How-To Geek

If you’re a Windows Home Server enthusiast you probably want to test out the new version code named Vail. You might not have an extra box to test it on, so here we take a look at installing it on VMware Workstation.

Have you ever typed out a really long command, realized it worked great, and then wanted to save it to a file? There’s an easy bash trick you can use to do just that.

When you create a Microsoft Virtual Hard Drive either through Virtual PC or Virtual Server, you have to specify the maximum size of the file up front. While you can set the VHD to be a fixed or dynamically sized file, the total size the VHD is determined at the time you create it. Over time, however, you may want to increase the total size of the VHD file as requirements for the system change to allow more space for installed programs and data files.

If you’re working on a project, and you’ve copied in or created a whole bunch of new files, you might find it tedious to manually add each of them. Here’s the quick command you can use instead:

When it comes to gathering statistics on web sites, you can never have enough. While one of the most popular method for tracking statistics is through services such as Google Analytics, log file analysis remains a reliable way to track your visitors as they are immune to script blockers. A widely used tool for log file analysis is the open source tool, AWStats.

If you rely on somebody else for managed hosting of your Linux servers, you might not always know exactly what type of server you’re actually running on. There’s a quick and easy way to figure this out, however.

As an IT manager, there are a lot of things you can do which directly impact your company’s bottom line. While the most obvious are direct hardware and software costs, an often overlooked aspect is energy/electricity consumption by computer systems. While servers need to be available 24/7, desktop systems only need to be available when the respective user needs it or for scheduled maintenance tasks. The rest of the time (usually more than 50% of the time), the system can stay in low power mode which reduces power usage, hence cost.

If you want to quickly see what processes are wasting all of your memory, you can do so with a simple command line that filters the output from ps to sort by memory usage, and return only the ten biggest memory hogs.

If you’ve got a web application that uploads files to the server through a PHP script, you might have noticed that by default you can’t upload terribly large files. Here’s how to change it.

All Dell servers come with the Dell OpenManage Server Administrator software which has the ability to monitor and display system level indicators. Additionally, through the Alert Management tab you can configure actions to execute whenever an alert is triggered. Unfortunately there is no vehicle for applying uniform notifications to all events, so we are going to provide a script which configures all the alert actions to send an email notifying you of the respective event. While you could set these up manually, having a script is ideal as you can easily deploy this across multiple servers.

Linux has a rich set of commands for manipulating and accessing files. The du utility gives information on disk usage, and the sort utility can sort the results. Finally, we can run those results through the head command, which gives you the top 10 lines outputted through any other command. We’ll chain the commands together to get the output that we want.

Unless you have a special setup, you typically only need a single IP address from your ISP to run your network. With your network sitting behind a firewall/router, you can direct your incoming traffic to the appropriate servers to handle email, web, remote connections and anything else. The problem comes when you have multiple servers which need to receive traffic from a common port. Instead of adding more public IP addresses (and cost), we are going to show you how to handle this situation using on a single IP.

Have you ever used a tail -f on a logfile, only to find that it’s scrolling by way too fast for you to deal with? If you know exactly what you’re looking for, you can always grep the contents, but often you aren’t sure what you need to see. In this case, it’s useful to reverse grep instead.

Changing the group a user is associated to is a fairly easy task, but not everybody knows the commands, especially to add a user to a secondary group. We’ll walk through all the scenarios for you.

A common function of many programs is the ability to send email. When working on development projects or doing product demos which utilize email, having an environment you know will work can be critical. For these situations, having a completely self contained email system, that is all emails “sent” never leave the local machine, is the answer.

Have you ever needed to quickly share a folder with another machine? Rather than deal with samba, nfs, or apache, you can just run a simple command instead.

If you use the rsync utility to keep your backups synchronized from your database server over to your backup or secondary file server, you might want to prevent the script from using too much bandwidth. Here’s how.

Microsoft Office 2007 introduced a new XML based file format for the Office suite of products. Word files use extension “.doc” for Office 2003 and earlier with “.docx” for Office 2007, etc. Most likely, none of this is new to you.

Like anything else on Linux, it’s easiest to do things from the command line, and when we’re dealing with servers that’s probably the only thing we easily have access to. Luckily it’s trivial to mount an ISO image in Linux.

There are lots of great utilities out there which do essential tasks such as monitoring and reporting that once you have configured them, they just sit in your system tray and do their job without you ever knowing. While this works great for desktop machines, this model is not ideal for server use which, typically, does not have anyone actively logged into it.

Are you missing some of WordPress.com’s nice features in your self-hosted WordPress blog?  Here’s how you can add many of these features back for free with some great WordPress plugins.

Would you like to install WordPress directly on your own site?  We’ve been covering ways you can use WordPress for your personal blog or website, so here’s how you can install the WordPress software manually on your own site.

Would you like to install WordPress on your own server the easy way?  Here’s how you can get WordPress up and running in only a few clicks on most webhosts.

If you’re a Windows Home Server user, there may be times when you need to access it from an Ubuntu machine on your network. Today we take a look at the process of accessing files on your home server from Ubuntu.

Would you like to run WordPress or other web apps on your PC so you can easily test and design websites?  Here we’ll look at how you can get the latest web apps on your computer in only a few quick steps.