Sure, you come to LowEndBox to get great deals, but did you know you can also learn a thing or two here? We have over 250 tutorials we’ve published over the years on topics such as Linux VPS administration, setting up and running popular services, how to get more out of your VPS, mad scientist projects, […]
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November 25, 2021 @ 7:00 pm, by raindog308Why Do My Files Have Quotes in the Them When I Use ‘ls’?
If you’ve upgraded to a recent Linux version, you may have noticed a change in the output of your ls commands. Specifically, files that have spaces or other special characters in them are quoted. For example, when you run ‘ls -l’, your directory listings that used to look like this: # ls -1 Screen Shot […]
How to Update Intel Microcode on Debian 11 Bullseye
Not long ago I noticed this message when booting one of my home systems: “TSC_DEADLINE disabled due to Errata; please update microcode to version: 0x22 (or later)” I wasn’t having any issues with the system, but this sounded like something I should correct. But doing a microcode upgrade sounded risky – couldn’t brick my CPU? […]
LowEndSetup: Initializing and Reinitializing Your VPS
ansible, cloud-init, linux, sysadmin, system administration October 14, 2021 @ 12:00 am, by raindog308If you frequently setup new VPSes or re-initialize them, you may find yourself typing the same commands over and over. There are various technologies to alleviate these hassles and get your environment consistently setup every time without all the manual work. Big Boy Solutions If you’re managing many systems, you may wish to invest in […]
Locking Down Access to Your VPS
There are a number of ways you can restrict access to your VPS. Passwords (specifically, good passwords) is the most basic method. Restricting access to ssh keys only is better. You can use Google Authenticator to require a short-lived number as a second factor of authentication. You could also setup a VPN so that only […]
How to Audit Every Command Run on Your Linux System
Periodically I’ve had auditors come to me and say “can you tell me what this user on this system did between such-and-such dates/times” and my answer is usually no. By default, Linux systems don’t log this info. But they can. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to use auditd, which is a daemon you […]
SQL vs. NoSQL – Which is Better?
db/2, developers, ibm, mysql, nosql, oracle, postgres, postgresql, SQL, sql server October 2, 2021 @ 3:41 pm, by raindog308In the world of database systems, SQL has been the king since it took off in the early 80s. It was conceived, developed, and codified in the 1970s but really hit its stride once developers had worked out the kinks and it rapidly overtook earlier, hierarchical DB systems like IMS. In the 21st century, NoSQL […]
Nodes and Modes: Maintaining Galera Replication for MariaDB
In a previous tutorial, we showed you how to setup Galera replication for MariaDB so you could have multi-node, multi-master clusters. We also saw how MariaDB painlessly replicates data. In this tutorial, we’re doing to forcibly interject a little pain into the process by seeing how Galera deals with down loads and replaced nodes. Once […]
Painless MariaDB Replication with Galera Clusters
Galera is MariaDB’s multi-master replication technology which makes it a snap to setup highly-available multi-node MariaDB clusters. In this tutorial we’ll walk through setting up a cluster and also look at some replication events. Cluster Design For Galera, you want to use odd-number clustered sizes: 3 nodes, 5 nodes, etc. It’s possible to run a […]
Easy Operating System Detection with nmap
Recently I was doing some discovery at work of some systems we inherited. I didn’t yet have access but wanted to determine what type of OS was involved so I could coordinate with the proper teams. You can often guess just by determining what ports are open, but the most efficient tool is the venerable […]
