I’ve been setting up Nagios for a client of mine, and one of the issues I faced was configuring Nagios to use sendmail to send notifications. It was attempting to use /bin/mail or /usr/bin/mailx to send email, neither of which were present on the CentOS box. There wasn’t any information when I Google’d it, so [...]

For the longest time, I read about virtualization but never fully realized the benefits of that approach. Recently I did, and as such my company upgraded to a virtualization server running VMWare ESXi as the hypervisor. I have to say, I love virtualization now, and have no idea how I went without. If you accidentally [...]

Recently, I’ve had to customize some Apache configuration options on one of my servers running Plesk. I needed to modify PHP’s open_basedir parameter among other things, and it was a little tricky to figure out how to do it properly. Once I figured it out, I thought I’d share. FYI, I’m running Plesk 10.4. Plesk [...]

I’ve been using PHP’s open_basedir function since I first setup my server, several years ago. It’s a really useful function for securing your servers, although it isn’t perfect. For years, I’ve had problems with the temporary directory not being accessible. Of course, it was a simple fix to use php_admin_value     open_basedir /var/www/vhosts/saebermedia.com php_admin_value     upload_tmp_dir /var/www/vhosts/saebermedia.com/.tmp [...]

I just realized when setting up a second CentOS 5.4 server that MySQL is required for PHP MySQL support (duh) and I didn’t include it in my tutorial so here it is. As an alternative, I’ll be posting a PostgreSQL guide as well, as some users may prefer that (I’ll be using it for my [...]