There are lots of online tools for checking your ISP provided internet speed. Most are web based interfaces and there are some great ones out there. The most popular is probably www.speedtest.net, but we also have www.fast.com, www.speedof.me, … even Google let’s you do it directly from its search page (you have to search using US-based…
Continue reading →Originally posted on 10th July 2015 and updated on 11th May 2016: There has been some controversy recently about StartSSL and their key management practices. You can google it and read up if you want but I’m going to continue using them since it’s easy, free and I’m just after the simplest of domain validation keys to make…
Continue reading →I almost exclusively use nano for my text editing needs but unfortunately it doesn’t have great options enabled by default and it has limited syntax highlighting for writing any code. This can be fixed fairly easily. Nano has a config file located at /etc/nanorc which can be edited to enable changes for all users. To…
Continue reading →In a previous post we worked through setting up your WordPress site on NearlyFreeSpeech. Now I thought I’d write about the additional configuration steps I take with my WordPress sites once I have the base install up and running. These are generic and can be used across any installation which is why I’ve separated them…
Continue reading →This quick guide will show you how to run a command in an SSH session and allow you to disconnect and leave the command to keep running. I use this frequently for running my backups to external drives so that I can kick them off then shut down my laptop instead of leaving it running…
Continue reading →The first post helped you get your NFS database set up. The second post got WordPress installed. And this third post will show you how to serve your WordPress site via HTTPS/SSL. Using TLS / HTTPS can be tricky to get configured. First, make sure you don’t have an .htaccess file in your root redirecting…
Continue reading →This post will get your WordPress installation working on NFS. The first post walked through setting up the NFS database. And the third post will show you how to turn on HTTPS. Download WordPress The next step is to download WordPress to NFS. Some basic knowledge is assumed here so hopefully you know how to SSH…
Continue reading →NearlyFreeSpeech (NFS) is a bare bones service provider for people who know what they are doing. This makes it a bit more involved in setting up things which other hosting providers may make a bit more straightforward. I’ll walk you through the process of getting WordPress working on a NearlyFreeSpeech hosted site over the next…
Continue reading →NFS allows you to use keys to log into your SSH sessions. This is much easier and more secure than remembering a password. You can set this up really easily by doing the following… First we need to generate a SSH key. Let’s use the putty keygen tool to do that. You can download it…
Continue reading →This quick guide to sending automated alerts to you whenever your server or computer starts up should work for any Ubuntu distribution, and in fact most other linux distros. We’ll create a nice simple script to send you a notification when your server starts up. Generally you’ll be the one turning on your server so…
Continue reading →I’ve put together a short series on the jobs I have running on my NAS on a regular basis which I rely on to backup various config files or even the whole filesystem, or to monitor the health of my hard drives. Feel free to copy should you wish. This script backs up & emails…
Continue reading →Pushbullet (https://www.pushbullet.com/) is a great tool which can be used on most devices to send notes, pictures, links, etc. For our purposes we can make use of it to send notifications from our NAS to our computer and/or phones. I find this much more convenient than email notifications and have been gradually replacing my email…
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