Category: Amazon Web Services

How To Tell If Your Linux Server Has Been Compromised

A server being compromised or hacked for the purpose of this guide is an unauthorized person or bot logging into the server in order to use it for their own, usually negative ends. However, the majority of compromised servers are carried out by bots i.e. automated attack programs, in-experienced attackers e.g. “script kiddies”, or dumb criminals. These sorts of attackers will abuse the server for all it’s worth whilst they have access to it and take few precautions to hide what they are doing.

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17 Things about Security

A list for protecting yourself and others from the most common and easiest-to-pull-off security crimes.

This article does not attempt to make you an information security guru or provide everything needed for those who are special targets. This is a list you can use to secure yourself, your significant other and your non-techie loved ones from the majority of the most-common and easiest-to-pull-off types of crime and cruelty. Continue reading “17 Things about Security”

Test internet speed from the Command-line

You probably have heard and tried using speedtest.net to test you computer or smartphone internet speed. If you have your own server or VPS you can also test internet speed connection from the command-line using the speedtest-cli utility. On this tutorial, I’ll show how to install and use speedtest-cli to test your internet speed.

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Configuring Elastic Load Balancer on Amazon EC2

Load balancers are used to distribute the requests/queries to multiple server instances. Most web infrastructures have multiple front-end servers that share the load of the application. Although there are multiple server instances, the end-user only see them a single node. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you on how to configure an Elastic Load Balancer on Amazon, add your web server nodes and point your domain name to the EC2 load balancer.

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Cloning your Instances on Amazon EC2

Multiple front-end web server setups are almost always in use these days. Instead of just one server serving web traffic, you create two or more servers which will share the load evenly to serve requests from users. These servers usually connect to a backend database server. On this tutorial, we’ll walk through the steps on adding another web-front end server by cloning you current web server node.

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Adding new disk on Amazon EC2 instance Centos/RHEL 6

Amazon VPS instances, by default only have a single disk for the whole filesystem of the server. Unless you chose to add an additional disk when you provision the server, adding disk space to your VPS can be tricky. Here’s a run down on how to add more storage to your server on amazon by mounting a new drive.

In this tutorial, I’ve mounted the new drive to /var/lib/mysql since I need to increase the disk space used by the database. This tutorial is still applicable even if you want to increase a different folder. The process will be the same.

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Install Gitblit Go on CentOS/RHEL 6/7

If you are a programmer or work with programmers, managing code repositories is one the task you’ll likely to encounter. Git has become widely popular for storing/managing code repositories.
Gitblit GO is an open-source, pure Java stack for managing, viewing, and serving Git repositories. It’s designed primarily as a tool for workgroups who want to host centralized repositories. Gitblit GO is an integrated, single-stack solution based on Jetty.
In this fast tutorial, you’ll be able to install GitBlit Go and create you own git repositories.
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Create a swap file in Linux

Some VPS on hosting providers like Amazon Web Services do not have swap by default. Or if your server was configured with small swap and now you want to increase it. Below are instructions on how to increase swap area.
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