If there are a couple things that a few years of system administration should have taught you, the importance of backups and logs is one. more »

A while ago I set on the search for a cheap domain and ssl certs reseller and settled for namecheap.com. Here I'm documenting my, overall positive, experience with them. more »

I never cared too much about my web presence and spikelab.org is the only domain I ever owned, so back then doing extensive researches to save a couple bucks didn't make much sense. Someone recommended Gandi to me and there I bought it. As for ssl certificates, CACert is what we all should use and push for, but right now we're far from a large adoption, and considering the associated fees (read bribes) required to be accepted in largely used browsers like IE it won't probably ever happen. more »

A friend of mine had to move some websites configured as vhosts on a certain ip to another hoster/ip and wanted this to happen without users noticing. The common approach is to lower the TTL a few days before switching to the new ip and maintain the old server up for an overlapping period. This is necessary because of broken dns cachers that won't honor the TTL and serve the cached ip. more »

I've been asked again how to track down a php script abused by spammers on a standard LAMP platform running apache and mod_php. So here it goes. more »

Scp is slow, that's a known fact. Known and annoying that someone tried to fix it producing the hpn-ssh patch:

SCP and the underlying SSH2 protocol implementation in OpenSSH is network
performance limited by statically defined internal flow control buffers.
These buffers often end up acting as a bottleneck for network throughput of
SCP, especially on long and high bandwidth network links.

We are recruiting a new sysadmin and I had to come up with a list of questions and a format for the interview. From past experiences and talking to colleagues I found quite a few possible approaches and reasons, but there still are some common rules interviewers should keep in mind. more »