Author: tony

One of the most frustrating errors the sysadmin comes across when working with Nginx is the 502 error. The text accompanying this error is ‘Bad Gateway’, which, unfortunately, doesn’t say much about what might have gone wrong. In contrast, the other errors clearly say that the resource or page was not found, or that you…

While the domination of Linux on the server scene is undisputed, managing servers isn’t for everyone. One big reason is that people just don’t know their way around the command line even if they are knowledgeable about what goes where. This prevents even highly experienced power users from being able to configure the server to…

While the Linux system comes with mail-reading facility built in, the environment is really not convenient for those who don’t love the command line that much. A graphical client offers a lot more ease and features. For setting up an email client in CentOS 7, you have two options: Set up a GUI-based client such…

When it comes to enterprise-grade network and service monitoring, there are few challengers to OpenNMS. It provides a simple web-based interface to visually monitor different parts of your service, and comes with a REST API that allows quick integration with virtually any system you might have. Installing OpenNMS on Ubuntu takes a bit of work.…

Editing PDF files is a common enough task; but unfortunately, there’s no good solution for it in Ubuntu by default. While a lot can be said for Evince when it comes to reading PDF documents, the editing story is still underdeveloped.   If you scan the Ubuntu forums for some time, you’ll primarily come across…

The default font collection on Ubuntu 16.04 leaves a lot to be desired. In fact, it was the case with much of Web (what with the very aggressively priced fonts and all that) until Google Web Fonts came along. We now have access to hundreds of font families through Google Fonts, fitting work as diverse…

The good thing about Ubuntu 16.04, as far as the Python programming environment is concerned, is that it comes with pre-installed Python3 support. For many years, the Python community has lived in the 2.7 vs. 3.0 divide, with many refusing the migrate. Eventually, however, the community at large came to appreciate the design decisions behind…

Just like SSL, Docker has made it way up the ‘nice-to-have’ things list to among the top five ‘must-haves.’ The unprecedented success of lightweight containers is a reflection of just how useful (and not to mention, light on resources) this service is for DevOps teams.   If you’re running the 9.1 (codenamed ‘Stretch’) version of…

For the uninitiated, RDP stands for Remote Desktop Protocol. And just like the expanded form suggests, it’s a protocol for a machine to accept remote desktop connections from other machines. XRDP is a server for CentOS 7 that implements this protocol and allows you to use different types of software to connect with your CentOS…

Why would one want to change the default SSH port? Does it make your server more secure? In a sense, it does. Changing the default port means that attackers get nothing by attacking the default port 22. While that’s not to say that the new port can never be hacked now, it does provide a…