If you run a recent vintage of Ubuntu, you may encounter the following dpkg error when you’re trying to update or install packages. This is usually caused by Ubuntu simultaneously running another instance of the package manager, often on system startup. Still, it can be annoying when you’re trying to update your system. So you […]
Category: Systems Administration
rkhunter on Ubuntu
This article details how to install and use rkhunter, the Rootkit Hunter anti-rootkit utility, on Ubuntu Server 16.04. Install and Update rkhunter Run a Scan If you don’t want to see all the checks, you can print only the warnings and positives instead: Interpreting the Results In this case, /usr/bin/wp is an installation of WP-CLI. […]
Using ufw on Ubuntu
ufw, or the Uncomplicated Firewall, is a convenient front end for managing iptables on your Ubuntu server. This article provides a brief tutorial on some of the most commonly used commands. ufw is available in Ubuntu from the 8.04 release onward, and the commands here should apply to any current version. Viewing the ufw Status […]
Ubuntu 16.04 Mail Server Updates
My previous instructions for setting up a Postfix/Dovecot/MySQL mail server on Ubuntu 12.04 work mostly as-is for Ubuntu 16.04, but there are a couple of gotchas. These workarounds are necessary due to some different locations of utilities on the filesystem and some changes to Ubuntu’s internals. We’ll go through these differences one by one. Mail […]
Install WP-CLI
The wp-cli command-line utility allows you to manage your WordPress sites without going through the WordPress dashboard, much like Drush does for Drupal. To install Composer and wp-cli on Ubuntu 16.04: Install Composer (I’d recommend not doing this as root.) Install wp-cli This installs wp-cli to $HOME/.config/composer/vendor/wp-cli/wp-cli/bin/wp To make things easier on yourself, symlink it:
WordPress: Optimizing Nginx and WP Super Cache
Today we’re going to compare the performance of a WordPress site before and after we install and optimize the WP Super Cache plugin. We’re running Ubuntu 16.04 Server, Nginx 1.10, PHP 7 with the Zend OPcache, MariaDB, and WordPress 4.6 with a few other plugins (Akismet, Jetpack, Yoast SEO, and Google Analytics). The system itself […]
Stop xmlrpc.php Attacks
Summary: how to diagnose and eliminate the xmlrpc.php WordPress exploit when it’s clobbering your web server. You’ve been running a public Ubuntu 12+ and Apache/LAMP web server for a while now. Until recently everything has worked fine, but suddenly your server is struggling to display even static pages. Sometimes content takes forever to load, and […]
Recompile Nginx (1.9+) Installed with Apt On Ubuntu 16.04
As mentioned in my older article on the subject, for many years Nginx had no hook for dynamically adding new modules, which meant having to recompile Nginx to add functionality. But the Nginx company has worked to address that issue: as of version 1.9.11, Nginx supports dynamic module loading. Still, there may be cases where […]
Install the Latest Nginx From Source on Ubuntu 16.04
So you want to install Nginx from source on Ubuntu. However, you want Nginx to work like you had installed it with the package manager. This means the startup file (/etc/init.d/nginx), binary (/usr/sbin/nginx), config directory (/etc/nginx/) and log files (/var/log/nginx/) will all be found in the usual Debian/Ubuntu locations. Fortunately this is pretty easy to […]
OTRS Installation (5.0.11) on Ubuntu 16.04
This article describes how to install the latest open source OTRS help desk system on an Ubuntu 16.04 server. If you’ve used my previous article, the procedure is little changed from before, but some of the specific commands are different. As of this writing, the current version of OTRS is 5.0.11, and I’m starting with […]