CentOS is one of the most popular Linux distributions, for several key reasons. As an operating system that is fully compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), it offers most of the advantages of a commercial distribution, for free. In addition, CentOS is widely used in the hosting industry because it serves as the platform …
Package manager yum is one of the most important tools available to a CentOS 7 system administrator. If the command fails to work, due to various reasons, the update, installation and removal of packages becomes a very difficult task. While software can still be installed from RPMs or compiled from source, yum has many advantages …
You are probably already familiar with the system monitoring tool top or similar programs such as htop, iotop or mytop. Atop is another related command line monitoring tool that provides extended functionality. It displays more information than top and can for example report the resource usage of completed processes. The most useful feature of atop …
Just like the name suggests, remote desktop applications (RDP) allow you to access a server remotely and fully control it. They have many practical uses, from simple tasks such as helping a user install software or troubleshoot an issue to really complex system administration tasks. Some of the largest IT companies in the world rely …
The popularity of chat application Discord has skyrocketed in the gaming community, where it is now the main communication tool. Discord has many advantages, one of the most important is the fact that it is open source and can be easily self-hosted. That means that you can quickly setup a server of your own, create …
PHP is a programming language that remains by far the top choice for web development. While it is criticized for not being a clean language or a very fast one, the latest statistics show that almost 80% of all the websites in the world are PHP-based. It is used everywhere and provides the best compatibility, …
One of the issues facing all webmasters is bad bots. Whether it’s comment spam, drive-by hacking attempts, or DDoS attacks, you’ve probably seen the issues some automated traffic can cause. In this blog post, we’ll be delving into an easy way of stopping common bad bots, using .htaccess files and mod_rewrite. If you’re using the …
Monitoring Linux servers – the ultimate beginner’s guide Server monitoring is one of the most important tasks of a Linux system administrator. Even the most stable server will eventually experience spikes of traffic, high CPU load and other such events that require manual intervention. This is why setting up a reliable monitoring system is critical, …
A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, is a service that creates an encrypted tunnel between the location of your computer and a remote server. All of your Internet traffic is routed through this tunnel, effectively masking your real location since your computer will seem to have the IP address of the VPN server. In addition, …
LVM, or the Logical Volume Manager, is a Linux volume partitioning solution that has been around for some time and provides a number of advanced features. While many people confuse LVM with the file system, it actually works on a separate layer in order to create a virtual partitioning scheme on top of the actual …