Knowledge Base

Every now and then, we need to scan ports as system administrators, even if the target machine is owned by us or not. To achieve this, nmap is the well known and reliable tool which is available for almost every platform. But to use nmap, we need to understand the background of it a little. […]

Sometimes you need to search the contents of .gz files in your system. Unfortunately, grep doesn’t work on compressed files. To overcome this, people usually advise to first  uncompress the file(s), and then grep your text, after that finally re-compress your file(s)… You don’t need to uncompress them in the first place. You can use […]

You’ve designed a database with MyISAM and suddenly realized that you need ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) compliant features and transactions. Right, you should use InnoDB. But how to change storage engine for your previous tables ? As far as i know, changing the storage engine for tables is easy by alter command. But there’s one flaw. You should […]

If you want to clear contents of a file in unix, you could just delete the file and recreate it. But there are much more simple alternatives. You can use echo method. To empty a file just enter the command below. I use my php_error.log file for example. echo -n > /home/base/logs/php_error.log That’s it. Your […]

Here is a clumsy script to check on an FTP Service on a remote server if running or down. The script is written in Python and is a very draft one, but does the job. The main goal is to check whether we get any response from the FTP server while we try to connect […]

IMPORTANT NOTE: Never assume the directory structures exist in your system as written in the document. Never blindly follow security instructions — read, review, compare, apply as it fits your system., Update your server as necessary As its nature, Linux is a multi-developer operating system and you might see an update on any package everyday, an updater like […]

The other day I was working on a server and needed the LARGEST files on some directory – including its subdirectories. As it turns out, it’s a very simple task limiting the file size you want with the output of the find tool. The -size argument will define the borders of your output. Let’s say […]

DirectAdmin determines the admin password during installation and saves these passwords into the file called setup.txt. If you havent changed this password, you can find it in this file, to see the file contents: less /usr/local/directadmin/scripts/setup.txt adminpass= you can find admin password here, and if you didn’t change it after installing you should be able […]