Using the Hosts File to Test Virtual Servers

As it becomes increasingly easy to deploy servers in a cloud, we often find ourselves wanting to test changes to servers on a running instance. Prudence advices against experimenting on a production server, but there are times when it is necessary to test on a fully functioning instance. For instance, if one wishes to switch… Continue reading Using the Hosts File to Test Virtual Servers

Installing vsftpd on Amazon’s Linux AMI

By default, Amazon’s Linux AMI provides only the amzn repository. While this repository does have quite a selection of packages, there are a few commonly used packages that are missing (e.g. php-mcrypt). On the FTP side, the only FTP server included is VS-FTP (vsftpd). While my personal preference has historically been pure-ftpd, this is a… Continue reading Installing vsftpd on Amazon’s Linux AMI

FastCGI on AWS

The following provides a brief outline of the procedure for getting FastCGI (with SuExec and PHP) working on an EC2 instance running Amazon’s Linux distribution (AMI) under Apache 2.2… Compile the Module: (dependencies include the httpd-devel package) sudo -i yum install httpd-devel cd /usr/local/src wget http://www.fastcgi.com/dist/mod_fastcgi-current.tar.gz tar -xzvf mod_fastcgi-2.4.6.tar.gz cd mod_fastcgi-2.4.6 cp Makefile.AP2 Makefile make… Continue reading FastCGI on AWS

PuTTY SSH

Having used PuTTY a lot over the past few years, I have often found it to have a few default settings that are rather annoying: Firstly, the colours – I never seem to be able to make out dark blue on black Change ‘ANSI Blue’ and ‘ANSI Bold Blue’ under Window > Colours Secondly, the… Continue reading PuTTY SSH