SoftDux Technical Blog

Here’s a quick & ditry trick to repair all MySQL databases on a server, in one go. Run the following commands on your server, in the console as root. mysqlcheck –all-databases -r #repair mysqlcheck –all-databases -a #analyze mysqlcheck –all-databases -o #optimize Share and Enjoy:

One often needs to use PASSIVE / PASV mode for FTP transfers to work successfully on some FTP servers, especially if you are on a network which is being NAT’ed by an ADSL / DSL / wireless router. Microsoft’s command line FTP program (ftp.exe) doesn’t have the PASV / PASSIVE command, so how do you [...]

I often need to find out what’s using up a lot of space in a user’s folder, or on a backup server. The easiest way is to use Linux’s “du” or Disk Usage command. The following command will show you the sizes of the different folders, and will only display it on that level – [...]

I was looking for a way to rename a Logical Volume on a Linux system, and found the following website useful. Unfortunately my attempt to rename a LVM based Linux installation failed miserably, and it never booted. So, I’ll have to retry it sometime later again. Share and Enjoy:

I found an interesting post on a HyperVM forum, on how to Secure & Optimize a VPS – the link can be found here Although a lot of this is aimed at cPanel VPS’s it can be used on any other VPS without a cPanel control panel as well. Please note, this is NOT my [...]

For some odd reason, one of the VPS’s on my OpenVZ Virtual Server sometimes looses the /dev/pty device files – I don’t know why, but it happens. So, a quick fix, is to run the following commands, as root, on the main host node.: In my case, the VPS’s ID is 1001. So, the command [...]

This one annoys me a lot! South African ISP’s who don’t know how to properly configure a transparent proxy server. I don’t mind if they force us to use their transparent proxy servers, but it does get to me that we still pay for the bandwidth which they have cached. Anyway, some of the transparent [...]

Here’s a nice tip on how to install Linux over the network (in this case a http / webserver), from a kickstart file Put this in the /ks.cfg file on your bootable CD: [php] title Remote Install root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz_remote ks=http://<domain>/<path_to_file>/<kickstart_config> vnc vncconnect=<observing_ip> initrd /initrd_remote.img # Barebones demo remote kickstart configuration # install network [...]

I was looking for a way to make my own CentOS 5.1 CD’s with various selected packages, some which are normally located on the other CD’s and not on the first CD. For what I need, I want to keep it simple, just use one CD to install the packages I need for a minimal [...]

I often want to modify the contents of a Linux CD, and then I need to recreate the ISO image before I can use it on another PC. One such example is to make a "vanilla" install of CentOS Linux for cPanel. cPanel and most other control panels don’t want / need all the extra [...]