - https://www.atomicorp.com/installers/asl | sh
Just follow though and everything should works as normal. Don’t pick to install the tortix-xen kernel if you’re using 64bit centos running on XenServer 6.2. (Note that this is a problem that seems to be exclusive to xenserver only. Other Xen like Amazon works fine with this kernel.)
Note that, since I’m using xen, I have to use tortix-xen repo in order to install the kernel. With the normal ASL-kernel, the VPS will not be able to boot. One bad thing I found on xenserver 6.2 is that, the 64bit version of the tortix-xen kernel does not work and fails with the following error in the log. ”kernel image too large: Invalid kernel”. I looked into that but wasn’t able to find anything substantial to resolve this issue. I’ll be bothering the awesome guys at ASL on this problem though and chip away at the problem.
FYI, the 32bit PAE tortix-xen kernel does work fine though.
For those interested, you definitely should give ASL a try, especially since there’s a solid 30 days trial. Its an interesting product and does seem to work well. My initial impression is good since it has a nice way to represent all the data and the firewall seems pretty easy to handle. I will be giving it some testing and we’ll see how this go.