dermot

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

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

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

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

Depending on what timezone you are in, you may find the time on your servers clock is out by a bit. The easiest way to check the current time setting is by running the date command: jupiter@home:~$ date Mon May 21 22:06:49 UTC 2018 jupiter@home:~$ If this is incorrect, you need to reconfigure the timezone … Read more

On previous Ubuntu server versions, a static IP addresses was set from the /etc/network/interfaces system file. In Ubuntu 18.04, NetPlan has been introduced to manage the network settings. This involves a different directory and a different syntax for editing the network settings file. To set a static IP address, go to /etc/netplan. In this directory … Read more

If you are testing out a number of applications of a particular type, for instance games or photo apps, you may end up with a folder full of .zip files and the extracted folders of contents also. Unless there is an index file in the folder, Apache will display all of the contents of the … Read more

What’s the use in having a server if you can’t have any fun with it? As much fun as it is installing, running and trialling various applications and web-based apps, wouldn’t it be cool to run some actual games on it. There are a lot of search results for games servers on the web, many … Read more

One of the best uses of your home server is to save data, whether it is files on a file server, photos, movies or music, etc., to the server and access it on many devices in your home. In terms of moving the files/data to the server, there are two ways of doing this: through … Read more

If you spend any time working with linux commands, you will start to get a preference for some of the flags and options available, to get just the results you prefer to see. Using an alias allows you to set a shortcut for a command of your choosing. This allows you to essentially build a … Read more

When working on your server, there will be many occasions in which you will need to read files saved on the file system. These could be config files, README files, log files or scripts. Basic server administration means being able to open files and read what is saved to your system. If you are working … Read more

When I first start experimenting with linux operating systems, I was quite confused by the structure of the linux file systems. Having grown up solely on Windows computers, this was very different to anything I had seen before, and took some understanding and time before I became familiar with it. Linux is based on the … Read more

More often than not, most of the interactions you have with the databases on your home server will be through the various applications you install on it. You will not have much reason to run commands manually on the databases… unless you want to that is. One of the great benefits I have found of … Read more