WordPress on Nginx, Part 1: Preparing VPS the Debian Way
In this first part, we deal with the LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MySQL, PHP) stack recipe and set up the basic server after installing the required packages. It started off thus: The theme developer…
Getting Started with SystemTap
If programming is an art, then debugging is even more so. To be a good programmer, one must master debugging. We have seen some good methods of kernel debugging, e.g., gdb, kgdb, kprobes,…
Cyber Attacks Explained: Packet Spoofing
Last month, we started this series to cover the important cyber attacks that impact critical IT infrastructure in organisations. The first was the denial-of-service attack, which we discussed in detail. This month, we…
Supercharge Your Self-Hosted WordPress Blog with Nginx & FastCGI
If you are running WordPress on a VPS, you’ve got all the power in the world to run the site exactly the way you want. If you know how to use that power,…
Kerala State Electricity Board Saves a Whopping Rs 8 Crore, Using FOSS
Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB) switched to open source solutions only a few years back, and now, not only manages the accounting and billing information of users across Kerala, but has made impressive…
The Nagios Setup Explained
In this article, we shall discuss Nagios, an open source software that is deployed in most data centres to monitor various system and network parameters. The practice of appointing prefects is a time-honoured…
Quick Setup Guide to Network Monitoring using Zenoss Core
Today’s businesses demand 24×7 uptime of IT infrastructure. To meet this need, a number of technologies are used, which include failover, clustering, redundant devices and high availability. Despite having more fault-tolerant and rugged…
DeleGate — A Multi-platform, Multipurpose Proxy Server
A proxy server works as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. There are various types of proxy servers. In this article, we will briefly discuss one of them,…
Puppet Data Centre Automation Solution, Part 3: Resource Types & Example Configs
The previous article in this series focused on creating users, groups and files (based on home directories). Let’s now look at the various types of resources provided by Puppet, by default, and at…





