Installing the Latest Version of Apache

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Ubuntu maintains a list of software for installation on your server, which can be searched and installed using the apt package manager. Often though you will find that the version of software in the official Ubuntu repository is a number of versions behind what is officially available from the software developer itself. This is due … Read more

Add Colours to Man Pages

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Sometimes you come across something new, and you just know your life will never be the same again! This is just how I felt when I came across an article on how to add colouring to Linux man pages just by adding some lines to the .bashrc file.

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Fixing the RAID Array

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One of the main things I wanted when I reinstalled the server was to take advantage of the RAID features which are part of the Ubuntu installation process. Most desktop computers only have space for one hard drive, and seeing as this server would be used for important files such as family files, business data, photos and home movies, it had to be resilient enough not to fail for predictable reasons. This meant setting up a second hard drive and configuring RAID.

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Career Change – what do you want to know…?

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This site was inspired by the knowledge I gained when upskilling and learning Linux when changing careers. A few years back, I was working in the pharmaceutical sector, weighed down by regulation & paperwork, and deeply unhappy with where my life and career were going. I really enjoyed computers. I was the go-to guy in … Read more

Control VirtualBox from a Script

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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

Unable to send mails from the website

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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

Webmin – Add File Manager

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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

Search for Torrents with qBittorrent

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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

Check What is Using up Space on your Drives

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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

Add Timestamps to History File

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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

LPIC1 – Study Notes 1

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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

Customise Your Bash Prompt

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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

Editing Text on the Command Line with vi

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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

Creating a New Database with Adminer

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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

The Difference Between Unix and Linux

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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

Check Internet Speed from the Command Line

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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

Shutting Down the Server from a Webpage

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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

Protecting your Web Pages with htaccess

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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

Change SSH Login Message

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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