Linux System Admins Blog

Here is a quick tip on how to remove a list of files. Let’s say you have the list of files inside a file called files_to_remove. Usually I would do something like this:
LIST=`cat files_to_remove`
and then
ls -al $LIST
just to check what is in the list and if it looks good.
And finally:
rm -vf $LIST

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I made a copy of Drupal6 site with SecurePages module installed and configured. This module is configured to redirect all or certain pages to https – depending on your configurations. For our setup we usually include the login and admin sections to redirect to https.
The problem is on the copied site that is [...]

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Although we made it a standard not to make any changes to Drupal core and core modules, there are times that our developers really need to make changes to core modules in order to add the required functionality. Cases like additional feature for ‘user’ or ‘comment’ modules and so on. At this state [...]

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Fedora release 12 became available to the public November 17, 2009. New features are plentiful and many are centred around KVM virtualization.
If you are like me and still running Fedora 10 or 11 and do not wish to wait till a yum based update is pushed out you can kick off your adventure into Fedora [...]

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Latest version of PHP available for RHEL5.x is 5.1.6 and no new RedHat releases are coming as packaging has ceased. You can get PHP 5.3 for RHEL5 from Remi, but it it’s incompatible with latest versions of Drupal, Civicrm or many modules so we need the a 5.2X branch of PHP. This requires building php [...]

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If you are using a shared server, or just have a limited account on your company servers, you might not have access to your php configuration file php.ini (this is usually found under /etc/php.ini in rhel/centos and /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini in debian/ubuntu). Still, in many situations it might be needed to enable php errors in the browser [...]

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This quick post will show how we can easily allow only certain http referrers see some location using nginx. This might be useful for example if you are using nginx as a static content provider and want to not allow everyone hot-linking your images and only your own sites. Doing something like this in nginx [...]

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Many people use subversion over ssh for a simple and secure way to work on remotely hosted svn repositories. This is normally as simple as running:
svn co svn+ssh://user@server/repo .
If the remote ssh server is not running on the default ssh port (tcp 22) then this needs a little tweaking to get it working. Normally I [...]

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This is my second activity on using AWS – this time the use of EBS.
Objectives:

Format a new EBS (10GB) and mount it on a running instance of private AMI (created on first activity – add link/ref to old post)
Setup a MySQL server with the datastore on EBS partition
Setup the partition(EBS) to start [...]

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Are you often waiting over 1 minute to get a ssh prompt? This can be caused by several things however more often then not is a missing PTR record for server address and enabled GSSAPIAuthentication in ssh_config. GSSAPIAuthentiction is Kerberos 5 centralized authentication/authorization mechanism that relies on resolving a hostname for proper operation, when it [...]

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