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Set up an anonymous FTP server with vsftpd in less than a minute

This small HOWTO describes how to configure vsftpd for an anonymous FTP site in order to make files available across your local network or the internet. The scenario this guide is based on is to quickly make a linux distribution’s installation tree available across the local network in order to be used for a network [...]

Maxmind’s GeoIP.dat.gz location change

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 [...]

Random downtimes during next 2 weeks

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 [...]

Using SSH for networking

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 [...]

How to Disable IPv6 in Fedora and CentOS

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 [...]

Use mod_deflate to Compress Web Content delivered by Apache

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 [...]

Use wget or curl to download from RapidShare Premium

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

SSL-enabled Name-based Apache Virtual Hosts with mod_gnutls

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.

Linux Distribution for Servers

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 [...]

When it comes to error messages…

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 [...]