If you’re a Linux user and you often log in to remote machines or servers, then this tutorial may save you some time. It’s a tip that user Oshunluvr from kubuntuforums.net showed me a few months ago. I’ve been using it ever since. It will allow you to log into machines with SSH servers on custom ports, with a specified username, by typing:
ssh domain.com
Instead of:
ssh user@domain.com -p 1234
This tutorial will show you how to take a vanilla Raspbian image and turn it into a HTTP server hosting one or more WordPress website. I’ve previously written a few bits and pieces about WordPress, but I’ve never actually covered how to install it on a Raspberry Pi until now. This was one of the first things I did with my Pi, so I’m going to assume you know very little and try to be as detailed as possible. The actual WordPress bit is very quick and easy once the ground work is done: wordpress.org has a 5 minute installation guide, but it doesn’t tell you how to do the difficult bits! This tutorial will cover everything you need, from the ground up.
This post is essentially a list of changes to the Pi’s default configuration that I would recommend you make before you start using the Pi as a server. These apply regardless of whether you want to use it as a mail server, an Owncloud machine, or a web server running something like WordPress. I’ll run you through the steps, starting with burning Raspbian to an SD card.
Google Analytics is everywhere. Seriously, everywhere. So much so that Google probably has a complete record of you hopping from site to site during your normal browsing, information that happens to be both extremely valuable to them and a pretty serious invasion of your privacy.
Want to host more than one website on your Raspberry Pi, without having to pay for multiple IP addresses? You can do this easily using Apache’s name-based VirtualHost configuration feature. This feature allows someone to connect to your Raspberry Pi (or other server) and get served different content based on the host header they sent with their request. This is automatic, and the user is none the wiser: they simply type your web address in the header, and your server uses that information to decide which website to display. Unless you tell them, they won’t know the Pi is also hosting other content.
This is the second part of a five part tutorial that will show you how to install a full featured email server on your Raspberry Pi. This tutorial covers Dovecot, which provides SASL authentication and IMAP capabilities.
The parts are:
The Introduction & Contents Page (read first)
Raspberry Pi Email Server Part 1: Postfix
Raspberry Pi Email Server Part 2: Dovecot
Raspberry Pi Email Server Part 3: Squirrelmail
Raspberry Pi Email Server Part 4: Spam Detection with Spamassassin
Raspberry Pi Email Server Part 5: Spam Sorting with LMTP & Sieve
This is the first part of a five part tutorial that will show you how to install a full featured email server on your Raspberry Pi. This tutorial covers Postfix, the Mail Transfer Agent.
The parts are:
The Introduction & Contents Page (read first)
Raspberry Pi Email Server Part 1: Postfix
Raspberry Pi Email Server Part 2: Dovecot
Raspberry Pi Email Server Part 3: Squirrelmail
Raspberry Pi Email Server Part 4: Spam Detection with Spamassassin
Raspberry Pi Email Server Part 5: Spam Sorting with LMTP & Sieve
If you have just updated to Android 4.4 KitKat, and you use a custom root certificate to sign SSL/TLS certs for your own server/website/WiFi then you may have had the “Network may be monitored by an unknown third party” prompt. Android allows you to add user defined SSL Certificate Authority Certs, but it then complains about them continually, which is incredibly annoying!
I recently installed a plugin for WordPress called “Better WP Security”. One of the features this plugin has is the ability to log all 404 errors, and temporarily or permanently block hosts that request too many non-existent pages in a short space of time. This is useful for blocking scripts that try to guess the location of your admin pages and then brute force their way in or exploit some specific vulnerability in the software. I noticed in the logs that one particular script (“w00tw00t.at.blackhats.romanian.anti-sec:)”) was checking my website to see if phpmyadmin had been installed but the setup script not run, requesting lots of pages like “phpMyAdmin/scripts/setup.php”. This got me thinking about securing the phpMyAdmin page a little, as I had pretty much just set it up and forgotten about it. I very rarely use it, but still wanted it installed just in case. So, the best solution was to simply disable access from outside my LAN.
Today an engineer from BT was fiddling with the junction box outside my house, and my modem dropped connection to my router. At the time, the router did not automatically force reconnect (my fault, I hadn’t configured it to do so). When I noticed what had happened, I reconnected to the modem. So far so good. A couple of hours later, I noticed that two of my three Pi (all of which are connected with ethernet cables) had not reconnected to the router. The one that did reconnect is running Raspbmc (XBMC port to Raspberry Pi); the two that did not are running Apache with some bits on top (a mail server, owncloud, and wordpress for this website!). This is a pain because not only did it take the services offline, but I was unable to SSH to the Pi to correct the problem. Removing and reconnecting the ethernet cables did not work, so in the end I had to pull the power and reboot.