By Joe Brockmeier
| Server Tutorials Article Published September 06, 2011
Is your hardware inadequate for your site? Throwing more resources at it may not be the best answer. For WordPress sites, W3 Total Cache is an inexpensive way to wring the most out of what you already have.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Server Tutorials Article Published August 29, 2011
Most admins know kill and pkill. But those looking for a quick, clean kill use slay.
By Kenneth Hess
| Server Tutorials Article Published August 26, 2011
If security is a primary concern for you (it should be), introduce yourself to 10 secure Linux distributions ready to work in any environment from small to enterprise to cloud.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Server Tutorials Article Published August 15, 2011
WordPress is one of the most popular CMSes, which means it is among the more commonly exploited. Use the Exploit Scanner plugin to help lock it down.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Server Tutorials Article Published August 09, 2011
Renameutils is aptly named. The easy-to-use collection of utilities makes renaming files as easy as using your favorite text editor.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Server Tutorials Article Published August 01, 2011
When it comes to collecting system status data, sar is a veritable workhorse. It is not, however, without its limitations. If you're in the market for a utility that also handles NFS, Slab data, and sub-second intervals, consider collectl.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Server Tutorials Article Published July 25, 2011
For sys admins, running a process can feel like driving cross-country without a road map. Pipe Viewer is one way to answer the question, 'are we there yet?'
By Joe Brockmeier
| Server Tutorials Article Published July 19, 2011
With GNU ddrescue you need never worry about the impact of optical media degradation on your data.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Server Tutorials Article Published July 11, 2011
Understanding regular expressions is important for anyone who spends time doing
system administration or programming. If that describes you and regexes are
not your strong suit, txt2regex is an excellent tool to have handy.
By Paul Ferrill
| Server Tutorials Article Published July 07, 2011
The initial beta of Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 was released to the MSDN community two months ago. We step through our user experience with and provide some tips to get things working optimally.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Server Tutorials Article Published July 05, 2011
For admins who work with Debian-based systems, the basics dpkg and APT's tools are old hat. For a richer user experiences, like knowing which packages have release-critical bugs, hog the most disk space and so on, Debian Goodies is a set of utilities that's good to know.
By Paul Rubens
| Server Tutorials Article Published June 30, 2011
Stuxnet-style malware that attacks computer hardware, physically destroying servers, networking equipment and storage resources in your data center is easier to create than you might think. Learn how to stop it in its tracks.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Server Tutorials Article Published June 27, 2011
Ready to roll out a site, but not sure how it will perform in real-world use? Consider Siege, an open source load-testing and benchmarking utility that will help stress test your setup before exposing it to the world.
By Paul Ferrill
| Server Tutorials Article Published June 22, 2011
We continue our step-by-step guide of how to build a Linux test server. This
time, we examine storage options and how to configure the machine as a test bed
for new Linux distros.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Server Tutorials Article Published June 20, 2011
Fedora or RHEL users working with RPMs will find these 5 little-known features to be of great value.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Server Tutorials Article Published June 13, 2011
Debian's package tools makes it easy to install and manage packages. For more complex tasks, however, tools are not as well-advertised. Here are five options worth checking out.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Server Tutorials Article Published June 06, 2011
Have a long-running job you want to "detach" from the terminal? Don't use tmux or Screen? If you haven't started the job yet, nohup is an easy to use option, and if you must stop a job in the middle, there's disown.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Server Tutorials Article Published May 31, 2011
No matter what the size is of your IT environment, issue tracking is a critical component of system administration. If you're looking for a simple issue tracking system that can be scaled as your shop grows, check out Roundup, an interesting solution that is easy to both test out and deploy.
By Paul Ferrill
| Server Tutorials Article Published May 27, 2011
Microsoft released a first beta of its upcoming System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 product to the MSDN community in early May. We took it out for a spin, and here's what we found.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Server Tutorials Article Published May 23, 2011
DenyHosts makes it easy to ward off unauthorized SSH connection attempts. The utility blocks attempts to connect to your server via SSH after too many failed attempts or from a blacklisted host.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Server Tutorials Article Published May 16, 2011
When your system is rooted, you can't trust most utilities to show processes from the rootkit. To identify the problem, check out unhide and unhide.rb.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Server Tutorials Article Published May 09, 2011
The tail utility is one of the most useful admin tools, but it's limited and outdated. Bring your log-watching capabilities into the 21st century and view multiple logs at one time with MultiTail.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Server Tutorials Article Published May 02, 2011
This Python app makes use of SSH to create a VPN between a Linux, BSD, or Mac OS X machine and a remote system that has SSH access and Python -- great for building a VPN on the fly.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Server Tutorials Article Published April 26, 2011
Perl may not be glamorous, but its modules are often hard to avoid. Oftentimes, the standard CPAN shell makes using them more difficult than it needs to be. If that's the case for you, consider switching to CPAN Minus.
By Joe Brockmeier
| Server Tutorials Article Published April 18, 2011
If you use git to collaborate, you probably also know about Gist, a Pastebin-type service from Github. But did you also know, that if you're a Vim user you can get even more out of it with the script Gist.vim?
