Issue FTP clients fail to connect to Plesk FTP Server (ProFTPd) hosted on CentOS. FTP login actually succeeds, but directory listing command times out. Error: Connection timed out after 20 seconds of inactivity.Error: Failed to retrieve directly listing. Resolution The issue occurred because ProFTPd passive mode was not configured on the server.

Here is a little PHP script that I use to backup MySQL databases on Hostgator Linux web servers. Simply save the .php file to a non publicly accessible part of the server and run regularly using crontab: /usr/bin/php /home4/username/my-backups/site-name/backup-task.php <?php$DATABASE=”db_name”;$DBUSER=”db_user”;$DBPASSWD=”db_password”;$PATH=”/home4/username/my-backups/site-name/”;$FILE_NAME=”site-name-backup-” . date(“Y-m-d”) . “.sql.gz”;exec(‘/usr/bin/mysqldump -u ‘.$DBUSER.’ -p’.$DBPASSWD.’ ‘.$DATABASE.’ | gzip –best > ‘.$PATH.$FILE_NAME);echo “Database(“.$DATABASE.”) backup…

When trying to edit commit log message using Tortoise SVN, following error is displayed: Subversion reported an error:Repository has not been enabled to accept revision propchanges;ask the administrator to create a pre-revprop-change hook

Last weekend I had a small task to update BIOS and other firmware on a non-mission critical DELL PowerEdge T310 server. To safe myself a site visit I decided to to do this remotely via iDRAC. I initially planned to run the updates from DELL Lifecycle Controller, but this was failing with error “The updates you are tying to apply are…

  Download Windows (.exe) version of iDRAC update utility from DELL. Extract the downloaded .exe file (with 7-zip or something similar).

Unified Server Configuration / Lifecycle Controller is one of the best, OS independent ways to update DELL server BIOS and firmware of various integrated components. To boot into Unified Server Configuration press F10 (System Services) during system start-up. Then, to initiate the Update module, go to Platform Update > Launch Platform Update > FTP Server. No need…

Issue VMware ESXi 5.5.0 datastore does not mount automatically after VM host server is rebooted. You can obviously manually add the datastore, but this doesn’t resolve the main issue, which is that all VMs hosted on that datastore go offline if VM host is restarted or recovers from a power cut.

Increasing size of a virtual disk in VMware ESXi is pretty simple process. Open VMware ESXi vSphere Client Right click on the virtual machine that holds the disk in question and select “Edit Settings“ Select the Hard Disk in question and change “Provisioned Size” to the required size Click OK

Issue Apache on CentOS 7 can’t send emails via Sendmail. Website front-end displays following error: Could not execute: /usr/sbin/sendmail /var/log/maillog file shows following error: sendmail[2450]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(apache): /etc/mail/sendmail.cf: line 0: cannot open: Permission denied

Background Tixbox Asterisk VOIP server on company’s LAN network. Remote client with Linksys SPA 942 VOIP phone trying to connect to Asterisk VOIP server via WAN (no VPN). Remote client has a static external IP address 82.67.44.44 SonicWall firewall on company’s network is configured as follows: The firewall has a range of 8 external IP…

SELinux, short for Security Enhanced Linux, is a Linux security module that is part of many Linux server distributions. While SELinux increases server security (despite being created by NSA), it often results in some unexpected access/permission denied errors. If you get one of such errors on a server with SELinux enabled, and there are no…

This tutorial shows how to setup Apache Virtual Hosts in CentOS 7. This is useful if you want to host more than one website on a single CentOS web server. For instructions on how to setup Apache, PHP, and SQL database on CentOS 7, check this article.  Setup folder structure for your websites We are going to…