Author Archives: William Jamieson
Manipulating configuration files using sed
Here at Envision Systems we have a standardised Linux operating environment for all our servers. We run a large bash script over our servers that installs what we need and fine tunes the server perfectly for our needs. As part … Continue reading
Setting up Linux user accounts for sftp without shell access
Often I need to allow people to send me files over a secure traffic connection (SFTP) but not allow them shell access to my server. Here’s how I do it: Create a new linux user account for your sftp user … Continue reading
Extending VMWare ESX 4.1 root logical volume disk size on Scientific Linux / CentOS /RedHat 6 guest operating system
I use VMWare fusion for development and my infrastructure partner uses VMWare ESX 4.1 to host one of my virtualised servers running Scientific Linux 6.x. Recently I needed some extra storage and so we tried to increase the root partition … Continue reading
yum update
I run my SL servers very lean and was having trouble compiling VMWare Tools due to missing dependencies, so I was hoping to find a good solution using yum. Here’s how to do it if your hosting provider is using … Continue reading
Mounting remote directories to Scientific Linux / CentOS /RedHat 6 via SSH using Fuse
Often I need to mount a directory from a remote machine onto my Linux server so that I can dump backups or perform other tasks. You can certainly use samba to mount windows shares but for Mac and Linux shares … Continue reading
Installing VMWare Tools on a terminal only Scientific Linux / CentOS /RedHat 6 Machine
VMWare Tools can greatly improve the speed, efficiency and manageability of your virtual environment as well as provide a number of other key benefits. This tutorial will step you through how to install VMWare tools on a Scientific Linux / … Continue reading
How to upgrade Scientific Linux / CentOS /RedHat From 6.0 to 6.1
Problem Simply running the following command won’t upgrade your system from 6.0 to 6.1 as it will only draw updated packages from the repository associated with it’s current release (6.0): Solution First let’s check the version we are currently using: … Continue reading
Setting up a self-signed SSL certificate using ModSSL, Apache 2 and Scientific / CentOS / RedHat
Self-signed certificates are very handy for helping two known machines talk to each other in a secure (encrypted) manner over https. Self signed certificates are simply certificates that you vouch for (or trust) yourself, without having to be externally verified … Continue reading
Get a list of ranked client IP addresses from your apache log
Most of the software I write is for businesses that have multiple office locations. Even though the software is web based, my clients often want to lock access down so that the software can only be accessed from within one … Continue reading
Setting up automatic SSH login without password on CentOS
Its reasonably common for me to require one server to log into another server automatically over SSH. Whether you’re transferring backup files to a remote server using scp or just performing a scheduled remote function, automating the authentication process can … Continue reading
