Ubuntu 16.04 LTS has been out for a little while now, and its standard repos offer some nice enhancements over Ubuntu 14: Apache 2.4.18, PHP 7, and MySQL 5.7.12 The process for creating a basic LAMP web server is also streamlined, as a couple of bugs that plagued Ubuntu 14.04 are now eliminated. To create […]
The Drupal 8 version of this article can be found here. As of today, April 21, 2016, Canonical has released Ubuntu 16.04 Server, supported until 2021. Ubuntu 16.04 has some nice enhancements, and some changes that will affect sysadmins and developers: it ships with Python 3 as the default Python, plus PHP 7, MySQL 5.7, […]
A list of Linux performance monitoring tools for CPU, disk, memory, networking, and debugging. CPU, Memory, Disk Monitoring sar and iostat are part of sysstat and available in most package repos. `sar -switch 1 3` means “perform the test three times at one-second intervals”. List processes by CPU/mem usage: $ htop Show CPU usage, all […]
This is a shorthand summary of web server performance and caching systems as of March 2016. General disclaimer: I try to link benchmark results that seem relatively neutral, but as with any survey or study or benchmark roundup, the most pertinent question is cui bono? Ultimately the only reliable benchmarks are those you run yourself […]
The only method I use to securely erase hard disks is ATA Secure Erase using the hdparm utility. Be sure to read the disclaimers and warnings at kernel.org carefully, since secure erase doesn’t work with all configurations and may brick your drive. The primary benefit of ATA Secure Erase is that it erases 100% of […]
Basic CentOS 7 Kickstart installation script for setting up servers automatically. To use, create a bootable disc containing the script below in the /isolinux directory and type linux ks=cdrom:/ks.cfg at the boot: prompt. #version=RHEL7 # System authorization information auth –enableshadow –passalgo=sha512 # Use CDROM installation media # cdrom # Use network installation repo –name=base –baseurl=http://mirror.oss.ou.edu/centos/7.1.1503/isos/x86_64/ […]
The Zend OPcache is a caching system that seeks to improve PHP performance by keeping precompiled PHP code in the shared memory of your web server. Since PHP is an interpreted language that has to be compiled into a set of intermediate instructions (“opcodes”) when someone accesses your PHP page or site, not having to […]
nmap is a security scanner capable of mapping topology, discovering hosts, determining OS and device profiles, examining individual services, and exposing vulnerabilities across networks. It’s licensed under the GPL and binaries are available for most platforms. A graphical frontend called Zenmap is available in most Linux repos. More specifically, nmap sends ICMP Echo (type 0), […]
mtr combines the behavior of the ping and traceroute utilities: it traces a route path between localhost and a destination device or computer, showing you a list of the routers between them as well as the average round-trip times and packet loss to each router. To do this mtr utilizes ICMP Type 0 and 11 […]
wget wget is a GNU utility for retrieving files over the web using the popular internet transfer protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP). It’s useful either for obtaining individual files or mirroring entire web sites, as it can convert absolute links in downloaded documents to relative links. The GNU wget manual is the definitive resource. Some Useful […]