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GNUPanel on Debian Squeeze

I was recently playing around with the “GNUPanel” Hosting control panel software. While trying to install the dependencies (with the install-dep.sh file), I encountered the error:

Debian version not supported

Even though the GNUPanel site seemed to say that Debian Squeeze was supported.

A quick look at the install-dep.sh file showed that it relied on the mawk unix utility.

By running apt-get install mawk, we can solve this problem and continue with the installation.

UPDATE:

I’ve now had a chance to play around with GNUPanel a bit more, and unfortunately, I don’t think it’s fully up to scratch. The installation process was pretty clunky – the automated installed script forced me to manually confirm the installation of at least 10 groups of packages. Once the software was installed, I had to guess at the username – and the web interface was also pretty…. “ropey”. These are mainly minor issues, and I’m sure that with some TLC, the project can progress, and become much more useable.

OpenVPN Internet Routing on OpenVZ VPS

As far as I know, the iptables masquerade module is not compatible with OpenVZ. As a result, many guides online on how to route all traffic through an OpenVPN Tunnel do not work with OpenVZ, as they depend on the masquerade module of iptables. This IPTables rule:

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o venet0 -j SNAT --to-source XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX

where XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX is your VPS’s EXTERNAL IP ADDRESS

can be used instead. You can add these lines to your /etc/rc.local file so that they are run at boot. You will also need to edit your /etc/sysctl.conf file, and uncomment this line:

#net.ipv4.ip_forward=1

by removing the #, so that it looks like this:

net.ipv4.ip_forward=1

to enable ip forwarding. Since this file is loaded at boot, you can enable IP Forwarding on the fly by running:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

through the command line.

I hope that this has helped someone – I know that I had to look through several guides online before I managed to get it working.