linux

How to share OpenSSH keys with WSL in Windows 10

Don’t want to copy over your ssh keys from Windows to WSL Linux? Or generate new ones? Then share your Windows OpenSSH key with WSL! The OpenSSH config gives you the option to share keys using an IdentityFile directive. Here is how you can share your keys between Windows 10 and WSL.

Read More

Benchmarking WordPress, simple load & speed testing with ApacheBench

ApacheBench, or ab, is a small benchmark utility that comes with Apache. It’s a really simple HTTP load generating tool, ideal for a simple WordPress load & speed test. How fast does your WordPress site respond? How many HTTP requests per second can your server handle? These are questions on which ab can shed some light. Here is how to load test WordPress with ApacheBench.

Read More

Recursive scp and symlinks

Recursive scp without following symbolic links. TL;DR: when using recursive scp, symbolic links aren’t preserved and are copied as if they are normal directories. So you have to look for another solution to recursively transfer symlinks over ssh. Here is one: Tar over ssh!

Read More

Install Varnish Cache on CentOS 6.7

In this article I’ll show you how to install Varnish Cache on CentOS, version 6.7 in this case. Varnish is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Because Varnish Cache is really, really fast, web applications like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla can greatly benefit from Varnish Cache.

Read More

Install Elasticsearch on CentOS 6.7

How to install Elasticsearch on CentOS 6.7. Elasticsearch is a highly scalable open-source full-text search and analytics engine. It allows you to store, search, and analyze big volumes of data quickly and in near real time. In this article we’ll go over the steps to install Elasticsearch on CentOS 6.7.

Read More

Generate pseudo-random passwords with OpenSSL

OpenSSL comes in handy when you need to generate random passwords, for example for system accounts and services. In this short post I’ll give you a quick example on how to generate random passwords with OpenSSL in Linux (Bash), Windows and PHP…

Read More

Tunnel RDP through SSH & PuTTY

Have you ever been in a situation where you needed to perform remote administration on a Windows Server, and the RDP port 3389 is blocked on a firewall? Did you know you can tunnel RDP over SSH with PuTTY? This particularly comes in handy when there is no VPN available to the remote network… Here is how to tunnel Remote Desktop (RDP) over SSH with PuTTY.

Read More

Turn off swap

Not every Linux server I maintain needs to have a swap partition and to start swapping. For instance, the MySQL servers all have more than enough RAM on board to do their work. Yet, when a swap partition is enabled Linux starts swapping, which may degrade MySQL database performance…

Read More

Redirect HTTP to HTTPS

In this post I provide you various HTTP to HTTPS redirection methods, for Windows Server IIS and Linux Apache. Use these examples to your advantage to secure the traffic between your visitors and your website.

Read More

Monit monitoring on Ubuntu 14.04 VM on Hyper-V

In this post you’ll learn about setting up a Monit monitoring service for your websites and services. Monit is a free and open source service monitoring application which can perform various event-based actions. Monit can send email notifications, restart a service or application, or take other responsive actions. We set Monit up on a Ubuntu 14.04 VM, built on Hyper-V. And we use Monit to monitor several websites, and send out notifications on downtime.

Read More

How to restore a deleted Open-Xchange context?

How to restore, or recover, an accidentally deleted OX context. If you’ve accidentally deleted an Open-Xchange context (contextid), then that is bad… Here is how to recover a deleted OX context and filestore… Assuming you make backups of course.

Read More

Convert decimal to hex in Bash?

A quicky for my archives: convert decimal to hex in Bash, and convert hexadecimal to decimal, in Bash. In mathematics and computing, hexadecimal (also base 16, or hex) is a positional numeral system with a radix, or base, of 16. It uses sixteen distinct symbols, most often the symbols 0-9 to represent values zero to nine, and A, B, C, D, E, F (or alternatively a-f) to represent values ten to fifteen. If you want to convert hexadecimal values to decimal and decimal values to hexadecimal, here’s how. All on the bash prompt…

Read More