This find command guide is a follow-up of my previous 90 Linux Commands frequently used by Linux Sysadmins article. Every week, or as time allows, I will publish articles on the ~ 90 commands geared toward Linux sysadmins and Linux power users. Let’s continue this series with the find command. The find command is part of findutils which […]
Improving OpenVPN performance and throughput
OpenVPN, Wireguard, L2TP/IPSec, SSTP, IKEv2, PPTP, or other. If you had the luxury of choosing, which of these VPN protocols would you use? Therein lies my problem. In my current use case, I must find a way to improve OpenVPN performance and throughput. You may have been following my Linux home lab build. One of […]
Replacing Cloudflare with CSF Firewall
March 8th, 2021 update: For the past year, this blog has been using Bunny CDN as a full-page caching solution. That said, I still use Cloudflare with other websites. I’m updating this guide with additional details and tips for using CSF (Config Server Firewall) to increase security with [or without] Cloudflare as a reverse proxy. […]
Serving your blog from full-page-cache CDN locations
Ask yourself, if this page didn’t load almost immediately, but instead, there was a blank white page for a few seconds, would you stick around? Around half of web users leave if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load a web page. Two years ago, I used Cloudflare’s Page Rules, specifically the “Cache Everything” […]
PHP Performance: Additional CPU cores vs Faster CPU cores
Some time ago, I received an email from a client experiencing slow performance issues with a LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MySQL, and PHP webserver). During a full audit, I found that the server’s load average was pretty low (see above screenshot). However, the website was indeed very slow. There were some misconfigurations, but one of the […]
What CentOS alternative distro should you choose?
In January 2014, CentOS announced it was officially joining with Red Hat while staying independent from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) under a new CentOS governing board. However, in December 2020, Red Hat requisitioned that CentOS terminate the development of CentOS 8. They also announced that support would be shifting to a CentOS alternative rolling-release […]
Linux benchmark scripts and tools
This list of Linux benchmark scripts and tools should prove useful for quick performance check of CPU, storage, memory, and network on Linux servers and VPS. Recently, I used a Linux benchmark script, which was no longer maintained. As a result, I compiled this quick list of scripts and tools for Linux benchmarking. Check each […]
Linux: ncdu and mc to manage large directories
Creating, modifying, and deleting files are everyday tasks performed in any operating system, even more so by Sysadmins, Developers, and Programmers. For the most part, these tasks are fast enough when managing a handful of files. However, on Linux and especially with servers, you may at some time have to manage millions or even billions […]
du – estimate and summarize file and directory space usage on Linux
This du command guide is a follow-up of my previous 90 Linux Commands frequently used by Linux Sysadmins article. Every week, or as time allows, I will publish articles on the ~ 90 commands geared toward Linux sysadmins and Linux power users. Let’s continue this series with the du command. du (disk usage) command is a […]
Home Lab Beginners guide – Hardware
Until recently, and for well over the past decade, my wife and I have been nomads. Moving from the Caribbean to Miami, New York, Las Vegas, Vancouver, and now back home. This has meant that for many of those years, my home office basically comprised of a few laptops and screens. These days, we are more […]