This is the final article (I think…) on MySQL database backup. In my previous article I discussed how to craft a very efficient script for automated LOCAL backup of your MySQL databases. But that isn’t the whole story. What happens if your server burns to the ground… or more likely the hard drive gives up […]

Earlier this year I wrote an article about creating scripts for backing up your MySQL databases. A week ago I wrote another article about automated and secure root user login to your root MySQL database account. I have also been learning Python on and off and learning quite a bit about variables and loops. While […]

If you are looking for a quick way to install a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack on an Ubuntu server, this should take care of you: sudo apt-get install tasksel sudo tasksel install lamp-server mysql_secure_installation First command installs tasksel… which is a really handy program.

Do you work with MySQL? I do… quite a bit. Do you often script stuff on your server to make your life easier? I do that as well… quite a bit… Are you including your database user account and password (or worse… your mysql instance root user account and password!) in plain-text in your script… […]

I have setup a few servers with Ubuntu Server and one of the common security tools I use is Fail2Ban. One of the common requirements that comes with Fail2Ban is the need to provide other administrative personnel with a place they can quickly check which IP’s have been banned. Using a cool program called incron […]

In this DigitalOcean article, as a part of a series to help developers with scaling, we will be talking about configuring Varnish with Drupal. This will greatly reduce the amount of time it takes users to load your Drupal based website, and increase t Source: How To Configure Varnish for Drupal with Apache on Debian […]

If you don’t know what a firewall is, let’s start there… A firewall is basically a digital “wall” that sits on the edge of your network or device. When someone makes a connection over a network or the internet to your server, they connect by the IP address + a Port. Firewalls, on a very […]

Another very quick post for all you aspiring Ubuntu server admins out there. I am not sure how I got along as far as I did without knowing how to easily add a service to the boot time start list or remove it from said list. I already knew how to manually start or stop […]

This was going to be a long article but I decided to cut it short. Use case: You have a Remote Server – You need to securely access some sensitive service or another (let’s say a MySQL connection) and don’t want to open the port to up to the internet. What’s a person to do?

As I am now hosting about 8 different sites I was wanting to make restoring from backups a bit easier and less manual. The ultimate goal is to login to my second server and have it up and running with as few key-strokes as possible. Scripting was the answer. It took me several hours of […]

Owncloud supports several different types of “cache” mechanisms for increasing application performance and, in one particular case, expanding functionality (enabling File Locking). The two types of caches I am going to discuss today are Redis and APCU. We will start with APCU. If you have a stand-alone Owncloud installation and just need to optimize for […]

If you aren’t familiar with Owncloud, it is a very cool open-source software package that runs on Linux Apache (or Nginx) that provides “dropbox like” functionality that you can host yourself. This is a big deal for the tech-savvy average-Joe that is worried about keeping private data private (i.e. he doesn’t want all of his […]

I will try to keep this short and to the point. If you work in a Windows/Linux mixed environment, you may come across a scenario where you need to move SSL certificates and private keys from a Windows server using IIS to Linux running Apache or similar. Windows and Linux tend to use two different […]

Webmin is a web-based system administration tool for Unix-like systems. It provides an easy alternative to command line system administration and can be used to manage various aspects of a system, such as users and services, through the use of the pro Source: How To Install Webmin with SSL on Ubuntu 14.04 | DigitalOcean   […]