Some times you just have to pull some tricks out of the vault.  These tips can be timeless, classic, or just retro. But generally speaking they still apply to users today. I’m not talking about how to backup to a tape drive, or using punch cards to create a program. I’m talking about tangible tips [...]

Categories: Advice, Linux, Open Source, Tutorials Advanced

Today’s Linux article has two purposes: 1) To add a little spice to your boring old email signature, and to help you understand a bit about bash scripting. The goal is to be able to create a pseudo-dynamic email signature that adds the uptime of your Linux box and/or the output of the fortune command. [...]

Categories: Advice, Email, Linux, Open Source, Tutorials Basic

Even though the Linux operating system is very stable and rarely needs a reboot, there are times when an update (such as a kernel update) will make this a requirement. At least that used to be the case. That is correct. With the help of a newly developed technology (dubbed Ksplice) even a kernel update [...]

Categories: Linux, Open Source, Server, Software, Tutorials Basic

If you are administrating your own dedicated server you should monitor it 24/7 to make sure that it is running smoothly and be able to react immediately when something unforeseen happens. The motherboard of one of my rootservers died just a few days ago and several of my websites where not accessible for a few [...]

Categories: Software, The Web

When you first start a blog and you’re slowly building your audience and your traffic, your site’s uptime/availability is not something that you often think about. When your audience is still small and your blog is down for one or two or even ten hours it really doesn’t matter that much, as the potential number of people who might have tried to visit and failed is small, and most of them at that point are friends or are somehow connected to you and will likely come back again.

Once you have grown your traffic to a fairly decent amount, however, downtimes that affect your site are a complete different story, a nuisance that can mean that hundreds of people are unable to get to your site, most of whom are likely to never come back again. In my experience, even when my hosting company promised 99.8% uptime, this began to increasingly seem like meaningless marketing hype when I started getting emails from friends and strangers alike informing me that my site was down at such and such an hour (many of which downtimes occurred in the early am hours when I wouldn’t have been online anyway).

Categories: Online Services, The Web