The Helpdesk For I.T. Administrators
The ‘makepasswd’ package on Ubuntu can be used to easily generate random passwords. This package is part of the Ubuntu repositories, however probably wont be installed by default. It also has the ability to generate MD5 hashes of the random passwords. Install makepasswd: $ sudo apt-get -y install makepasswd Generate a random password: You can …
Nginx is a high performance web server, which can also act as a great reverse proxy. Reverse proxy’s are placed in front of the web server handling the processing, to speed the site up, by either caching data, and/or load balancing across multiple back-end web servers. This howto will outline the steps required to set …
A default installation of PHP and Apache on a Ubuntu 13.04 will set a maximum upload limit of 2MB. Quite often you will want to increase this to a larger size. How high you set this limit will depend on your requirements. This howto guide will step you through the process to increase the PHP …
By default, Ubuntu 13.04 doesn’t enable the rewrite engine module after installing Apache. The rewrite engine for Apache allows for on-the-fly URL rewriting/changing. This allows for the use of urls that are human readable, and SEO friendly. The rewrite engine is capable of capturing a website request, running it through a series of expression checks, …
This “how to” guide will step you through the process of setting up Nginx, PHP, and MySQL on Ubuntu 13.04.
This guide will step you through how to take an IP address, and find out what its reverse dns host name is. This is useful for checking mail server DNS setup, etc. The DNS system works two ways. It is used to convert host names to IP addresses, but it can also convert IP addresses …
You often need to know what physical drives are attached to a system, how many drives are connected, or even what device names match up with which physical drive. There is a handy tool called ‘lshw’ which is used to extract detailed information on the hardware in the PC. Unfortunately this doesn’t come pre-installed on …
You often need to know what physical drives are attached to a system, how many drives are connected, or even what device names match up with which physical drive. Ubuntu comes with a handy tool called ‘lshw’ which is used to extract detailed information on the hardware in the PC. To view a listing of …
Changes you make to iptables firewall rules only exist for the current boot, and if you don’t save the config, you will loose any changes upon rebooting. CentOS 6 blocks most incoming ports by default, so you will generally have to make changes to the firewall if you install any new packages. Thankfully CentOS 6 …
There are many Linux distributions out there, all with their slight differences. It’s sometimes its hard to determine what distribution you are current using, assuming you weren’t the one who installed it. The commands below can be used to determine the Linux distribution you are using, and in most cases, what version. Generic check: cat …