Linux Archives

Over 80% is running on some form of Linux – so does your Mac and you iPhone. Sometimes we have to get our hands dirty on the command line – it makes you feel like a proper hacker.

Here are some pointers I picked up on my journey.

How to use FTP from the Linux Command Line

You can use the ftp command to talk to an FTP server from the Linux Command Line. Type ftp to see if the tool is installed. If you get a “command not found” message then go ahead and type yum install ftp to make it available on your system. Using it is very straightforward – … Read more

How to log into MySQL as root user in Plesk

You may have noticed that there is no MySQL root user on servers running Plesk. That’s because Plesk renames this user into “admin” by default – for security reasons. The password for the admin MySQL account is the same as for the Plesk Panel admin account. Even so, when you try to login to MySQL … Read more

The Postfix Cheat Sheet

I recently had some trouble with my postfix mail service. Not knowing where to being looking for log files and restart commands, I thought this quick cheat sheet would come in handy in the future: Starting and Stopping On CentOS we can speak to postfix like this: postfix start postfix stop postfix reload The this … Read more

How to use Bind Mounting in Linux

Bind Mounting allows us to make one directory accessible from more than one location. It’s like “intercepting” directory1 and making the system redirect requests to directory2. Let’s take a look how to set this up and why we may want to use this technique. Quick Refresher: Device Mounting Perhaps you’re familiar with mounting devices to … Read more

How to SSH into a Virtual Machine in Parallels Desktop

I was pulling my hair out the other day trying to connect to a VM in Parallels Desktop. It’s fairly straightforward, yet rather complex at the same time. Here’s how to do it step by step. In this example I’m running Parallels Desktop 8 under Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks, and my Guest OS CentOS … Read more

How to run PHP from the command line in Linux

Did you know that you can run PHP directly from the command line? Here’s how: Running a command Let’s run a one-liner and see the output displayed in our console. We’ll use phpinfo() because we know it should generate a lot of text. We need to start our line with php, use the -r switch … Read more

How to fix yum update failure blaming “qpid-cpp”

I’ve just tried to update one of my CentOS 6.2 servers that was built from an older AMI, only to find that the yum update command stopped unexpectedly with several dependency errors. They all pointed to something called “qpid”, and I must admit that I’ve never heard of it – nor did I know that … Read more