Getting the Most Out Of Your Home Server
I recently rebuilt my server and reinstalled Ubuntu 18.04 to two drives using RAID. One of the first things I did was to reinstall VirtualBox and phpVirtualBox, in order to spin up virtual servers. This is a very handy way of testing applications or doing work on your server without risking either damaging and corrupting … Read more Control VirtualBox from a Script
Recently I upgraded my server and found that I was having trouble in sending mails from the linuxhomeserver.com website, as in they wouldn’t send. I spent a bit of time looking into it, and these are the steps I went through to get it working again. 1. Install sendmail: sudo apt install sendmail 2. Edit … Read more Unable to send mails from the website
By default, Webmin comes with an impressive array of tools for managing your server. One notable exception though is a graphical file manager, for managing files and directories on your server. While you can indeed do this via the command line, it is a great deal easier and more user friendly when looking at icons … Read more Webmin – Add File Manager
Once you have your torrent client installed, you are now ready to begin downloading torrents. While torrents have many uses in distributing software, they are probably most infamously known for being the download mechanism of choice for downloading movies, music and other such copyrighted material. Some ISPs are recording IP addresses of downloaders on behalf … Read more Search for Torrents with qBittorrent
It’s a fact of human nature that the more space you have, the more stuff you will accumulate to fill it. This is true for our lives as much as it is true for our servers. Given that you have invested in a nice big 1Tb or more hard drive, you may find that after … Read more Check What is Using up Space on your Drives
If you’ve been using the linux command line for you may have come across the history command, which displays your shell history, or the commands you have run recently. When you run a command in the terminal, a copy of this command is saved to the .bash_history file in your home directory. You can call … Read more Add Timestamps to History File
A few years back I studied the LPIC1 material, and in doing so gained a much better and fundamental understanding of how linux works. Prior to that, I had been picking up bits here and there by reading and following guides on the internet, but this explained to me in a way that I understood … Read more LPIC1 – Study Notes 1
The default and most common means of logging into your server over SSH is through using a password. The problem with this is that you leave open the possibility for an attacker to try log in to your account by guessing your password multiple times until they get it right. Attackers can run continuous dictionary … Read more Using SSH Keys to Login to Your Server
When you SSH onto your server, the command prompt you work with is the standard Ubuntu prompt. The format of this prompt is set in the .bashrc file in your home directory, but the code for customising the command prompt is not very easy to manually update or change. There is a great site which … Read more Customise Your Bash Prompt
The discussion over which is the best command line text editor is one that has brought heated debate to the linux community since linux began. When I first started playing with linux I deftly managed to avoid both by using the nano text editor, which was very easy to use and did not require knowledge … Read more Editing Text on the Command Line with vi
For many web applications, a database is needed to store and organise the data being generated. As a MySQL database system was installed as part of the LAMP (Linux, MySQL, Apache, PHP) server installation, you just need to create the individual databases which your web app will need. Adminer is a very simple and useful … Read more Creating a New Database with Adminer
When I started building my linux home server I really didn’t know much about linux or the history behind it. As I researched the operating system to learn about it, I kept coming across references to Unix, almost side by side with Linux. There didn’t seem to be a big difference between the two, so … Read more The Difference Between Unix and Linux
Checking your internet download and upload speeds often involves going to the speedtest.net site and running their test. This is a bit difficult to do from your server seeing as there is no graphical interface or browser to use. What we need is something we can run from the command line. Speedtest-cli does exactly this … Read more Check Internet Speed from the Command Line
Being able to conveniently shutdown our server when we are not using it is very handy. The most obvious way of doing this is to SSH into the server, and then issue the ‘shutdown –Ph now‘ command. However, this can be a bit tedious, especially if you are trying to do it from a phone … Read more Shutting Down the Server from a Webpage
Once you have a web server up and running, and you begin using it to either host your own files or applications, you may find that you would like to begin protecting access to some data on it from anyone casually browsing the web interface. While many applications you install will have login pages for … Read more Protecting your Web Pages with htaccess
When you SSH in to your server, one of the things you notice is the mass of text that greets you upon successful logon. There is some useful information there, like server load, storage usage and whether any packages can be updated. There is unfortunately though, a lot of advertising and less useful information. While … Read more Change SSH Login Message
When working on your server, you will often need to escalate to administrator privileges, either to install programs or edit system files which are owned by root. These are tasks which are normally reserved for the root account only, but a normal user account can also be given the ability to do these tasks, by … Read more Use Sudo Privileges Without Entering Password
Once your server is installed and set up, it is ready to be packed away somewhere out of the way, i.e. in an attic, a basement or a press. From now on, all of your interactions with it will be across the network, either through webpages, SSH sessions or maybe viewing movies on other devices. … Read more Wake On LAN – Start up your Server Remotely
If you find that you need to run a particular command whenever the server boots up, there are a number of ways to do this. rc.local One of the traditional and most popular ways is to use the rc.local file. Ubuntu will look to this file when booting up, and execute any commands in it … Read more Running Commands at Startup
I still remember where I was when I first saw tabbed browsing. It was in my future brother-in-law’s flat in London, and a friend of his was browsing the web. I noticed that, instead of having multiple Internet Explorer (IE6!) windows open, there was only one window open on a new browser I hadn’t heard … Read more Using Screen for Multiple Terminal Sessions