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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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   […]

Need to administer some drupal stuff from the command-line? DRUSH is the answer. But first you need to get it installed. I am putting the commands to run here to do just that for my own future reference. Hope this is of benefit to everyone else! Elevate yourself: sudo -s Check if Pear is installed: […]

I have been having issues I can’t narrow down that have been causing Apache to go into a conniption and the websites on my server to go down. The quick duct tape fix has been to login ot the server and restart Apache. This is a manual process though and the site could be down […]

If you haven’t gotten around to setting up regular backups of your website MySQL databases you are asking for serious trouble. In this article I am going to provide shell script examples that you can use to quickly setup database backup jobs. As far as scope goes, we are going to be talking about how […]

“Enterprise Log Search and Archive” (AKA ELSA) is an open-source project started by an individual who needed the ability to not just collect logs from a bunch of devices but to also quickly search and parse them. And by a “bunch” I mean on the scale of millions and millions of logs. A lot of […]

This tutorial is going to be a bit to the point so there is an assumption that you have a level of comfort with Linux and with basic file manipulation, ownership, etc. I recently launched a new site, www.mtkfirmware.com, that is focused on collecting firmware for Mediatek based devices. The majority of the site is […]

If you are wanting remote access to an Ubuntu Server, the answer is SSH (Secure SHell). Ironically, SSH actually isn’t in the most secure configuration out of the box. Several of the servers I run are public facing, which means SSH particularly needs to be locked down. So lets talk about locking down SSH. I […]

Read about it more in detail here on Redhat’s site. This vulnerability affects all applications using certain versions of OpenSSL, so this is a cross-platform issue. This isn’t nearly as atrocious as Heartbleed was as there isn’t a chance of leaking your private keys. However, if you use Qualsys labs excellent SSL web scanner to […]