Author: Patrick Hawkins

So you are ready to banish the self-signed SSL certificate error from your control panel. How does one go about doing so? Although there are a number of steps, it is ultimately pretty simple.

Many customers who are purchasing their first server with Liquid Web are surprised to see a foreboding warning in their browser the first time they log on to their control panel:

The time on your dedicated server might not be something you think about every day, but it is vitally important to keeping every piece of your server running in sync. Since it is so crucial, a lot of effort has been made by Linux developers to make it run smoothly without much effort. However, there are a few things you are going to be able to want to do with time on your server.

Now that you have seen the basics of exigrep, let us dive into some e-mail troubleshooting where exigrep really shines.

Perhaps a particular domain on your cPanel server has stopped receiving e-mail. Or, an address on your domain is able to receive e-mail, except from your supplier. Maybe you can receive e-mail just fine, but are receiving error message bounce-backs from Yahoo. How are you going to get the fine-grained information you need to figure out just what is going on?

Occasionally, you will find that you need to open up a port in your firewall for some application or another. Depending on which firewall is installed on your server, there are several ways to go about this:

Imagine you have a file. Perhaps it is a log file. It is long, and has much information in it. And buried somewhere in that file, there is one piece of information that you need to find. It would take far too long to read through the huge file. This situation cries out for some faster method of extracting that piece of information.

So, you know how to ssh into your server. But how do you know if anyone else is shelled into your VPS server or Dedicated server?

While no substitute for your own offsite backups, cPanel backups are extremely useful for recovering data in certain situations.

What is APF?

Advanced Policy Firewall, or APF, is a firewall sometimes seen on Liquid Web’s servers. It is basically an interface to iptables, which is the standard interface to managing network ports on Linux machines. Interacting with iptables can be complex and error-prone, and APF greatly simplifies working with it. However, APF is still only accessible by ssh. There is no way to make changes in APF through WHM or cPanel.