Linux Archive

The other day I decided to install Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot nativly on my Dell Studio 1737 laptop. Everything went great except for one thing. When it came time to connect to the Internet or any network resource for that matter I was reminded of the days of dial up in that things were VERY slow. The problem seems to be with the iwlagn module produced by the iwlwifi Linux kernel driver which supports several Intel wireless LAN adapters. There would seem to be a bug in it causing a huge speed decrease when conneted to a 802.11n network. The only solutions I found was to do one of the following things: » Continue Reading

The other day I moved a clients existing Magento powered ecommerce site from Apache to nginx. The following is the configuration file I used to run the application under nginx.

The site is running flawlessly using this configuration and the memory drain caused by Magento under Apache seems to be somewhat less then it used to be meaning I am no longer having to restart the Apache httpd service as I had in the past when things got gummed up be the resource hungry application know as Magento. This configuration takes into account you will want to run Magento under both http and https so the first thing you will want to do is make sure SSL support is enabled in your nginx.conf file.
» Continue Reading

This post is about configuring nginx to run wordpress. The actual setup of WordPress remains the same as with any other server so I will not cover that in this post. For instruction on how to setup WordPress I suggest reading the documentation regarding WordPress installation contained within the WordPress Codex at http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress.

The main difference between running WordPress on a server such as Apache is how the rewrites work. below is a working configuration which runs WordPress flawlessly using nginx which I use. This nginx site configuration file should reside in your /etc/nginx/sites-available/ folder. Be sure to change the paths within this configuration to reflect your paths to WordPress and log files. Once this configuration file is in place and linked to your sites-enabled folder restart your nginx process and you should be good to go with full support for WordPress’es Permalinks. » Continue Reading

In my opinion File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a dated protocol which no administrator in their right mind should ever allow to run on any server they are in charge of administrating. FTP was never a protocol designed to be secure and just as Telnet to access remote servers was replaced long ago so should FTP. I will not go into the many weaknesses of FTP security wise when used over the Internet but I am sure if you are reading this you already understand there is a huge risk allowing such a protocol to run on any of your systems.

There are a few solutions to FTP’s shortcomings when it comes to security such as FTPS and SFTP. In this post I will cover SSH File Transfer Protocol or SFTP. SFTP allows for secure file access, transfer and management over SSH which most Linux servers generally have installed to allow for remote administration.

By default any account with SSH access already has SFTP access as well. The problem with just adding a user and letting them have at it is that by default along with SFTP access users which you only wish to grant file management access also have shell access and may be able to install and run processes you may not wish them to run on your server. The following is a command by command walk through on how to allow users only file management access via SFTP while not allowing them to gain shell access on your server. » Continue Reading

In my previous post I covered the installation of nginx, PHP-FPM and MySQL on Ubuntu. In this post I will cover the installation of APC and Memcached onto the server. As before I kept to the use of of packages located on the official Ubuntu repository in order to keep upgrading and maintainance headaches to a minimum. Also before these are the step I took on an Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) installation. However you should be able to follow the same steps with any newer release of Ubuntu.

Note that this post is meant as a follow up to my previous post on the installation of nginx, PHP-FPM and MySQL on Ubuntu which can be found here. However these steps should work fine for installing APC and Memcached in an Apache environment as well. Just be sure to replace the /etc/init.d/php-fpm restart commands with /etc/init.d/apache2 restart.

This post covers the installation of both APC and Memcached although you may not necessarily need both being that APC is generally capable of doing what Memcached does in smaller environments but depending on your websites software and infrastructure you may need Memcached in place of APC or in conjunction with APC. » Continue Reading

This weekend I decided after reading into the speed gains associated with moving from Apache to nginx to go ahead and fire up a new server and attempt to configure it to run nginx along with PHP-FPM, APC and Memcached. I must admit I was not expecting things to go as well as they did. Quite honestly besides a little bit of a learning curve figuring out rewrites using nginx the install was a breeze. The move to nginx from Apache has increased the performance of my web sites beyond what I honestly expected.

This post will cover the installation of nginx, PHP-FPM and MySQL. In order to keep the size of this post down some what I will cover the installation of APC and Memcached in a post following this one which can be found here. » Continue Reading