All Questions

A security auditor for our servers has demanded the following within two weeks: A list of current usernames and plain-text passwords for all user accounts on all servers A list of all password ...

I am responsible for maintaining two Debian servers. Every time I have to do anything with security certificates, I Google for tutorials and beat away until it finally works. However, in my searches ...

I need to get a list of human readable du output. However, du does not have a "sort by size" option, and piping to sort doesn't work with the human readable flag. For example, running: du | sort -...

What is the best way to determine if a variable in bash is empty ("")? I have heard that it is recommended that I do if [ "x$variable" = "x" ] Is that the correct way? (there must be something more ...

Just a quick sanity check here. Can you ping a specific port of a machine, and if so, can you provide an example? I'm looking for something like ping ip address portNum.

Currently I can only copy a single .tar file. But how can I copy directories recursively with scp?

This is a Canonical Question about Server Security - Responding to Breach Events (Hacking) See Also: Tips for Securing a LAMP Server Reinstall after a Root Compromise? Canonical ...

One thing that annoys me no end about Windows is the old sharing violation error. Often you can't identify what's holding it open. Usually it's just an editor or explorer just pointing to a relevant ...

I want to rewrite all http requests on my web server to be https requests, I started with the following: server { listen 80; location / { rewrite ^(.*) https://mysite.com$1 ...

My Git setup runs fine on Linux, but when I try to set things up under Windows (using Git for Windows and TortoiseGit), I don't know where to put my private SSH key (or, better still, how to tell ssh ...

How to automate SSH login with password? I'm configuring my test VM, so heavy security is not considered. SSH chosen for acceptable security with minimal configuration. ex) echo password | ssh id@...

I just wondered what exactly the difference between [[ $STRING != foo ]] and [ $STRING != foo ] is, apart from that the latter is posix-compliant, found in sh and the former is an extension found ...

By default, htop shows colored status bars for processors, memory, and swap. From left to right, the bars are colored green, blue, yellow, and red depending on some thresholds. What does it mean when ...

The other day, we notice a terrible burning smell coming out of the server room. Long story short, it ended up being one of the battery modules that was burning up in the UPS unit, but it took a good ...

This is a Canonical Question about IPv4 Subnets. Related: How does IPv6 subnetting work and how does it differ from IPv4 subnetting? How does Subnetting Work, and How do you do it by ...

When I try to ssh to another box, I get this strange error $ ssh hostname Bad owner or permissions on ~/.ssh/config But I made sure that I own and have rw permissions on the file: ls -la ~/.ssh/ ...

I have just installed postgres 8.4 on Ubuntu 9.10 and it has never asked me to create a superuser. Is there a default superuser and its password? If not, how do I create a new one?

We all know it happens. A bitter old IT guy leaves a backdoor into the system and network in order to have fun with the new guys and show the company how bad things are without him. I've never ...

*NOTE: if your server still has issues due to confused kernels, and you can't reboot - the simplest solution proposed with gnu date installed on your system is: date -s now. This will reset the ...

I'd like to graph the size (in bytes, and # of items) of an Amazon S3 bucket and am looking for an efficient way to get the data. The s3cmd tools provide a way to get the total file size using s3cmd ...

I have Googled about a solution for quite some time, but couldn't find an answer. I am on Ubuntu Linux and want to run a server on port 80, but due to security mechanism of Ubuntu, I get the ...

This is a Canonical Question about File Permissions on a Linux web server. I have a Linux web server running Apache2 that hosts several websites. Each website has its own folder in /var/www/. /var/...

I have an existing public/private key pair. The private key is password protected, and the encryption may be either RSA or DSA. These keys are the kind you generate with ssh-keygen and generally store ...

We received an interesting "requirement" from a client today. They want 100% uptime with off-site failover on a web application. From our web application's viewpoint, this isn't an issue. It was ...

The aim for this Wiki is to promote using a command to open up commonly used applications without having to go through many mouse clicks - thus saving time on monitoring and troubleshooting Windows ...

Every tech conference I've ever been to, and I've been to a lot, has had absolutely abysmal Wi-Fi and Internet access. Sometimes it's the DHCP server running out of addresses. Sometimes the backhaul ...

This is a Canonical Question about selecting the right Apache httpd MPM. I'm a little confused between the different MPMs offered by Apache - 'worker', 'event', 'prefork', etc. What are the major ...

Is there a secret way to bind MySQL to more than one IP address? As far as I can see the bind-address parameter in the my.cnf does not support more than one IP and you can't have it more than once.

Here's my situation: I'm setting up a test harness that will, from a central client, launch a number of virtual machine instances and then execute commands on them via ssh. The virtual machines will ...

In IIS 7 on Windows Server 2008, application pools can be run as the "ApplicationPoolIdentity" account instead of the NetworkService account. How do I assign permissions to this "...

This is a Canonical Question about Apache's mod_rewrite. Changing a request URL or redirecting users to a different URL than the one they originally requested is done using mod_rewrite. This includes ...

You know, you see pictures like below and sort of chuckle until you actually have to deal with it. I have just inherited something that looks like the picture below. The culture of the organization ...

I have searched for this option already, but have only found solutions that involve custom patching. The fact that it does not show in --help and no more info can be found probably indicates the ...

How do I get the current Unix time in milliseconds (i.e number of milliseconds since Unix epoch January 1 1970)?

Is there a built-in command line tool that will do reverse DNS look-ups in Windows? I.e., something like <toolname> w.x.y.z => mycomputername I've tried: nslookup: seems to be forward look-...

I'm doing some test-runs of long-running data migration scripts, over SSH. Let's say I start running a script around 4 PM; now, 6 PM rolls around, and I'm cursing myself for not doing this all in ...

This is a Canonical Question about File Permission and Why 777 is "destructive". I'm not asking how to fix this problem, as there are a ton of references of that already on Server Fault (reinstall OS)...

This is a Canonical Question about using cron & crontab. You have been directed here because the community is fairly sure that the answer to your question can be found below. If your question is ...

I have to copy a large directory tree, about 1.8 TB. It's all local. Out of habit I'd use rsync, however I wonder if there's much point, and if I should rather use cp. I'm worried about permissions ...

I just installed an SSL Certificate on my server. It then set up a redirect for all traffic on my domain on Port 80 to redirect it to Port 443. In other words, all my http://example.com traffic is ...

I have a couple of networking components in my rack that take giant AC adapters ("power bricks") that don't fit neatly into my rackmount PDU. I have one "thingy" that is shown below, and I need to ...

Other than for historical reasons, is there is reason to have “www” in a URL? Should I create a permanent redirect from www.xyz.com to xyz.com, or from xyz.com to www.xyz.com? Which one would you ...

I know that 127.0.0.1 ~ 127.255.255.254 are the loopback IP addresses for most modern operating systems, and these IP addresses can be used to refer to our own computer. But what's 0.0.0.0? It seems ...

In Chrome, clicking on the green HTTPS lock icon opens a window with the certificate details: When I tried the same with cURL, I got only some of the information: $ curl -vvI https://gnupg.org * ...

I'm looking for an overly simplified answer to the following question. I'm trying to build a foundational understanding of how Nginx works alongside something like Gunicorn. Do I need both Nginx and ...

How can I check what modules have been added to an nginx installation?

I want to secure a file upload directory on my server as described beautifully here, but I have one problem before I can follow these instructions. I don't know what user Apache is running as. I've ...

My office job routinely sees me connected to a Linux box via VNC. Sometimes I start a remote job on the console, and realize later that it runs much longer than expected. (Should have started that ...

I need to troubleshoot some problems related to environment variables on a Unix system. On Windows, I can use a tool such as ProcessExplorer to select particular a process and view values of each ...

I would like to know if there's a way to tell which local branch is tracking which remote branch in Git. I'm using one remote server, which is named "origin".