Vote 1

How To Safely Redirect /index.php To / Using .htaccess / Apache

June 28th, 2008

Any PHP based software like WordPress, Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, MODx etc. will serve pages both from http://your-site.com as well as http://your-site.com/index.php. This creates duplicate content for search engines, which may then decide to penalize your site for duplicate content. You can safely prevent duplicate content with the following apache code / directive added to your .htaccess file (or in httpd.conf):

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Vote 0

Looking for Unmanaged Dedicated Web Hosting Providers

June 2nd, 2008

My minimum requirements are:

  • Pentium Core 2 Duo
  • 2 GB RAM
  • 2 X 160GB SATA II Harddisk with Hardware RAID 1
  • 1500GB Bandwidth
  • 10Mbps with option to easily upgrade to 100Mpbs in future
  • Remote Reboot facility
  • 5 usable IP Addresses
  • Price lock for at least an year or more.
  • CPanel / Plesk not required

Note: It would like to have CentOS installed and RAID-1 configured. Any option to cheaply purchase additional IP in future will be great. Any monitoring facility will be icing but not required.

Few questions:

  • Where is your DC located?
  • Are you a reseller?
  • What is your uptime guarantee? Can you give it in writing?
  • What kind of power backup do you have?

Please respond using the contact form or comment form below. Comments may not be published on this post.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Vote 2

LayeredTech, Dedicated Web Hosting Provider, Suddenly Increases Price by 26%; Twice in 12 Months

May 29th, 2008

I am a long time LayeredTech dedicated server customer. Today out of the blue LayeredTech increased the price by 26%! None of the “service improvements” directly benefits average customers like us:
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Vote 0

Google Proxy Hacking - How Your Page Rank Can Be Stolen & Pages Removed from SERP

February 23rd, 2008

I recently came across an instance of Google Proxy hacking with one of my clients, which removed his index page and other pages from SERP (Search Engine Ranking & Positioning) and he lost the page ranks (went down to zero). We were asked to protect his site against Google Proxy hacking, a really dangerous technique which can not only cause you to loose page rank but also remove your pages from SERP, all because Google cannot properly identify original pages from duplicates.

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Vote 0

How To Fix Postfix Warning: dict_nis_init: NIS domain name not set - NIS lookups disabled

December 25th, 2007

First of I didn’t ask postfix to do NIS lookups. These warning messages started showing up when I commented out alias_maps and decided to only use alias_database instead. The fix was simple.

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Vote 0

How To Protect Linux Server From Stolen Zombie Netblocks & 100% Professional Spammer Controlled Netblocks

December 3rd, 2007

DROP (Don’t Route Or Peer) is an advisory “drop all traffic” list from Spamhaus, consisting of stolen ‘zombie’ netblocks and netblocks controlled entirely by professional spammers. DROP is a tiny sub-set of the SBL advisory designed for use by firewalls and routing equipment. It can also be implemented in iptable rules as explained below.

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Vote 0

6 Simple & Safe Postfix Changes for Over 95% Spam Reduction

November 18th, 2007

I used to receive around 5,000-7,000 spams daily on angsuman [at] taragana [dot] com email which is publicly available on the internet. It was consuming too many productive hours daily to fight spam. I decided to fight back. To reduce the spams I first made changes to my postfix configuration with the aim to stop most spams upfront. With 6 simple changes to my postfix configuration my spams dropped from 5,000 - 7,000 to a manageable 5-20 spams daily, often less. Let’s look at these 6 simple postfix changes in details to drastically reduce your spam count too. I am consistently getting over 99% spam reduction after implementing these changes.

The changes proved to be safe and without false positives. In several weeks of manual browsing through the log file, I couldn’t spot a single false positive (a case where legitimate mail is rejected).

Note: This changes do not involve (nor do they conflict with) spamassasin or clamav, which I might add later.
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Vote 1

6 MySQL Database Replication Tips

November 18th, 2007

Replicating on two or more MySQL master database servers

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Vote 0

Monitoring MySQL Queries Using Bash Script

November 18th, 2007

Monitoring MySQL queries is a favorite pastime of MySQL administrators especially for performance reasons. Here is a simple bash script to monitor long running MySQL queries in realtime using the ubiquitous ’show processlist’. The best part about this script is that you can use it to log your queries over time for later evaluation.
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Vote 0

Hosted Subversion Services - Comprehensive List & Reviews

November 17th, 2007

This is a comprehensive list of hosted subversion subversion (source code repository) service. I did not include the list of hosted subversion service providers who restrict to only open source projects like sourceforge or tigris.
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