Before Christmas, the latest stable releases of PHP were released for the 5.4 and 5.3 branches – 5.4.10 and 5.3.20 – but there is also the latest alpha release – 5.5.0 Alpha 2, following on from the Alpha 1 release … Continue reading →

It’s important to make sure your operating system and applications are regularly patched, to ensure the system is kept up-to-date and reduce the chances of it being compromised. If you run Red Hat Enterprise, Fedora or CentOS (any rpm/yum based … Continue reading →

Version 3.6.7 of the Linux kernel was released on November 17th, which might make users of Red Hat Enterprise or CentOS wonder why they’re still running 2.6.x versions of the kernel. Ubuntu jumped to version 3 in October 2011, with … Continue reading →

The importance of regularly backing up your data cannot be over emphasised or repeated often enough. Whilst all businesses are at risk from data loss, surveys continually indicate it’s the small businesses that are most at risk, with around 50% … Continue reading →

When generating a Certificate Signing Request (or CSR) for an SSL certificate, there is usually only a single hostname required – what is know as the ‘Common Name’, composed of Host + Domain name, e.g. “www.example.com” or “example.com”. However, if … Continue reading →

If you want to make changes to the PHP directives of a single site this can usually easily be achieved by adding them to a .htaccess file. However, if you are running suPHP (a security tool which forces PHP scripts … Continue reading →

The Yum package manager includes a little known rollback & repackage function that allows you to rollback updates. Repackaging can take a lot of space, so it’s disabled by default! The rollback mechanism can undo package installations by uninstalling the … Continue reading →

When you run an install or update command using yum, it checks the list of repositories (repos) in /etc/yum.repos.d/ and tries to install/update a package using the details in the config files found there. However, in some cases it’s not … Continue reading →

On Red Hat based Linux systems, such as CentOS, the most common way to install software and applications is to use the package manager Yum. The standard command line options should be familiar to anyone with even basic sysadmin experience, … Continue reading →