Pat Howe's Blog

Setting up scheduled tasks known as Cron Jobs on a Ubuntu server

In this short article, I will set up scheduled tasks known as Cron Jobs on a Ubuntu server. This will allow me to automatically run PHP scripts on the server at various points in time without any interaction. Any user account on the Ubuntu server can set up their own Cron Jobs which will run under their own account. If you want to make sure the scheduled task has full access to everything then it will need to run under a privileged account such as the “root” user and you

Hosting multiple websites on a single Apache server

In this article I will run through the setup of multiple websites on Apache on a single Ubuntu LAMP server. LAMP is a common acronym for a typical setup and stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. I will go through step by step using FileZilla (for transferring files) and PuTTY (command line interface for configuring the server). There are example screens walking through each step showing both enabling or disabling the default Apache website and adding/enabling other websites. The process is the same for each additional domain so after

The role of the Product Management in Technology

Back in 2011, I was asked by my boss at the time what I saw as the role of the Product manager because he wanted to establish that role within our technology department. I did indeed become a product manager at the start of the following year. In this short article, I will share with you what we did and how it was received. The first thing I said in August 2011 when asked what I thought the role of the product manager should be in our business (a business

Steps to securing your Apache web server on Ubuntu

This article goes through some of the things you can do to protect your web server from certain types of attacks and to keep the disclosure of information down to a minimum. It will show you how to help prevent clickjacking, SSL cipher or mime-based attacks. It will show you how to avoid error messages and other methods giving away more information than is needed. These can mostly be prevented at a server level so that they apply to all websites that you publish on the server. A brief description

News on general availability of new top level domains

There have been more top-level domain names released to general availability (GA) in 2016. In this short article I have listed those that are available now and those that are being considered for release. I’ve split the listing into those that are available to purchase now under GA and those that are at an earlier stage where you cannot purchase but may register an interest in them (and possibly buy in the future). Some sites call this pre-ordering or pre-registering but there is no guarantee that you will get the

Fixing GD by replacing the version in the bundled PHP package

The GD Library in PHP allows developers to output images from code in various formats rather than output HTML mark-up for displaying web pages or snippets. It is a very popular method of creating images used on web forms where the validity of a human user needs to be attained (this method is commonly known as Captcha). However, a bundled PHP distribution might not come with GD enabled and fully functioning such as those used by the “apt-get install php5” command on Ubuntu. Even after “apt-get install php5-gd” is run

Setting up Apache, MYSQL and PHP on Ubuntu Linux (LAMP)

This article shows you the commands required to set up an Apache web server on a fresh Ubuntu Linux installation from a Command Line Interface. It goes through the steps to setup PHP and MySQL and link both to the Apache web server. It doesn’t just finish there though. I also cover installing OpenSSL for managing secure certificates, VSFTP for file transfer protocol accounts and the GD PHP image library. These are popular things to do for say running WordPress but not essential to a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and

Upgrading packages on Ubuntu from the command line

This short article goes through the commands required to upgrade to the latest trusted distribution of Ubuntu 14.04 Long Term Support (LTS) but the same commands can be used for any Ubuntu upgrade. The following example shows the commands and actions for upgrading all of the packages on Ubuntu to their latest distributed versions rather than just applying updates to currently installed packages. The first thing to do is login using your Command Line Interface (CLI). You will probably login with an account that does not have upgrade privileges. You

How to use and customise gradients in Adobe Illustrator

Quite often getting gradients to do exactly what you want them to do can be a challenge. In this short article, I’ll cover gradients within Adobe Illustrator but the principles can be used in other Adobe products. First up, what is a gradient? It is the smooth transition from one colour to another colour or more colours. This is done mathematically by apply some of the target colour to the starting colour in the pixels between those colours. A gradient starting out as black and ending as white will go

Secure Ubuntu connection via AWS authentication token using CLI and FTP

This is a bit of a specialist article that shows how to do something in specific circumstances rather than try to cover all eventualities but hopefully it will be useful outside of the narrow example for those that need help. In this article I set up a secure connection to a Linux server running Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with authentication through a token. The connection to the server examples is shown from both a Command Line Interface (CLI) and a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client. I’m

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