Bur.st Networking Support

Discussion Forums

Bur.st's discussion forums are an excellent place to discuss anything about Bur.st, including questions/issues you may have. Unless your issue is "* is broken", please use them before emailing .

General Support

Quick settings

The following settings apply to using your Bur.st account. It's pretty simple: <servicename>.bur.st

  • Secure Shell (SSH): shell.bur.st
  • Telnet/rsh: Not provided (deprecated)
  • Secure Copy (SCP): scp.bur.st
  • Secure FTP (SFTP): sftp.bur.st
  • File transfer (FTP): ftp.bur.st (Soon to be deprecated. Please use SFTP)
  • External web/WWW proxy: (Use your ISP's)
  • Internal web/WWW proxy: none
  • mySQL database: mysql.bur.st:3306
  • Incoming mail (POP3 or POP3S): pop3.bur.st (Unencrypted POP3 will soon be deprecated)
  • Incoming mail (IMAP or IMAPS): imap.bur.st (Unencrypted IMAP will soon be deprecated)
  • External outgoing mail (SMTP): (use your ISP's)
  • Internal outgoing mail (SMTP): smtp.bur.st
  • Usenet news (NNTP): nntp.bur.st (external access on request only)
  • External DNS resolution: (Use your ISP's)
  • Internal DNS resolution: 203.82.212.241
  • Domain hosting DNS: ns1.bur.st/203.82.212.241, ns2.bur.st/203.82.210.9, ns3.bur.st/202.53.4.130, ns4.bur.st/220.233.31.155, ns5.bur.st/130.95.13.24
  • DNS seconding DNS: ns2.bur.st/203.82.210.9, ns3.bur.st/202.53.4.130, ns4.bur.st/220.233.31.155, ns5.bur.st/130.95.13.24
  • Domain mail hosting: mail1.bur.st, mail2.bur.st, mail3.bur.st, mail4.bur.st

Times for changes

The following times are a guide to when changes you or Bur.st Suport make will take effect. Times are AWST (+8UTC):

  • New domain's DNS hosting: daily at 2:30am
  • New domain's mail hosting: daily at 2:30am
  • New domain's web hosting: daily at 2:30am
  • New domain's secondary DNS hosting: daily at 2:30am
  • Existing domain zone update: hourly, on the hour.
  • Seconday DNS to load new zone with a NOTIFY: 5 minutes
  • mySQL account addition: Immediate (once processed by support)
  • Password change: Immediate
  • Email forward: Immediate
  • Procmail filter: Immediate
  • Domain email alias: Every hour at 1 minute past the hour
  • Emails with URGENT in the subject: 0-6 hours (unless deemed non-urgent)
  • NOTE: THE SUPPORT QUEUE IS NOT CURRENTLY GETTING MUCH ATTENTION DUE TO LACK OF SUPPORT STAFF!
  • Donating users form request: 0-30 days
  • Donating users complex request: 0-90 days
  • Non-donating users form request: 0-30 days
  • Non-donating users complex request: 0-90 days
  • New account sign-ups: Currently disabled

Changing your password

It is strongly recommended that you regularly change your Bur.st password. To change your password, ssh to shell.bur.st and type "passwd". You will be asked to type your old password, your new password and then confirm your new password. Nothing will appear as you type (not even *s).

A secure password is considered to be:

  • One that isn't used for anything else! Don't use a common password for multiple accounts.
  • 8 or more characters in length
  • Contain upper and lower case letters
  • Contain numbers and special characters
  • Not based on a common dictionary word or name

Bur.st regularly runs the hashed passwords through a password cracker and accounts with weak passwords are automatically locked without notification.

Disk usage quotas

By default, non-donating users are allowed only 2MB of disk storage while donating users are allowed 1GB. If your account goes beyond this amount, you will be emailed nightly and after 6 days you will not be able to create any new files. This will lead to your email bouncing back to sender.

You can check how much disk space you have used by typing "quota" at a command prompt on shell.bur.st.

Network status mailing list

By default, all new accounts are subscribed to the network status mailing list. This list is a low-volume email list for information about major Bur.st outages. Follow instructions within the email to unsubscribe yourself.

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Email Support

Using your email

There are four methods for reading your Bur.st email:

  • Point your preferred mail program's (Eudora, Outlook Express etc) incoming mail server to pop3.bur.st (for POP3 access) or imap.bur.st (for IMAP) access. If your mail program support its, turn on encryption for safer email exchange. Eventually, unencrypted access will be deprecated.
  • Use a terminal email client on shell.bur.st to access your email spool directly. eg, pine or mutt. This is also very handy when you have a massive attachment in your email and want to delete it before downloading to your local computer.
  • Use Bur.st's webmail.
  • Forward your email to another, non-Bur.st email account you read.

Please ensure you either read your Bur.st email or forward it to an account that does get read. An account who's email is not getting regularly read or forwarded will automatically be deemed inactive and get locked by the system.

Webmail

If you're on the move, would like to deal with all your email on the server but prefer web-based email over a terminal email client, point your browser to webmail.bur.st. Bur.st uses the common Horde IMP for webmail. If you are experiencing difficulties access Webmail from work due to firewall/proxy restrictions the try using the address mebwail.bur.st as an alternative, as many corporate firewalls and proxies ban connections to any hosts with 'webmail' in them.

Forwarding your email

On your first login to shell.bur.st, you are asked if you would like to forward your email to another address. Please ensure your Bur.st email is either read or forwarded to an address you do read.

To forward your email manually, ssh to shell.bur.st and edit ~/.forward with your favourite text editor (eg: nano ~/.forward). Type the address (or addresses - each on a new line) you want to forward your email to. If you want a copy of your email stored on Bur.st aswell, put your Bur.st username as the final line. Save the file and "chmod 644 ~/.forward" to ensure the mail system has permission to read it.

Spam filtering

Spam filtering is done 'opt-in' on Bur.st. If you want to turn spam filtering on for your Bur.st account, SSH to shell.bur.st with your Bur.st username and type 'nospam'. The default spam filtering is quite tame and will not get every spam. Any spam it does get will be silently deleted. If you want to configure spamassassin beyond that, you will want to read up on procmail and spamassassin.

Virus filtering

All emails entering Bur.st's primary mail server, mail1.bur.st, are scanned for viruses. Any email containing a virus is immediately dumped. No warning message is sent to the sender as these days the majority of worm emails fake the From: address and systems with automated warnings are just as annoying as receiving the virus itself.

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Web Hosting Support

Putting up a web-page

Your web-page, http://www.bur.st/~username, belongs in ~/public_html/. You can either scp/sftp/ftp a web-page you have created into this space or you can edit it directly on shell.bur.st.

Don't forget to "chmod -R 755 ~/public_html ; chmod 711 ~" your files after you have uploaded them so they are visible.

Perl/CGI and Python

Bur.st's web-servers support the Perl and Python langauges with CGI for all users and virtual domains by default. Output files are currently output as the web user, but are changed to be owned by you once a day.

If you are missing library files which you would find useful, please email with details.

PHP

PHP support is provided to donating users with a virtual domain, upon request. To minimize the risk of running PHP, Bur.st's PHP web-server is seperate to the main web-server and runs with safe-mode turned on.

To request PHP access, please visit the domain addition/change form.

PHP scripts should have the permissions 700 to run securely. PHP files are set to 700 daily but you should set these permissions yourself if you wish to view your PHP files immediately.

mySQL

Access to the mySQL database is given on request. A database is created for each domain you would like one for - the database name is the domain (or sub-domain) stripped of all periods ("."s). eg, the database that will be created for yourcompany.com.au will be "yourcompanycomau". Access is given to you with the username of the account the domain is attached to and a seperate password.

If you wanted a mySQL database for access from your http://www.bur.st/~username/ web-site, your database's name will be the same as your username, rather than based on the domain-name.

For security reasons, your Bur.st password and mySQL password are not synchronised. You may change your database account password by using the SQL command "SET PASSWORD = PASSWORD('your_new_password');". Please do not use the same password as your normal Bur.st account.

Your scripts (perl or PHP etc) will need to be pointed to the database server mysql.bur.st on port 3306 using TCP. The mySQL database server is not local to the PHP web-server - it lives on a seperate machine. The majority of PHP packages are made to use either local mySQL or mySQL via the network but generally default to local, which won't work.

PHPmyadmin can be accessed via http://phpmyadmin.bur.st/.

Directoy Listings

Index files on Bur.st's web servers are: index.html index.htm index.shtml index.cgi index.pl index.php default.html default.htm default.shtml default.cgi default.pl default.php

If you do not place an index file in a directory, the web-server will automatically generate a directory listing for files in the directory. If this is not your intention (eg, in a cgi-bin directory), ensure you have an index file! Simply doing an "echo > index.html" or uploading an empty index.html will work.

Password protecting files

You can protect files by requesting a username and password before they can be accessed. Bur.st allows you to specify specific per directory settings using a .htaccess file.

Specify your settings in .htaccess and generate your password using htpasswd, on shell.bur.st. For further information on htpasswd, see http://www.apacheweek.com/features/userauth

Web stats email and raw web-logs

Basic statistics on your web-site are generated weekly and emailed to your Bur.st account or webmaster@your_domain for virtual hosting.

Access to raw web-logs for a Bur.st web-page, http://www.bur.st/~user, cannot be provided. Access to raw web-logs for your virtual domain are provided upon request (email support) and can be found in ~/weblogs.your_domain.

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Domain Hosting Support

DNS

When you request DNS domain hosting, your domain gets added to Bur.st's name-servers. You will need to redelegate or register your domain to:

  • ns1.bur.st - 203.82.212.241
  • ns2.bur.st - 203.82.210.9
  • ns3.bur.st - 202.53.4.130
  • ns4.bur.st - 220.233.31.155
  • ns5.bur.st - 130.95.13.24

Please use as many name-servers as possibly when delegating/redelgating your domain!

If you're familiar with BIND, you have read/write access to your domain's zone file, found as ~/zone.domain.com. Changes to your zone are read in by the name-servers hourly, on the hour. Remember a mistake in your zone-file may wipe your domain off the Internet, so make sure you know what you're doing! You may wish to use "named-checkzone" to check your new zone file is still valid.

If you're not familiar with BIND (or aren't confident) and need a sub-domain added or changes made, please email with details.

Web virtual domain hosting

Web pages for http://www.your_domain.com and http://your_domain.com get stored in ~/public_html/your_domain.com/. Your personal web-page www.bur.st/~your_username grabs its files from ~/public_html/.

For further information, see the web hosting section.

Weekly web logs for hits to your front page are emailed to webmaster@your_domain.com every Sunday morning at 3am AWST. Your domain's raw web-logs are available as ~/weblogs.your_domain.

Putting a Bur.st logo (such as the one below) linking back to http://www.bur.st/ on your page would be greatly appreciated!

Click here for Bur.st logos.

Email virtual domain hosting

Email for your domain is hosted by Bur.st's mail server and backed up by its off-site back-up mail servers in case the primary goes down.

By default, every email address @your_domain.com is forwarded to your_username@bur.st. If you would like to add specific aliases@your_domain.com to forward off to other addresses, simply edit ~/aliases.your_domain.com and follow the format of the default address in there. e.g. to forward joe@your_domain.com to joe@hotmail.com you would add the line:

joe: joe@hotmail.com

The mail server reads new aliases in once an hour at one minute past the hour.
If you're not familiar with editing text files through a Unix shell, or have made a change that urgently needs loading, email .

DNS seconding

Please ensure you have included all of Bur.st's secondary NSs in your domain delegation with the registrar of your domain/s:

  • ns2.bur.st - 203.82.210.9
  • ns3.bur.st - 202.53.4.130
  • ns4.bur.st - 220.233.31.155
  • ns5.bur.st - 130.95.13.24

And included them in your zone file as NS records so your master NS will allow Bur.st's secondaries to transfer the zone file. eg, for a BIND zone file: 

  • IN NS ns2.bur.st
  • IN NS ns3.bur.st
  • IN NS ns4.bur.st
  • IN NS ns5.bur.st

For details of the location and the transit connectivity of each name-server, see the table below. Details were taken from BGP in Sept. 2004 and may change.

nsX Location Peering and transit
ns1 HostAway, Perth WAIX, Bright (ANC, AAPT)
ns2 HostAway, Perth WAIX, Bright (ANC, AAPT)
ns3 Fasthit, Perth WAIX, Optus
ns4 Swiftel, Sydney Sprint, Telstra, ANC domestic-only
ns5 UWA, Perth PARNET (WAIX, AARNET (Sprint, Verio), Amnet (Optus, AAPT))

If you're requesting Bur.st second more than a few domains, please help automate the addition by providing the list in a text file - one domain, without the tailing period ("."), on each line.

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Shell Access Support

Using SSH

To ssh to shell.bur.st, you will need an ssh client for your local computer. The following ssh clients are recommended but use whatever you want:

  • For MS Windows: Putty
  • For Unix: OpenSSH
  • For MacOS Classic: MacSSH
  • Web/Java: MindTerm SSH

Open a connection to shell.bur.st port 22 using ssh, type in your username, your password and you're in. The first time you login you will complete your account setup. The following settings for your ssh client may be useful:

  • Set compression on and to the maximum setting.
  • Use blowfish as your encryption protocol.
  • Use SSH protocol 2.

General Unix shell commands

The following is a list of common Unix shell commands for navigating your way around your Unix shell account: 

  • man <command name>
    Gives you information about the command
  • <command name> --help
    Generally gives you options for the command
  • ls
    Lists files in the current directory
  • ls -al
    Lists all files in the current directory showing all attributes
  • rm <filename>
    Removes filename
  • cd <directory>
    Changes to directory
  • cd ..
    Changes directoy up one level
  • pwd
    Shows your current directory

Common programs

The following are commonly used programs found on shell.bur.st: 

  • pine, mutt
    mail readers
  • irc, epic, irsii, bitchx
    IRC clients
  • centericq
    ICQ/Yahoo/AIM/MSN client
  • tin, slrn
    usenet news readers
  • htpasswd
    Used for generating passwords for your web-page
  • passwd
    change your Bur.st account password
  • traceroute, mtr
    network path and latency tracing utilities

Please note that many programs are restricted to donating users only. Can't find a program you'd like to use installed on shell.bur.st? Email with details.

Getting around firewalls

Some users find themselves on networks that do not allow external SSH access. shell.bur.st is actually entirely dedicated to ssh, which means you can connection on any TCP port (port 1 through to 65535) and get a valid SSH connection. Examples:

  • Your network blocks outgoing connections to TCP/22 and all unprivledged ports. Solution: Point your SSH client to shell.br.st:789 (a random privledged port).
  • Your network blocks all outgoing access except web browsing. Solution: Point your SSH client to connect to shell.bur.st on port 80 or 443.
  • Your network blocks all outgoing connections. You can only use an http web proxy. Solution: use Putty's "connect through web proxy" setting to connect to shell.bur.st port 80 via the web proxy.
  • If you are blocked from accessing webmail.bur.st you might try connecting to mebwail.bur.st as an alternative, as many corporate firewalls and proxies ban connections to any hosts with 'webmail' in them.

User limits

Non-donating users have a number of limits placed on their shell logins, including how much CPU time and memory a process can use before being killed. To have these restrictions lifted (vastly increased), take a look at the donate page.

Donating users have larger ulimits than anyone should ever hit. If you find you are hitting one of them, drop an email.

To check your current ulimits, type "ulimit -a" at the command line on shell.bur.st.

Disk quotas

By default, non-donating users are allowed only 2MB of disk storage while donating users are allowed 1GB. If your account goes beyond this amount, you will be emailed nightly and after 6 days you will not be able to create any new files. This will lead to your email bouncing back to sender.

You can check how much disk space you have used by typing "quota" at a command prompt on shell.bur.st.

Donate access

If you choose to become a donating user you are added to group devel on shell.bur.st. On shell.bur.st this gives you:

  • 1GB disk space instead of 2MB
  • Greatly increased user process limits
  • Access to almost all programs

See the donate page for more details.

Development access

If you are a donating user and you want development access (compile programs, play with scripts, write your own code), email and ask for group donate access.

When you request devel access, you are given a second home directory within /devel, which is mounted exec (/home is mounted noexec), and is linked into your real homedir as "devel".

Bur.st has support for C, C++, Java, Perl, Python and TCL and has numerous editors and compilers. If you find something missing that you'd like to see, email .

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