Software

Question: I just purchased a small hosting account for my art studio, and I am considering having a Flash designer make the site. Is this a good idea? Answer: Flash-based sites have many benefits: virtually unlimited possibilities for animations, video streaming, and dynamic applications. All of that, however, comes with …

In the hopefully unlikely event that you are unable to access your website, the first thing you should check is your own network connection. You may find that you cannot access any websites. If that is not the case, there is a network problem between your computer and your server. …

Question: What are user agents, and why are they important? Answer: In the context of web servers, a user agent is any network host that connects to the server. Most frequently, it is used to refer to web browsers, but it can be other things as well. Anytime a search …

There are a lot of free FTP clients out there for the Mac, but my favorite is Cyberduck. Boasting a great user-interface and support for a wide variety of protocols, it’s a good alternative to the popular but expensive Transmit 3. The open source software has a number of features …

Few issues with dedicated servers are more important than security, and no security software is overlooked more than firewalls. Most people expect firewalls to work the way they want them to without any effort. While that is impossible, there is a free software firewall solution available that makes installation, setup, …

Question: How do I change my MySQL root password on my dedicated server? Answer: If you have never set the password for MySQL, the server will allow you to connect as root without any password at all. This is obviously not secure and needs to be fixed. Consider it an …

Question: I keep seeing the program called “named” running on my server. What is it? Answer: Named is one of the DNS programs, also known as Bind, which is a free and open source DNS management system. Bind handles all of the DNS for your Linux server and is usually …

On Windows systems, all files usually have three or four-letter extensions after the file names. For example: .jpg, .txt, .docx, etc. Executable files, in particular, have an .exe extension. In Linux, files do not need an extension, even executable files, although typically documents and images still have them. Text files …

Question: What are symbolic links in Linux? Answer: Linux has a convenient feature that allows you to link a virtual file to a real one. For example, if you have a directory called “images” and you also want one called “photos” to point to the same place, you need to …

Question: How do I manually setup email aliases in Linux? Answer: Generally speaking, there is probably no reason for you to modify your aliases file manually. In some cases, however, a script will require you to edit the file, and it is important to know where it is and how …