There are many times when I needed to find out my outgoing (or external) IP for the servers which are behind load balancers or firewalls.  I used to just login to another external server from the server in question and find out by looking at “who” what my external ip is.  Even though it works [...]

My friend today asked me how to convert all spaces in filenames under a specified directory to underscores. Also, at the same time lowercase all of the filenames. Here is a quick script to do what is needed. Let us start with creating some test data in a temp directory:
mkdir temp
cd temp
touch [...]

Server monitoring is a big part of running a solid web site.  As an admin, you must know what is going on your server.  One of the tools most Linux/Unix admins are used to is called “top”.  “top” by itself is a very powerful tool.  Here is a quick guide on how to read output [...]

As you may know mysql fulltext search is not highly scalable.  One of the options to get around this scalability limitation, which I prefer, is to use Sphinx.  You can use Sphinx with out having to alter your mysql installation.  But, if you would like to use from within mysql and not have to [...]

Most of the users who work with distributions such as: centos, fedora, redhat, etc use yum as a package update/installer. Most of them know how to do “yum update [packagename]” (to update all or [certain packages]) or they do “yum install packagename” to install certain package(s). But yum can do so much more. [...]