Blog Archives

Alternative’s to Cpanel: Webmin

I’m going to start a mini series of posts here called Alternatives to Cpanel, first you might ask why not Cpanel and its worth pointing out that Cpanel is arguably one of the most popular and most comprehensive control panel solutions for web hosting out there, it might not be good for some people or some use cases the first of which that comes off the top of my head is using Nginx (pronounce it Engine-X) instead of Apache.

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Posted in General, Reviews
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HOWTO: Upgrade Debian Lenny (5.0) to Debian Squeeze (6.0) on Rackspace Cloud Servers

I recently posted on how to update Debian for vps.net servers and its intricacies, I have since been able to document the process for Rackspace and this guide also works for Virtuozzo or OpenVZ VPS’ where you don’t have direct control over the kernel from your VPS so here goes.

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Posted in HOWTO's, Tutorials
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HOWTO: Upgrade Debian Lenny (5.0) to Debian Squeeze (6.0) on VPS.net

Here are the working upgrade instructions from Lenny to Squeeze (Debian 6) on VPS.net.

Disclaimer: please test this yourself first on a NON PRODUCTION SERVER. this may or may not work with other server providers but is specifically tailored to the VPS.net system,

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Posted in HOWTO's, Tutorials
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Email alerts whenever someone logs into root via SSH

Want to be notified instantly when someone logs into your server as root? No problem. there was recently a discussion over on the vps.net forums after an incident where a user had had several of there servers logged into as root by an unknown source (since resolved) a helpful user (R4Z0R49) posted this helpful guide and I have cleaned it up and added some further notes and caveats.

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Posted in HOWTO's, Security, Tutorials
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SSH Root Security Tips

ok so i thought i would shove a quick techy thing up while its fresh in my head. this post i think is great when you are in an environment where you have to compromise on security and ease of use. I have to admit though, this tip is not my own i read this originally on Jordan Bedwell’s (Envygeeks) site however the site no longer seems to be available and i havent yet found it anywhere else.

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Posted in HOWTO's, Security
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Linux Securing your /tmp directory

its recently been noted that lots of people having there servers hacked because they were running vulnerable versions of PHPMyAdmin. obviously the best advice to fix this is to upgrade your PMA install to the latest version or to otherwise protect it with passwords etc (apache passwords not just the db passwords).

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Posted in HOWTO's, Security
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DotDeb updates: Repo now GPG signed!

i know its actually slightly older news but its worth sharing anyway, the DotDeb repositories are now GPG signed so you can be more assured that the mirrors are as safe and secure as the central mirror and you also dont have to worry about the this repository is not encrypted/signed error any more.

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Posted in General, HOWTO's, Tutorials
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Updating PHP and MySQL on Debian

so a client particularly wanted php 5.3 for a project and mysql 5.1 but at the moment needs to operate on smallest possible footprint.

i did some research on it and actually found a useful resource for updated php and mysql resources called Dotdeb – http://dotdeb.org

the idea of this repository is to keep the core lamp stack binaries up to date and keep support for the ease of updating (via apt-get)

so upon taking a look i decided to trial it on my personal vps and with my niggles i rolled it out to the work server i manage along with the client too.

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Posted in General, HOWTO's, Tutorials
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