Tag: Linux

Fast, Portable and Secure.

Containerization is a technology that is taking the IT world by storm! It’s no surprise considering the considerable benefits of shifting to a container based deployment.

Introduction

The servers that run our applications, our businesses, all depend on the stability and underlying features offered by the operating system (or OS) installed. As administrators, we have to plan ahead and think to the future of how our users will use the machines we oversee while simultaneously ensuring that those machines remain stable and online. There are numerous operating systems to choose from; however one of the most popular, most stable, and highly supported OSes is CentOS. A combination of excellent features, rock-solid performance stability, and the backing of enterprise-focused institutions such as Red Hat and Fedora have led to CentOS becoming a mainstay OS that administrators can count on.

Whether you’re new to hosting websites or a seasoned developer, you’ve more than likely heard of a LAMP stack. The LAMP stack is the base set of applications that most websites running on a Linux server are served from and is commonly referred to as “Lamp”. Rather than a single program that interacts with the website being served, LAMP is actually a number of independent programs that operate in tandem: Linux, Apache, MySQL/MariaDB, and PHP. Throughout this article, we’ll walk through installing the LAMP stack on your CentOS 7 server so you can run a website from any Dedicated Server or Virtual Private Server. Although we’re focusing on installing LAMP on a CentOS 7 server, the steps that we’ll cover are very similar across multiple Linux distributions.

You may find the “can’t resolve hostname” or “temporary failure in name resolution” error when using retrieval command like wget, cURL, ping or nslookup. There are many reasons why these commands can cause an error, including file corruption.  For the sake of brevity, we look towards commonalities between these commands to solve the issue.

When using PhpMyAdmin, it’s essential to have the correct user permissions to create edits/writes to the database.  Otherwise, insufficient permissions can lead to  errors like the ones pictured below “#1044 – Access denied for user …[using password: YES]” and “#1045 – Access denied for user…[using password: YES]”.  In our tutorial, we’ll show you how to correct this issue using the command line terminal.  Let’s get started!

Sites with SSL are needed more and more every day. Its ubiquitous enforcement challenges website encryption and is even an effort that Google has taken up. Certbot and Let’s Encrypt are popular solutions for big and small businesses alike because of the ease of implementation.  Certbot is a software client that can be downloaded on a server, like one of our Ubuntu VPS servers, to install and auto-renew SSLs. It obtains these SSLs by working with the well known SSL provider called Let’s Encrypt. In this tutorial, we’ll be showing you a swift way of getting HTTPS enabled on your site.  Let’s get started!

As administrators for many of our VPS servers and Dedicated servers, we may find ourselves needing to do certain things while on the go. We may also not have a laptop or PC within reach. But one thing most of us have at all times is a cell phone. Whether we have an Android or an iPhone, most of us do possess a smartphone. One thing great about these smartphones is their constant connection to the Internet. Having that constant connection makes it simple to use various apps that assist with admin tasks through our smartphones. Here is a list of five applications available both on iPhone and Android. If you are interested in checking them out, click on your phone’s type next to the application name. You can also search for these applications by name in your smartphone’s app store.

Our last article on Ubuntu security suggestions touched on the importance of passwords, user roles, console security, and firewalls. We continue with our last article and while the recommendations below are not unique to Ubuntu specifically (nearly all discussed are considered best practice for any Linux VPS server or dedicated server) but they should be an important consideration in securing your server.

Thank you for taking the time to review this important information. You will find this guide broken down into six major sections that coincide with Ubuntu’s security policy guide. The major topics we talk on throughout these articles are as follows:

What Does Varnish Do?

Varnish is a website accelerator. It’s designed to decrease the time it takes for your website to load and an ideal tool for improving performance on busy, mission-critical sites.