One of the necessities of a multi-boot setup is partitioning, but the uses of partitioning go far beyond its application to multi-boot setups. The act of splitting a drive into multiple logical parts is known as partitioning; each part is called a partition. A physical drive refers to the actual, tangible device, while logical drives refer… Continue reading Partitioning Basics
AWS Instances with EBS Root Volumes
While instances backed with EBS-root volumes do cost a bit more than the equivalent instance-store images (there is a cost for I/O), they have certain advantages – persistence and ease of replacement being notable. This article will focus on the latter. As a quick side note before proceeding, it is possible to add ephemeral storage… Continue reading AWS Instances with EBS Root Volumes
VirtualBox fails to start
Some of my recent exploration of virtual machines in VirtualBox led me to using a beta version of version 4. After an unsuccessful removal of a virtual machine, VirtualBox continually crashed (error relates to qtcorevbox4.dll) as soon as the interface appeared, and reinstalling the program did not resolve the issue. In order to continue using… Continue reading VirtualBox fails to start
Growing an EBS Volume
One of the great uses of EBS volumes is there persistence, however, there often comes a time when the data outgrows the original size of the volume. It is a fairly easy matter to remedy this, however, there does tend to be a moment of downtime. While many filesystems do have a method for ‘growing’,… Continue reading Growing an EBS Volume
Preparing a Snow Leopard USB Installer
It’s holiday time, and as such, the geek within is restless. Today’s task is to prepare an OS X installer on a USB drive, starting from an Apple Disk Image (.dmg), without access to a Mac. (Note: the limits imposed above were purely for the fun of it – I have access to a functioning… Continue reading Preparing a Snow Leopard USB Installer
Migrating from S3 to Cloudfront
Amazon’s S3 is, as the name suggests, simple storage. It allows for the remote storage of static files, and will serve them on request. While it can be advantageous to use on a website, it is not a true content delivery network, as files are served from a single location (the server hosting the bucket).… Continue reading Migrating from S3 to Cloudfront
Nginx and W3 Total Cache
With the increasing popularity of the lightweight nginx server, the latest developer build of W3 Total Cache, includes support for nginx. As nginx does not have directory specify files (e.g. .htaccess), the settings are intended to be added to one’s nginx.conf file. Before preceding, I simply cannot pass up an opportunity to extol the virtues… Continue reading Nginx and W3 Total Cache
Apache: Not GET Request
My error logs were recently filled with repetions of the the following line: [Date] [warn] [client IP] Not GET request: 2., referer: As it turned out this was caused by the mod_pagespeed module (from Google). Disabling it has stopped the errors, I will be trying out a newer version of the module shortly. Additional info:… Continue reading Apache: Not GET Request
Setting up TinyDNS on Amazon’s Linux
If you need to setup both a DNS Server and DNS Cache, consider http://www.fefe.de/djbdns/#splithorizon – there are some issues with the points below that need to be resolved (specifically the resolv.conf pointing to the dnscache, without pointing the dnscache at the djbdns). DNS nameservers serve the purpose of mapping a domain name to an IP address. Typically,… Continue reading Setting up TinyDNS on Amazon’s Linux
Setting up nginx as a Reverse Proxy
Procedure for setting up nginx as a reverse proxy on Amazon’s Linux distribution, with Apache running in the background. …Read the Rest
Using the Hosts File to Test Virtual Servers
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
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
Decoding a Base64 Email Attachment
I had a few files containing email attachments that needed to be converted into usable files. The following code (which has no checks in it), did the trick: <?php function decode_email_attachment(){ $data= file_get_contents($inputfile); file_put_contents($outputfile, base64_decode(str_replace( “\r\n”, “”, $data ))); } ?>
Basic Email Analysis
Despite ever increasing security, it appears that email accounts are breached more often now than ever before. Quite possibly this comes down to the user as opposed to the email service itself. The focus of this article includes distinguishing between spam sent from an unknown account and illegitimate emails sent from a known account; a… Continue reading Basic Email Analysis