- server-administration

Blocking IP Addresses using IPtables

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:12:54 +0000

Blocking IP Addresses using IPtables The following article describes various ways to block IPs using the built-in RedHat firewall, iptables. The following command will drop all incoming connections from IP xx.xx.xx.xx: To block a range, such as xx.xx.xx.* specify the

Compiling PHP on CentOS 5 (64bit) with MySQL Support

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 23:10:59 +0000

Compiling PHP on CentOS 5 (64bit) with MySQL Support Moved to the new Apache category.

Enabling Automatic Software Updates on CentOS 5

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:13:34 +0000

Enabling Automatic Software Updates on CentOS 5 It's important to keep your server software up-to-date. The commands below will enable automatic nightly updates using CentOS 5's default yum package manager. centos how-to vps

How to Install and Configure X11 with Remote VNC Access on Centos 5

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:12:07 +0000

How to Install and Configure X11 with Remote VNC Access on Centos 5 The instructions below will walk you through the process of installing the X window system, GNOME desktop environment, and configuring VNC so that you can access it remotely. As a general rule of thumb you should never run X windows as root. In this example we will add a system user with the username 'wkst' and configure X windows to run under that user.

Change the Language in a Linux (BaSH) Shell

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:14:13 +0000

Change the Language in a Linux (BaSH) Shell To set your current shell to a different language you use the bash variable followed by the language you want: If you want to set that so its used every time add an export line to your for that user. The .bashrc file can be found in each user's homedir, if they don't have one you can create it:

How to Change the Time Zone in Linux

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:14:38 +0000

How to Change the Time Zone in Linux To set the timezone in Linux, update /etc/localtime with the appropriate timezone file from /usr/share/zoneinfo. Example: This would set your time zone to PST/PDT (Pacific Time) because that is the time zone Los Angles is located in.

How to Change the Shell Type for a Specific User

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 14 May 2011 00:07:09 +0000

How to Change the Shell Type for a Specific User If you would like to change the shell type for a specific user you can do the following. In this example we will change the shell type for username johnsmith to Bash: cpanel how-to shell vps centos ubuntu

Changing your Hostname

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 14 May 2011 00:01:32 +0000

Changing your Hostname Change the hostname line in /etc/sysconfig/network to the hostname you want (this file may be different on FreeBSd and others). Your hostname should be something prefixing a domain you own (this is referred to as a fully qualified domain name, FQDN), so server1.yourdomain.com for example, not just yourdomain.com. Changing it in that file ensure that your hostname gets set each time networking starts, however you'd need to restart networking for it to get set in the curren…

Fixing Crontab Permissions Wrong Error

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:15:41 +0000

Fixing Crontab Permissions Wrong Error If you are receiving the error /usr/bin/crontab permissions are wrong. Please set to 4755 when in the cron section of cPanel, the commands below may correct the error for Redhat/CentOS/Fedora servers. Log into the server via

How to Determine the Filesystem Type of a Partition

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 21:43:32 +0000

How to Determine the Filesystem Type of a Partition The following command will show you the filesystem type of a partition on a physical disk, LVM, or flat file disk image. Read the man page for to see how else it can be used to get the information you're looking for.

How to Disable Shell Access for a Specific User

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:16:20 +0000

How to Disable Shell Access for a Specific User If you would like to disable shell access for a specific user you can do the following. In this example we will disable shell access for username johnsmith: PHPCGI centos cpanel how-to shell vps ubuntu

How to Extract the Contents of an RPM File

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 23:00:56 +0000

How to Extract the Contents of an RPM File Sometimes it can be useful to extract the contents of a RPM file without actually installing it. In order to do so, use the following command: how-to centos

Hardening your TCP/IP Stack Against SYN Floods

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:17:13 +0000

Hardening your TCP/IP Stack Against SYN Floods Denial of service (DoS) attacks launch via SYN floods can be very problematic for servers that are not properly configured to handle them. Proper firewall filtering policies are certainly usually the first line of defense, however the Linux kernel can also be hardened against these types of attacks. This type of hardening is useful for SYN floods that attempt to overload a particular service with requests (such as http) as opposed to one that inten…

ImageMagick [Imagick] PHP Class Broken or Fails to Install

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 22:35:47 +0000

ImageMagick [Imagick] PHP Class Broken or Fails to Install Some versions of CentOS (including the most recent 5.5) have an issue with a buggy 6.4.8 RPM version of ImageMagick. This version prevents the Imagick PHP class from working properly, and also prevents the extension from being installed via PECL. If you are using the Imagick

Server Administration

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:59:11 +0000

Server Administration server-administration index

How to Install Apache 2.2.x and PHP 5.2.x on CentOS 5

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 23:07:37 +0000

How to Install Apache 2.2.x and PHP 5.2.x on CentOS 5 Moved to the Apache category.

Installing FFMpeg and FFMpeg-PHP

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 23:22:19 +0000

Installing FFMpeg and FFMpeg-PHP /* This article can possibly be re-written using the RPMs available from RPMForge. */ Below is a step-by-step how-to on installing ffmpeg and ffmpeg-php on CentOS 5.3. The reason we (or anyone really) have not published a script to automate the process is due to the complexity of the installation and the fact that it is very prone to failures along the way, almost always requiring some sort of h…

Installing IOTop on CentOS5

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 22:22:17 +0000

Installing IOTop on CentOS5 Iotop is a Python program with a top like UI used to show of behalf of which process is the I/O going on. This can come in handy for administrators trying to track down a specific process that may be causing a disk I/O bottleneck.

How to Lock and Unlock a System User Account

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:18:05 +0000

How to Lock and Unlock a System User Account Disabling shell access doesn't fully lock a user out of a server. They can still login via ftp/pop/imap/smtp servers if they are running on the local server and are checking local user authentication. Below you will find instructions on how to fully lock a system users account.

Getting your LVM to show up in single user mode

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:18:45 +0000

Getting your LVM to show up in single user mode When booting Linux into single user mode or rescue mode, you will find that unless the distro has found and enabled the logical volumes that you wont see any devices. This makes it a fun task when you need to mount, scan, resize, whatever a partition. Below are instructions on enabling your logical volumes.

Using DD Over Netcat vs SSH

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 22:40:11 +0000

Using DD Over Netcat vs SSH dd is a very handy shell command for writing raw data blocks from one place to another. Since it can read directly from raw device files, it is very useful for copying entire partitions or drives from one location to another. One traditional way to get this drive data from one location to another is to pipe DD's output stream over

Redirect non-www Traffic to www Using mod_rewrite

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 23:07:18 +0000

Redirect non-www Traffic to www Using mod_rewrite Moved to the Apache category.

Securing cPanel After Install

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 01:05:12 +0000

Securing cPanel After Install This guide is intended to give some basic steps on securing cPanel after the initial installation. Please see our Initial Setup Guide if you have not already completed it. Tweak Settings Under Main >> Server Configuration >> Tweak Settings, enable (

How to Shrink an LVM Volume

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:20:18 +0000

How to Shrink an LVM Volume The following steps will show you how to shrink an LVM volume. In this example we will be shrinking volume VolGroup00-LogVol00 down to 20GB. Note: This can and will cause data loss if performed improperly or on a volume that you attempt to shrink below the current volume usage. With that said, the steps are as follows:

How to Upgrade Debian Lenny (5.0) to Squeeze (6.0)

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:30:34 +0000

How to Upgrade Debian Lenny (5.0) to Squeeze (6.0) To begin, edit and change all occurrences of lenny to squeeze. A quick vi macro if you use it would be . Once finished, you file should look similar to the one below. Next we'll update the package lists:

Upgrading CentOS 32bit 4.x to 32bit 5.x

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 11 Feb 2014 02:08:30 +0000

Upgrading CentOS 32bit 4.x to 32bit 5.x We have found the following guide very useful in this process. This works for both dedicated servers as well as VPS nodes: cPanel Servers If your server has cPanel installed you first need to remove filesystem from the exclude line in /etc/yum.conf. If you don't the yum upgrade procedures below will fail.

How to Upgrade Ubuntu 8.04 to 9.04

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 23:09:00 +0000

How to Upgrade Ubuntu 8.04 to 9.04 Please see our new, more comprehensive guide.

How to Upgrade Ubuntu from Versions Prior to 10.04

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 17:51:35 +0000

How to Upgrade Ubuntu from Versions Prior to 10.04 This guide provides instructions on how to get your VPS upgraded from Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10, 9.04 or 9.10 to 10.04. There are some major configuration and system revisions between these versions so some care needs to be taken when upgrading else you will be left with a broken system! If this is the case, please contact support.

Using Wget for Recursive FTP

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:21:10 +0000

Using Wget for Recursive FTP We have found that using wget to recursively grab FTP contents is useful in the following situation: * You cannot use or due to restricted or no shell access on the remote server * You need to recursively get directories and globbing with

How to Reset Yum's Fastestmirror Plugin

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 13 May 2011 23:46:21 +0000

How to Reset Yum's Fastestmirror Plugin The yum-fastestmirror plugin is great for server admins. It goes out and attempts to determine which mirror would be faster to download from and automatically selects that mirror. The plugin works well for the most part but every once in a while it can choose a mirror that is slow. If you want to reset the plugin so that it will retest the mirrors all you have to do is the following: