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 [...]

This is mainly a note to myself about two patches, just in case I ever decide to use OpenSSH for networking, in addition to remote administration. First, is the cipler-none patch that adds none as a valid argument to the -c command line option. By using it, the transferred data is not encrypted. Pros: eliminates [...]

They say that by disabling IPv6 things get a bit smoother and faster regarding networking. I don’t really know if this is true, but I guess, if you’ve decided to disable this feature, you probably care to do it the Right Way™. As far as I know, trying to disable IPv6 through anaconda during the [...]

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 article describes how to use the command line download managers wget and curl in order to download files from your Rapidshare Premium account.

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.

Some days ago, I decided to upgrade my server’s operating system, Fedora. Starting from Fedora Core 3, I have used yum to perform all the distribution upgrades, but for the seventh version of the OS I decided to go all the way re-installing it from scratch. I’ve been improving the server’s configuration files and automation [...]

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 [...]

A while back I had mentioned dircproxy as a solution for an IRC proxy server. Although dircproxy is good and effective, recently I’ve been reading many positive comments about another similar application, BIP. I hope I find some free time in the next days to give it a shot. Judging by its extensive feature set, [...]