We had been paying for 10 shared hosting accounts, and have recently moved to a dedicated server.. problem is now our host has removed our support (guess the first 3 months really shouldn't have been covered) We now need to be able to dig deeper into our server (but without the GUI) we are unable to do the basic things. I have been to the big book stores and none offer a hands on book for REMOTE servers.. Anyone know of a good place to brush up on linux (remote server) upkeeping? editing the Apache httpd.conf file.. the simple stuff Thanks, Jason Miller
It's pretty much trial by fire. Nothing is really overly general, all packages are installed differently when installed manually, configuration files from different programs are all different, etc. Sorry . I wanted to know the same thing a few years ago and there was and I believe still is, nothing of that sort worth noting. However - *if* you're using the right distro and you have a local linux machine with a gui installed, , you can admin your server with a gui! This helps a lot. For example, I have a local linux desktop machine with all the nice desktop and gui stuff installed. Then I have on my servers the standard stuff installed, without the gui stuff. When I ssh into my server from the linux box, I can run gui products from the server - but using my local gui interface (i.e. the gui stuff is external to the server). This is a really nice feature available in linux - run the program locally but use the gui interface remotely. Since I use mandriva as my distro, I just log into my server and run the gui admin program (drakconf) from the command line. that opens up a gui window where I can change server settings, install packages, etc. You might also consider installing webmin - a free program that lets you control a lot of your server through a web browser (note: I use this occassionally, but webmin is a daemon. for security purposes, I start the daemon on my server only when I need to use webmin, then stop it when I'm done using the program). Also, set your browser homepage to be a site on your server. That way you'll be ensuring your site is live every time you open a browser .