Start SSH in Plesk

Recently I’ve had a situation that on one of the servers with Plesk panel installed on it SSH service was not working. Unfortunately there is no way to restart the service via panel for some reason. You can restart other services, but not ssh, probably because service itself is not managed in any way by Plesk panel. Anyhow, interesting way to hack around this was to use cron jobs to execute tasks and restart the service :-)...

April 1, 2017 · 1 min · Ivan Tomica

Nested Tmux

Ever wanted to have tmux session inside of tmux session? Don’t know how to control the one inside of current tmux session? Easily: Ctrl+b Ctrl+b COMMAND So basically, you need to send your prefix twice. You can also use: Ctrl+b+b COMMAND

March 28, 2017 · 1 min · Ivan Tomica

Checking disk activity with ZFS – iostat

Pretty neat little command that I wasn’t aware before, but quick check of the manpage would bring it to my attention. :-) To check current disk activity stats on your zpool you can use: zpool iostat -v POOLNAME You can of course omit pool name, without it it’ll show statistics for all pools. Command output example: $ zpool iostat -v capacity operations bandwidth pool alloc free read write read write ---------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- storage 838G 554G 1 40 54....

March 28, 2017 · 1 min · Ivan Tomica

Deploying Let’sEncrypt on R1Soft Server Backup Manager (CDP)

Securing R1Soft Server Backup Manager (CDP) with SSL/TLS encryption sounds like a good idea. Using Let’s Encrypt to accomplish that sounds even better! Unfortunately, there’s no way to automatically install SSL certificates to Server Backup manager as its web interface is being run by Apache Tomcat, which parses those certificates from its keystore, so yeah, there’s a bit of hacking involved. Naturally, I wrote a script to resolve that :-)...

March 27, 2017 · 3 min · Ivan Tomica

Installing cPanel on low memory system

This is more of an reminder for myself when trying to install cPanel system on cheap, low memory system, just to test something out. On CentOS 7 cPanel requires at least 1024MB of RAM, while on CentOS 6 it requires 768MB of RAM. If you have less than that install will straight out fail. I understand that this are recommended requirements, and that is not good idea to run anything serious on less memory than that....

March 24, 2017 · 2 min · Ivan Tomica

How to configure Bind with IPv6 on cPanel

This one is pretty simple, and if you properly set up your network settings when installing server it should work automatically, if not go to the Basic setup window: Navigate to the IPv6 settings section and enter your server main IPv6 address. Save settings and WHM should automatically rebuild your named.conf to listen on IPv6 address.

February 28, 2017 · 1 min · Ivan Tomica

Installing Let’sEncrypt SSL on cPanel DNSOnly

If you’re using cPanel DNS only you probably know that AutoSSL feature isn’t available on it. Reason for that is because DNSOnly cPanel installation doesn’t have web server running as classic version does. To circumvent this you may use certbot standalone mode to issue a Let’s encrypt certificate. Command you would use is: certbot certonly --standalone -d HOSTNAME -n -m CONTACT@EMAIL.EXAMPLE --agree-tos Ok, if domain resolves to the correct server certbot will launch its built-in web server and perform verification and hopefully certificate should be issued....

February 21, 2017 · 2 min · Ivan Tomica

How to set up ZFS on CentOS 7

Recently I have started thinking about backups on my personal web server (on which this blog is hosted on). Simplest solution I have come up with is to just mount additional drive to the server, format it as ZFS, sync stuff to it and then just snapshot that drive. This way I don’t use much space for storing backups and I can keep more frequent backups. Sure, I could just move website to that ZFS drive, and I will probably do so in future, but for now it is how it is....

December 12, 2016 · 2 min · Ivan Tomica

Self hosted email

There are many reasons why would somebody want to host their own email server. There are many advantages for doing this but there are also many drawbacks. Setting up your own mail server can certainly be a great learning experience filled with discoveries about different set of technologies, protocols and how stuff works in general. Hosting your own email server can also be a huge pain in the ass, especially if you start to have problems with spamming but I won’t go too deep into pros or the cons since, if you’re already here, you probably read a thing or two and decided for yourself if you want to host your own email server or not....

September 26, 2016 · 13 min · Ivan Tomica

Enable mod_status in Apache 2.4

Thing that I miss with Apache on CentOS 7, and in the matter of fact, every SystemD based distribution is running service httpd status and immediately seeing full Apache status along with number of active connections, server uptime etc. This article will focus on how to enable mod_status in Apache 2.4 so you can successfully utilize apachectl fullstatus command from your server to display web server statistics. Prerequisites for apachectl fullstatus option to work are mod_status module installed and enabled in Apache configuration and links or some other text based web browser....

August 19, 2016 · 2 min · Ivan Tomica