A ramdisk - or if you prefer, RAMdisk - is a method of taking a section of memory and treating it as disk. If you think about it for a moment, the pros/cons should be obvious: RAM is much faster than even the fastest disk, so operations on the ramdisk are much faster than when using NVMe, SSD, and certainly spinning disk. However, RAM is also volatile. If the server reboots or crashes, anything on the ramdisk is lost. R...
Read More
Back in December 2019 I spotted on Low End Talk a great offer for bare metal servers from OVH's SoYouStart brand. As I looked at the ad, I wondered: Could one guy, working solo, become a successful ho...
Read More
In the course of my career, I've periodically come across code like this in shell scripts: TEMP_FILE=/tmp/tempfile Or sometimes, slightly more elegantly: TEMPFILE=/tmp/tempfile.$$ The problems with th...
Read More
I've been working on a small app written in golang, and I'd like my local-area network connections to the golang-embedded webserver to be over https. Most of the clients are going to be scripts runni...
Read More
In a previous post I invited folks to join me in auditing MIT's Free Online Operating System Course. This post outlines what I have done to get ready to run MIT's teaching operating system, Xv6, on my...
Read More
I've setup a home virtualization lab using ProxMox, which is a free and very powerful virtualization host. Prior to ProxMox, I tried: VmWare ESXi: No clones in the free version? See ya. XCP-ng: Got s...
Read More
I. Setting Up Our Own Email Server If we are here on the Low End because we are starting or running a business, then email definitely will be on our list of needed features. Many of our wonderful Low...
Read More
In the mid-70s, my father worked in the American automotive industry in Michigan, and I visited him at work as a small boy. He took me into the "computer room" (as they used to call datacenters) and...
Read More
@Phill from Virtfusion is launching his new virtualization management utility, also called Virtfusion. @MikeA at ExtraVM already has Virtfusion up and running at OVH Gravelines Data Center. When @Mike...
Read More
As reported here on Low End Box a few days ago, a German court found that the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) required website hosts to avoid sharing readers' IP addresses w...
Read More
Great tutorials should be concise. How concise? How about 27 words? LowEndBox would like to give a shout-out to LowEndTalk member @skorupian setting a new world record for the shortest quality tutor...
Read More
Do you still use USB thumb drives? Flash or SD or MicroSD cards? Portable hard drives? Even in this age of ubiquitous cloud, there's still a ton of bits and bytes being carried around in people's ba...
Read More
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 administr...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
If 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 environmen...
Read More
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 Aut...
Read More
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...
Read More
In 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...
Read More
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 tut...
Read More
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...
Read MoreRecently 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. Yo...
Read More
In this tutorial we'll show you how to configure your VPS so that every time someone logs in, you receive an email alerting you to this fact. This is kind of a "lowend intrusion detection system" thou...
Read More
When new provider submit offers, one of the many checks we perform is to see if their WHMCS license is valid (assuming they're using WHMCS of course). Generally about once a month we get an offer from...
Read More
With the rise of Chia farming, many hard drives provisioned in LowEnd dedicated servers are arriving having suffered phenomenal (ab)use. Sure, your dedi provider is usually on the hook to replace if...
Read More
Bruce force attacks are attempts to guess common passwords by repeatedly trying to login to your server. SSH is the most common target but FTP, IMAP, POP3, and other password-based systems can be tar...
Read More
Tarsnap is a cloud backup company that emphasize strong cryptography. It's the brainchild of Dr. Colin Percival, former FreeBSD security officer. Its motto is "online backups for the truly paranoid" a...
Read More
Aug 16, 2025
Aug 16, 2025
Aug 15, 2025
Aug 15, 2025
LowEndBox helps you discover reliable, budget friendly hosting, from cheap VPS plans to low cost dedicated servers. Whether you're running a website, app, or project, we make it easy to find hosting that fits your needs without breaking the bank. [Learn more about LowEndBox]
Arirang / Aug 07, 2025
optimus_prime / Aug 16, 2025
DediRock / Jul 10, 2025
RIYAD / Aug 12, 2025
Invitation To Join Me For MIT's Free Online Operating System Course!
Did you ever have something you wanted to do for a long time but never actually started? Maybe something that seemed too big or too difficult? For a long time I've wanted to take MIT's Operating Syste...
Read More