Usually, the only time I make a change to the timezone setting of the operating system is during the installation time. But it may happen that a change to that setting is necessary. There are several ways to do this, but, as usual, there is only one Right Way™ to set the timezone info in [...]

During the last months, I’ve been experimenting with Xen virtualization. An old computer, equipped with a Pentium III running at 700Mhz, 512MB of RAM and an 160GB IDE HDD runs four installations of my favorite Linux distribution, CentOS, one as a Dom0 and the other three as DomUs with 64MB of memory each.

If there are still references to device nodes for block devices, as they are set by the kernel, for example /dev/hda, in /etc/fstab, you should seriously consider replacing them with the volume’s label or its UUID. Even if you use an LVM setup, the /boot partition shouldn’t be referenced by its device node.

I’ve used the phrase “writable by the webserver” numerous times throughout this blog, without ever bothering to explain in detail what this means. Yesterday, I received an email asking me exactly that, so I decided to finally write a post about it and use it as a reference whenever I use the aforementioned phrase. I’ll [...]

delayed-shutdown is an initscript that delays the shutdown (runlevel 0) or reboot (runlevel 6) procedure as long as a pre-defined lock file exists. The goal is to create a mechanism, which can be used by programs that perform critical operations that must not be interrupted, in order to delay system shutdown until these programs have [...]

Today I noticed that AWStats, the web traffic analysis tool, had stopped generating valid reports since November 23. After spending about 3 whole hours trying to figure out what on earth had happened and having checked all the things that could have gone wrong, I went through all the automatic emails my server had sent [...]

Last weekend I spent most of my free time revising the configuration of the server. This time my sole intention is to further improve the allocation of resources (mainly memory) to the various services. This involves a lot of testing, graphing and note taking as some of the currently used software needs to be fine-tuned [...]

From a user’s perspective, having to use an old beta version of Firefox in my primary desktop, while, at the same time, a final stable release of the browser has been released, is a bit annoying. But, the fact that this happens due to technical issues makes it partially acceptable. The following article aims to [...]

One of the most efficient methods to reduce the usage of bandwidth by the web server and, at the same time, increase the speed of the content delivery is to compress your web pages and, generally, all output that is returned to the clients. The compression of the web content can be done using several [...]

This post is not an article about how to receive email notifications from your system, but rather a tip about what should be your very first (No.1) action after a clean installation of a Linux system. It is well known that Linux – and obviously many other *nix systems, if not all – are pre-configured [...]