Until now I have been creating partition images with Partimage, which has never failed. Another very popular tool nowadays is CloneZilla. This software, which happens to include partimage among various other utilities, has wider filesystem support and a better set of features – taking/restoring backups across the network is supported. The fact that this is [...]

This article describes how to implement SSL-enabled name-based vhosts – that is secure virtual hosts which share the same IP address and port – with the SNI-capable mod_gnutls module for Apache’s httpd web server.

This post is both a tip about vsftpd‘s configuration and an example of what an error message should not look like. If you use vsftpd’s user_config_dir directive in order to set a directory that will hold configuration files for per-user customized server options, be warned that, if one of those files contains a directive whose [...]

I don’t know if 260000+ rejected attempts to relay email through an email server within a week should be considered an attack or just a considerable amount of bad traffic, but for my small server with the limited bandwidth this was an incident that I wouldn’t like to face on a regular basis. This article [...]

Apache is a very flexible web server implementation. The .htaccess files give the webmasters the ability to override the default server configuration on a per-directory basis, provided that httpd’s configuration pernits the overrides of the htaccess file. I am aware that there are thousands of cheat sheets (aka ready-made recipes) out there, mostly implementing mod_rewrite conditional redirections, but I decided to bookmark this article because it is very well and carefully written.

The Slack World, a Slackware related online magazine has published a very good write-up about how to create a chroot environment. Tom Newsom writes in his article: In this document I shall be showing you how you can run, for testing purposes perhaps, two versions of Slackware simultaneously. Both will be fully fledged installs and [...]

The Red Hat Magazine included an excellent tip about how to lock out a user, if it fails to supply a valid password for a pre-defined number of login attempts. This is implemented by making use of the The PAM module pam_tally. This practice serves as a barrier for those, either human or bots, who [...]

A long time has passed since Fedora 6 was released, many of the initial bugs have been fixed, so I decided to perform an upgrade of the installation on the server that powers this web site. Everything has gone well, despite the fact that a few strange things happened during the upgrade.

When it comes to business – despite the recent Microsoft-Novell deal -, interoperability and maximum compatibility between two major Linux distributions are of significant importance, as they can lead to less maintenance time, effort, trouble and costs. Having written that, I consider this article, which describes how to create RPM packages and initscripts that are [...]

Those who use a SELinux enabled distribution – more specifically those who have set the SELinux security layer to enforcing mode – will most probably know about the auditd daemon (part of the audit package in Fedora Core). By default, all SELinux messages are recorded to the syslog, but when auditd is running, then all [...]