Tag Archives: Linux

Offline Mutt to replace Thunderbird on Ubuntu (3 of 4)

The previous post looked at setting up offlineimap for managing received emails, and this post will look at setting up msmtp for managing sending emails. The main reason I don’t like to use Mutt’s built-in SMTP to send directly to …

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Offline Mutt to replace Thunderbird on Ubuntu (2 of 4)

It doesn’t make sense to look at the Mutt config first, even though that is at the heart of everything. So first of all I’ll cover offlineimap. This package will replicate the IMAP folders from your email provider (Google Apps …

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Offline Mutt to replace Thunderbird on Ubuntu (1 of 4)

I’ve fallen out with Thunderbird recently and the geek in me has been interested in getting Mutt up and running for a while. But I needed certain functionality and it’s taken a little while to put all of the pieces …

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Memcached constant timeouts and high load

Just a rather silly one… So the two webservers on one site started to run at a crawl. The timeout was so bad, the load balancer healthchecks were failing and they were up and down constantly. Lots of checking of …

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Preventing Site Cloning and DoS with Fail2Ban

This one came up as a result of the DoS attack last week when a site I administer was hit repeatedly for page downloads at the rate of 2 or 3 a second for a couple of hours. The same …

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DoS on Amazon EC2 instances running WordPress

I was got out of bed with an emergency call from a client at the weekend because his blog was down. This is the one that is getting a lot of traffic, but CPU was spiking up to 100% quite …

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Fail2Ban behind an Amazon Load Balancer

When using F2B on servers that sit behind Amazon ELBs (and probably load balancers of other types), the client IP in the error log is usually that of the load balancer. Banning the load balancer from access is probably not …

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Adding a new MySQL slave on EC2

There are a few posts around for doing this easily, but this has just worked nicely for me. This was done between two instances on Amazon EC2 cloud. On the existing slave (in mysql) SLAVE STOP; SLAVE SHOW STATUS\G; # …

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Blocking advert sites using /etc/hosts

Using the hostsfile.mine.nu approach to blocking adverts is nothing new, but sometimes in the course of testing something, I do actually need to see if adverts and ad pop-ups are working correctly. So I do this… Download the hosts file …

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Persistent SSH connections with tmux

I administer a group of Amazon cloud instances and am constantly having to SSH in to update and monitor them. And for some reason (maybe because I live in the back of beyond) I often get really poor connections to …

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