CentOS Archives

How to use FTP from the Linux Command Line

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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 allow passive FTP connections in Plesk on Amazon EC2

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AWS LogoPassive FTP connections should work out of the box in Plesk. If no other firewall or NAT is interfering with it.

I’ve recently noticed that when I install Plesk on Amazon EC2 every passive FTP connection fails with an error such as “Server sent passive reply with unroutable address. Passive mode failed.”

The reason for this mishap is twofold:

EC2 instances are behind a NAT, and therefore have an internal (unroutable) IP, and an external (public) IP. When a passive connection request comes in, ProFTP – Plesk’s default FTP Server – tells the connecting client its internal private IP address, and in turn quite rightly fails to connect to it.

On top of that, we need to make sure to open a range of ports we want to use for passive FTP connections and tell ProFTP only to use those.

Let’s do all this this step by step!

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The Postfix Cheat Sheet

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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

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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 run Plesk on your local network and access virtual domains on your Mac

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Whether you’re running Plesk on a dedicated machine on your network or in a virtual environment, you’ll want to setup test domains and work with them as if they were live – just like it was running in a data centre. It’s not as easy as I thought, which is why I took some notes … Read more

How to create a Plesk Mirror

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When you deploy Plesk to various instances on your local network you can save the world (and yourself) from a lot of internet traffic by creating a local mirror. This is a duplicate of the original installer files needed to deploy Plesk which are downloaded once and can then be used from a machine on … Read more

How to SSH into a Virtual Machine in Parallels Desktop

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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