Articles by Falko Timme
About Falko Timme
Falko Timme is an experienced Linux administrator and founder of Timme Hosting, a leading nginx business hosting company in Germany. He is one of the most active authors on HowtoForge since 2005 and one of the core developers of ISPConfig since 2000. He has also contributed to the O'Reilly book "Linux System Administration".
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Mirror Your Web Site With rsync
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: backup, debian, linux, ubuntu •
Comments: 43 •
Updated: Aug 06, 2018 This tutorial shows how you can mirror your web site from your main web server to a backup server that can take over if the main server fails. We use the tool rsync for this, and we make it run through a cron job that checks every x minutes if there is something to update on the mirror. Thus your backup server should usually be up to date if it has to take over.
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Linux screen Command: Keep Processes Running Despite a Dropped Connection
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: linux, other •
Comments: 17 •
Updated: Apr 18, 2018 Linux screen Command: Keep Your Processes Running Despite A Dropped Connection I guess you all know this: you are connected to your server with SSH and in the middle of compiling some software (e.g. a new kernel) or doing some other task which takes lots of time, and suddenly your connection drops for some reason, and you lose your labour.
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Checking Package Dependencies with apt-rdepends on Debian and Ubuntu
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: debian, shell, ubuntu •
Comments: 1 •
Updated: Apr 10, 2018 This guide shows how you can check the dependencies of a package with the tool apt-rdepends on Debian and Ubuntu systems. The great thing about apt-rdepends is that it resolves dependencies recursively, i.e., not only does it show the direct dependencies of a package, but also the dependencies' dependencies. This is great, for example, if you want to rebuild a package from the sources, etc.
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How to Benchmark Your System (CPU, File IO, MySQL) with Sysbench
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: linux •
Comments: 14 •
Updated: Mar 29, 2018 How to benchmark your system (CPU, File IO, MySQL) with sysbench. Sysbench is a benchmark suite which allows you to quickly get an impression about system performance which is important if you plan to run a database under intensive load. This article explains how to benchmark your CPU, file IO, and MySQL performance with sysbench.
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Setting Up Postfix As A Backup MX
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: email, postfix •
Comments: 11 •
Updated: Mar 26, 2018 Setting Up Postfix As A Backup MX. In this tutorial, I will show how you can set up a Postfix mail server as a backup mail exchanger for a domain so that it accepts mails for this domain in case the primary mail exchanger is down or unreachable and passes the mails on to the primary MX once that one is up again.
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How do I edit files on the command line?
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: other, shell •
Comments: 4 •
Updated: Feb 02, 2018 To edit files on the command line, you can use an editor such as vi. To open the file, run vi /path/to/file Now you see the contents of the file (if there is any. Please note that the file is created if it does not exist yet.). The most important commands in vi are these: Press i to enter the Insert mode. Now you can type in your text. To leave the Insert mode press ESC.
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How To Tell Apache To Not Log Certain Requests In Its Access Log
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: apache •
Comments: 13 •
Updated: Oct 25, 2017 How To Tell Apache To Not Log Certain Requests In Its Access Log. Normally Apache logs all requests in its access log. In certain cases this can distort your page view statistics (if you use a tool like Webalizer or AWStats that creates statistics based on Apache's access log), for example if you get lots of visits from search engine spiders or from a certain IP address (e.g. your own), or if each of your pages includes another page (e.g. in an iframe) from your web site (that would instantly double your page views which is obviously not correct). This short guide shows how you use Apache's SetEnvIf directive to prevent Apache from logging such requests.
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How To Configure Remote Access To Your Ubuntu Desktop
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: desktop, ubuntu •
Comments: 29 •
Updated: Aug 28, 2017 This guide explains how you can enable a remote desktop on an Ubuntu desktop so that you can access and control it remotely. This makes sense for example if you have customers that are not very tech-savvy. If they have a problem, you can log in to their desktops without the need to drive to their location. I will also show how to access the remote Ubuntu desktop from a Windows client and an Ubuntu client.
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Key-Based SSH Logins With PuTTY
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: linux, security •
Comments: 66 •
Updated: Aug 03, 2017 This guide describes how to generate and use a private/public key pair to log in to a remote system with SSH using PuTTY. PuTTY is an SSH client that is available for Windows and Linux (although it is more common on Windows systems). Using key-based SSH logins, you can disable the normal username/password login procedure which means that only people with a valid private/public key pair can log in. That way, there is no way for brute-force attacks to be successful, so your system is more secure.
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nginx: How To Block Exploits, SQL Injections, File Injections, Spam, User Agents, Etc.
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: linux, nginx, security, web server •
Comments: 9 •
Updated: Jun 16, 2017 This short article explains how you can block the most common exploits, SQL injections, file injections, spam and user agents used by hackers and bandwidth hoggers from your nginx vhosts with some simple configuration directives. This configuration is far from being complete, but it's a good starting point. You will have to watch your logs for attempted break-in attempts and then try to modify/complete the ruleset.
