SysAdmin Valley » Uncategorized

BeanTownHost.com launches new website

mshields — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 20:10:55 +0000

We have launched a new website. Make sure you check it out at www.beantownhost.com. This time around we decided to try not to cram as much information in and instead try to keep the site nice and clean. Also with the website launch we’ve officially launched our Twitter and Facebook accounts (we’ve had them for a while, just never used them). Follow us on Twitter and Like Us on Facebook and maybe we’ll give our followers a special surprise. More to come later

My new best friend: RackTables

mshields — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 13:23:38 +0000

For years I’ve been using a piece of software that a friend wrote to help me manage servers, switches, routers, workstations, asset tracking, IP address management, and how all my devices are connected to each other. It was a very good piece of software, but even though one of the features was to tell the system when the equipment is located (office, datacenter, etc), I couldn’t tell where in that location it was. So I searched around and found quite a few open source applications that have popped up in the last few years, most of them were garbage, some of them were decent but even if they had a few of the features I wanted, they usually were missing key features.

That’s when I came across RackTables. It’s simply amazing. It let’s me keep track of all my hardware, keep track of my locations (office, datacenter, etc), keep track of where my hardware is located, how my hardware is interconnected, keeps track of all IP subnets and what’s allocated, and much more. Anyone who’s responsible for managing servers, networks or datacenters should definitely check out RackTables. There’s a great demo on their site.

With RackTables you can:

Have a list of all devices you’ve got
Have a list of all racks and enclosures
Mount the devices into the racks
Maintain physical ports of the devices and links between them
Manage IP addresses, assign them to the devices and group them into networks
Document your firewall and NAT rules
Describe your loadbalancing policy and store loadbalancing configuration
Attach files to various objects in the system
Create users, assign permissions and allow or deny any actions they can do
Label everything and even everyone with flexible tagging system
And, of course, you can access all that from anywhere in the world. All you need is a browser and internet connection!

How to delete the MBR in Linux

mshields — Tue, 18 May 2010 17:22:04 +0000

There have been times where I’ve installed Linux on a computer and needed to reinstall Windows. Sometimes I’ve had an issue where after the install gets finished, the installer appears fine but it doesn’t update the MBR (Master Boot Record). So when you reboot the computer you get a Lilo or Grub error saying that the Linux Operating System that it thinks is install is not there.

Before you reinstall Windows, download any of the bootable Linux distro’s such as Fedora Live, Ubuntu or Knoppix and boot into the temporary Linux. Then bring up a Linux shell and type the following. You may need to change hda to your appropriate hard drive device

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

More SEO tricks using Apache rewrites

mshields — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:04:17 +0000

Another tip related to one of my previous blogs. All websites have an index page (aka Home Page), but no matter whether it’s index.html or index.php or any other name, some search engines will view http://www.domain.com/ and http://www.domain.com/index.php as duplicate content. So I use the following to redirect index.php to /

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^index.php$ / [L,R=301]

Make your domain more SEO friendly

mshields — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 20:42:44 +0000

A lot of SEO experts say that if you allow people to go to either domain.com or www.domain.com the search engines will index both URLs as if they are two totally different sites. You might think that is bad news, but what ends up happening is the search engines will see the same content (duplicate) on both domain.com and www.domain.com and the search engines will demote your listing for having duplicate content on more than one domain.

The way to fix this is to either permanently redirect all traffic from domain.com to www.domain.com, or vice-verse. If you’re using Apache there is a quick and easy way by using .htaccess files. To redirect all domain.com to www.domain.com, you can do the following:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Or if you want all www.domain.com to forward to domain.com, use this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Linux Commands and WordPress

mshields — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 19:08:20 +0000

Thanks to one of the SysAdmin Valley reads who alerted me to a mistype in one of the blogs. When you are typing in Linux commands into WordPress and it uses a double hyphen, you need to change the formatting to “Preformatted” for the text. The reason it, WordPress converts the double hyphens into a single hyphen. See the following example.

With double hyphens & normal formatting:

rpm –version

With double hyphens & preformatted formatting:

rpm --version