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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How to Benchmark Your System (CPU, File IO, MySQL) with Sysbench
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: linux •
Comments: 14 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: 13 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 To Tell Apache To Not Log Certain Requests In Its Access Log
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: apache •
Comments: 15 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: 34 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: 73 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 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.
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How To Save Traffic With nginx's HttpGzipModule on Debian Jessie
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: debian, nginx, web server •
Comments: 0 In this tutorial, I will describe how to configure HttpGzipModule on a nginx web server (on Debian 8). HttpGzipModule allows nginx to compress files and deliver them to clients (e.g. browsers) that can handle compressed content which most modern browsers do. With HttpGzipModule, you can compress HTML, CSS, Javascript, text or XML files to approx. 20 - 30% of their original sizes, thus saving you server traffic and making your modem users happier.
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nginx - 413 Request Entity Too Large
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: errors, linux •
Comments: 1 You see the following error in your browser when you try to upload a file through http: 413 Request entity Too Large
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Basic HTTP Authentication with Nginx
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: linux, nginx, web server •
Comments: 6 This tutorial shows how you can use basic HTTP authentication with Nginx to password-protect directories on your server or even a whole website. This is the Nginx equivalent to basic HTTP authentication on Apache with .htaccess/.htpasswd.
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Rate Limiting with nginx
Author: Falko Timme •
Tags: nginx, web server •
Comments: 0 This article explains how to use the nginx HttpLimitReqModule to limit the number of requests for a given session. This is useful, for example, if your site is hammered by a bot doing multiple requests per second and thus increasing your server load. With the ngx_http_limit_req_module, you can define a rate limit, and if a visitor exceeds this rate, he will get a 503 error.
