Bash Prompt

I’ve been using Arch Linux (btw) on my laptop for a while now and I’ve always used an AUR helper to automate finding, installing and updating AUR packages.

Web servers have been able to compress the content they serve for quite a while now.

Configuring a webserver like nginx or Apache is pretty simple to get a webpage served.

These days your primary means of listening to music if likely from an app on your phone.

Benchmarking is hard.

The problem In the Linux desktop environment, there are two methods of copying and pasting.

Redis is an in-memory caching application that we will use to cache session information and as a full page cache.

PHP-FPM is a high performance alternative to the standard PHP library that I used in Part 1 of this series.

There are many options for improving the performance of an Magento installation but little benchmarking data regarding what sort of improvement they make.

This guide will walk you through taking an brand new server to having a working Magento instance in 10 minutes or less.

Varnish is an in-memory caching proxy server that caches website objects such as images, html pages, CSS files in RAM.

This guide will walk you through taking an brand new server to having a working Magento instance in 10 minutes or less.

I love gedit as a MarkDown editor.

Troubleshooting web servers When a webserver is setup and configured, especially when it will be serving several sites from the same IP being able to craft exact HTTP(S) requests is important to troubleshoot and ensure everything is working as you want it…

Converting between units is a task that comes up occasionally and can get tricky especially if you want to script the conversions.

Sometimes, particularly when writing a bash scripts or one liners, a process is attached to the terminal and cannot be stopped with the usual ctrl-c or ctrl-q.

Voice recognition and automatic dictation have always been a difficult (and expensive) task on most operating system including Linux.

I’ve been reading about cryptojacking (abusing someone’s browser to mine crypto-coins) and crypto-mining in general and wondered if is possible to make money mining cryptocurrencies on some of the hardware that I have access to.

Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love top First of all, if you’re running Linux on your laptop and a media server in your house or you’re the admin of a small number of servers that you have complete control over then this article is not aimed at you.

When installing a configuring and modifying a website it is frequently necessary to make changes to the way that the webserver is serving the site e.g. enabling mod_deflate or enabling HTTP2.

The /etc/resolv.conf file configures how the Linux system resolves hostnames.

A large part of using a shell is manipulating text strings using tools such as grep, sed and cut.

gzip and bzip2 are the most common compression utilities used on Linux and are used pretty much anywhere compression is required.

Telnet, the protocol and the command line tool, were how system administrators used to log into remote servers.

When a bash command is run it usually gets run in a single thread.

A server being compromised or hacked for the purpose of this guide is an unauthorized person or bot logging into the server in order to use it for their own, usually negative ends.

There exist many ways of maliciously taking a website offline.

Over my career as a Systems Administrator, I have acquired some productive habits when I’m working on the command line that I have picked up from sysadmins more experienced than myself.

Sometimes the simplest seeming jobs end up being more annoying than they should be.

These days it is becoming mandatory to serve websites only via HTTPS.

Security is now more important than ever and securing your SSH server is one of the most important things that you can do as a systems administrator.

OpenVPN is an open source secure tunnel application.

Hugo is a great static website generator, I use it for this blog and am absolutely loving it!

Introduction In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we extracted the IP addresses that made unauthorized SSH login attempts and then sorted and ranked them.

In Part 1 of this series, we extracted the IP addresses of machines making unauthorized SSH connections from a /var/log/secure file.

Introduction System administrators are expected to solve many different problems and answer diverse questions throughout their working day.

This guide is now outdated.

Varnish is a reverse proxy that speeds up web sites by running in front of the web server and serving static websites assets such as images from RAM.

Sysadmins often need to discover how the performance of an application is affected when the system is under certain types of load.