Jay Versluis

Jay is a medical miracle known as Super Survivor. He runs several YouTube channels and websites, and he's also live on Twitch sometimes. To support him on his mission to make the world a better place, you can support him on Patreon or buy him a coffee.

How to install PHP 7.x on a CentOS LAMP Stack

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By default, CentOS 7 comes with support for PHP 5.4. Sadly that version has reached the end of its life in 2015and is no longer updated by the developers. If we want to stay up to date with the latest software, we may want to upgrade (if our applications are working with newer versions of PHP).

For CentOS users this either means to compile cutting edge versions from source and tweaking lots of scary system configurations – or dipping into the power of Software Collections. These are official pre-compiled packages by the software vendor, designed to run newer versions of software alongside those that are provided by default.

At the time of writing, PHP 7.2 is available but it’s not part of the software collections yet, so we’ll use  PHP 7.1 with FPM support under Apache (as it’s the recommended way to do so).

Let’s begin!

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Finding your current MAC address in CentOS

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I had an issue with one of my servers the other day: its power supply died unexpectedly during a scheduled restart. The poor thing never cam back up again.

Lucky for me, the data centre could simply swap out my hard disks and put them into another server. Although my data was save, the server wouldn’t connect to the network anymore – because it had a new MAC address. CentOS stores this value in two of its files, and when it changes (which is hardly ever the case), those files need to be updated.

Here’s how I fixed the problem. I did this on a CentOS 6 server, but it looks like the procedure is the same for CentOS 7.

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How to hide the social links at the bottom of Plesk

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By default, Plesk displays several links in its footer. Two of them are links to Plesk’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Sometimes less is more, and thankfully there’s an easy way to suppress those links if we don’t want to see them anymore. Simply create a file called /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/panel.ini and add the following content to it: ; … Read more

Testing Incremental Backups in Plesk Onyx

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From time to time I get crazy ideas, and last week that crazy ideas was to test how well incremental backups can be restored in the latest version of Plesk. Specifically I wanted to know how Plesk would react in times of a crisis, which usually happens at the worst of times.

Up until recently I’ve always done full backups – but incremental backups are a lot more space saving on the target device, plus it reduces the load on the server and data traffic significantly. Let’s see what these incremental backups are all about.

Wikipedia suggests that after a full backup, each increment needs to be available to make a restore.  This would indicate that deleting one backup in the middle (simulating a failed backup) would mean the restore would fail.

But how does Plesk work, and how would it react if we’d take away an increment in the middle? Would it indeed need all incremental parts to rebuild a backup? Or would it always refer to the full backup and write its increments accordingly? Let’s find out!

I’m using a test system on a CentOS 7.5 server, with Plesk Onyx 17.8 installed. I have a test domain with a default WordPress instance, but it’s not doing much at the moment and could probably do with a quick facelift if anything. 

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How to remove OSSEC Agent on macOS Sierra

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I’ve been trying to find a way to remove OSSEC on one of my Macs. Most documentation is a bit outdated and references files from yesteryear, so here’s how to do it on macOS Sierra in 2018. These instructions were written with OSSEC 2.8 in mind. I’m not familiar with later versions. Removing the three … Read more

How to enter C64 Mode on a Commodore 128

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The Commodore 128 was marketed as being “three computers in one”. I guess technically they were correct when they made that statement. Although I’m very find of the native 128 mode, the system saw its uses mostly as a games machines in C64 mode. I don’t recall anybody ever looking at CP/M mode longer than half an hour (if that).

There are three ways to put the C128 into C64 mode. Two of which I always knew about, ever since my friend Frank Jagow bought himself a whole C128 system from his paper route money in 1986. But the third option’ve only recently learnt about – after over 30 years of being a C128 fanboy. How exciting!

Here are all three options.

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Discovered: Commodore 64C used in an auto repair shop (2018)

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I’ve recently discovered a tweet that showed a Commodore 64C complete with green monitor and 1541-II drive, heavily dust covered, but still working and being used in a Polish Auto Shop. The picture itself was fascinating enough, but I’ve also discovered that it was a screen grab from a video – which I’m including here … Read more