As it becomes increasingly easy to deploy servers in a cloud, we often find ourselves wanting to test changes to servers on a running instance. Prudence advices against experimenting on a production server, but there are times when it is necessary to test on a fully functioning instance. For instance, if one wishes to switch… Continue reading Using the Hosts File to Test Virtual Servers
Category: Systems Admin
Topics dealing with servers – specifically setup and operation, in particular on Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure.
Installing vsftpd on Amazon’s Linux AMI
By default, Amazon’s Linux AMI provides only the amzn repository. While this repository does have quite a selection of packages, there are a few commonly used packages that are missing (e.g. php-mcrypt). On the FTP side, the only FTP server included is VS-FTP (vsftpd). While my personal preference has historically been pure-ftpd, this is a… Continue reading Installing vsftpd on Amazon’s Linux AMI
Hardening PHP with Suhosin
Suhosin is a package designed to harden PHP, in the sense that it addresses potential vulnerabilities that might be introduced through user scripts. It comes as both a patch which can be applied directly to the PHP source code and as an extension that can be built for PHP. This article looks at how to… Continue reading Hardening PHP with Suhosin
FastCGI on AWS
The following provides a brief outline of the procedure for getting FastCGI (with SuExec and PHP) working on an EC2 instance running Amazon’s Linux distribution (AMI) under Apache 2.2… Compile the Module: (dependencies include the httpd-devel package) sudo -i yum install httpd-devel cd /usr/local/src wget http://www.fastcgi.com/dist/mod_fastcgi-current.tar.gz tar -xzvf mod_fastcgi-2.4.6.tar.gz cd mod_fastcgi-2.4.6 cp Makefile.AP2 Makefile make… Continue reading FastCGI on AWS
Website Optimizations, Part 1
I have recently been working on a few optimizations for this site. While there are many more to go, I thought I would note a few while they were still fresh. While I prefer Chrome as my daily browser, because of a few addon’s, Firefox is my testing browser of choice. A few must have… Continue reading Website Optimizations, Part 1
Virtualmin on AWS Linux AMI
I have been playing with the AWS Linux AMI for the past few days, and have been setting up a new server based on it. I decided to go with Webmin/Virtualmin on this server, but ran into a couple of problems along the way. The one I wish to mention at the moment, is that… Continue reading Virtualmin on AWS Linux AMI
PuTTY SSH
Having used PuTTY a lot over the past few years, I have often found it to have a few default settings that are rather annoying: Firstly, the colours – I never seem to be able to make out dark blue on black Change ‘ANSI Blue’ and ‘ANSI Bold Blue’ under Window > Colours Secondly, the… Continue reading PuTTY SSH
Setting up a RAID on EC2
At home, I have my operating system drive setup in RAID 0 (striped). The advantage of this, of course, is that read and write speed is appreciably increased (my benchmarks show the array to be about 1.7x as fast as either drive on its own (mind you, I am using older drives, and they are not quite… Continue reading Setting up a RAID on EC2
Migrating an AMI to use an EBS-root
As some of my sites run code not permissible on shared hosting plans, I have previously used a dedicated server, and more recently (the past year), have used Amazon EC2. My original images ran in the m1.small category (the default), but with the addition of the t1.micro category last week, I decided to migrate to… Continue reading Migrating an AMI to use an EBS-root