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Blocking malicious crawlers or scrapers in Apache
Occasionally we see a customer who has a popular website that often gets people trying to crawl it and copy the lot, This has the unfortunate side effect that its hammering the site. Made worse only by dynamic pages and loops this can literally take down a server in some occasions. Often you can slow…
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Finding spam sending PHP scripts on your server
Everyone has the occasional user who may leave something on their server that may send spam, or not update things as fast as they should. Tracking down the spammer can be a real problem though. Sometimes you can track down the domain, but not the script, other times they may have so many files that…
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Emailed backup of a database via cron – Attaching files via command line
Sometimes people want an easy offsite backup option for important databases or files, and having a cron to automate that can be helpful. One of our customers had such a case so i wrote a shell script which emailed him a copy of his database every day. Since i thought it was a handy thing…
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Restarting Apache on deploy
Often we have customers who have larger websites they deploy, or even multiple websites they deploy , and they need the apache cache cleaned or even the application restarted. Often the reason people want this is so developers do not need to login with SSH, do not need root access, and things are just a…
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Saving some typing and time with SSH configs
If you are like me, then you may find yourself connecting via SSH to multiple machines a lot during the day. There is an easy way to make short cuts to save you remembering ip addresses, user names, or other things. This tutorial is for people using Linux primarily, people using Windows should be able…
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Setting up Domains Keys (DKIM) on Postfix
This is a quick and fairly painless way of setting up DKIM, on a postfix server. DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is a method for associating a domain name to an email message, thereby allowing a person, role, or organization to claim some responsibility for the message and helps verify that your mail is legitimate. This…