Browsed by
Tag: Virtual Private Server

Fixing the annoying “perl: warning: Setting locale failed” error message

Fixing the annoying “perl: warning: Setting locale failed” error message

Comments 15 comments

I was getting really annoyed getting these messages while managing my Debian and Ubuntu VPSes perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = (unset), LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = “en_US.utf8” are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale (“C”). Turns out the solution is simply to run these commands export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 export LANG=en_US.UTF-8 export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 locale-gen en_US.UTF-8 apt-get install locales dpkg-reconfigure locales The export lines above…

Read More Read More

KnowledgeTree speed on VPSes

KnowledgeTree speed on VPSes

Comments 1 comment

I was trying out KnowledgeTree 3.7.0.2 (Community Edition) on 3 different virtual private servers just to see how they fare  with “heavy” websites, and here’s how they perform generating a page of 20 items. All VPSes are 512MB instances running on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS . APC Hosting (Virtuozzo) Request created in 17.190s Rackspace Cloud Server (Xen) Request created in 0.446s Club Uptime (OpenVZ) Request created in 0.299s The most ironic thing is that the above VPSes are listed in order…

Read More Read More

Debian Lenny to Squeeze upgrade

Debian Lenny to Squeeze upgrade

Comments 0 Comment

Debian 6 i.e. “Squeeze” was released almost a month ago. Although there are still about 11 months more before Debian 5 “Lenny” is no longer supported, I figured I would upgrade one Debian Lenny Xen-based VPS hosted on a Rackspace Cloud,  currently functioning as an OpenLDAP server, as a weekend project. The upgrade steps were straightforward: 1. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change all instances of lenny to squeeze. 2. Run the following commands in succession in terminal sudo apt-get update sudo…

Read More Read More

Unattended updates on CentOS

Unattended updates on CentOS

Comments 4 comments

Having recently had to clean up after the Exim4 vulnerability that did not get patched on a server in time, one of the first things I do on a new VPS is set up automatic unattended updates. The steps are clearly documented for Debian/Ubuntu, but for CentOS it was a little harder to find the information. Here are the steps: In a terminal session run yum install yum-updatesd Next you need to edit /etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf and edit the following lines to…

Read More Read More

WordPress updates without FTP login prompts

WordPress updates without FTP login prompts

Comments 0 Comment

One gripe I have about running WordPress on a VPS is that it keeps prompting me to enter the FTP password every time I do an update. As it turns out, you can save your FTP login credentials in wp-config.php so that you never get asked again! Simply add the following lines to wo-config.php // ** FTP SETTINGS FOR AUTO-UPDATE ** // define(‘FTP_HOST’, ‘YOUR-HOSTNAME-HERE’); define(‘FTP_USER’, ‘YOUR-FTP-USERNAME’); define(‘FTP_PASS’, ‘YOUR-FTP-PASSWORD’); Remember to change the values above accordingly.

Logwatch, Exim4 & SSH Attack Dictionary Prevention on Debian Lenny VPS

Logwatch, Exim4 & SSH Attack Dictionary Prevention on Debian Lenny VPS

Comments 1 comment

Thanks to the excellent tutorials over at Slicehost, I got an idea of some the things you need to do to secure your brand new virtual private server (VPS) straight away.  To me, the main takeaways with regard to security would be: 1. create a privileged user with Sudo access 2. disable the root account login 3. use strong passwords e.g. a combination of letters in upper and lower case, numbers and other characters 4. setup iptables firewalls I had…

Read More Read More