Zen of Linux

Offering https:// (SSL secured encrypted connections) is a feature most demanding webmasters who care about their customer’s privacy will want to offer on any e-Commerce website.
Here is a small how-to about configuring your apache to use SSL and how to install the required certificates. This is known as using a self-signed certificate.
First, install some required […]

While configuring, changing or testing stuff on a dedicated server, things might break or you lock yourself out. Things like that often happen while securing your server. Anyway, there is help!
Most ISPs offer a rescue console or booting into a rescue system to undo unwanted changes or rescue data from a defunct system. The rescue […]

Running your own server is challenging. One of the first steps you should take though, are measures to make your system more secure and keep unwanted guests or intruders outside. In this simple how-to on securing a linux server, I’d like to mention a few basic steps I would recommend in order to harden […]

After a fresh install of WordPress and the first posts you did to find your way around the admin panel and basic functionality of WP, some users start to fiddle with the knobs and begin to customise the appearance of their blog.
While this is OK for the human reader of your blog, it might not […]

After wrangling with an older Kyocera printer on the Eee PC, the next level is to connect a newer HP LaserJet 1018.
The Xandros printer management actually recognizes the device by the correct id, but as printing does not work right after connecting, this seems to be just the id that is transferred via the USB […]

An up and running operating system exposes a number of services to the user or the network by running so called deamons in the background. These are the services you may be familiar with from the Microsoft Windows envirnment, where the Task Manager (opened with <CTRL>+<ALT>+<DEL>) lists all sorts of little programms humming away.
No, under […]

Compiling an application or programm from source is actually not as complicated as it seems. In most cases and when everything is setup right, the procedure is as follows:

Go to a directory where you have write permissions or become the superuser root
Get the source of the application, for example from the web with wget
Untar the […]

When on console, you can exit the X Server, which is running in the background, with:
/etc/init.d/gdm stop
or later restart it with:
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart
The toggle shortcut to switch back to the X Server’s GUI is <CTRL> + <Alt> + <Backspace>

The are numerous scenarios possible, where a RAID system can get out of sync. That means that the data on one disk is not exactly the same as on the other drive - although these two disks should be in perfect sync all the time. But don’t panic, this is what RAID was actually made […]

This is a short how-to to create and mount a software RAID 1 partitition.
Before you start, it may be helpful to read this
Then begin to mechanically install your new disks. Check the /dev directory. Your new disks should show up. In my case they were automatically labeled “sdb” and “sdc”, “s..” as these are SATA […]