Get to know this reverse proxy load balancer for web traffic with SSL support.

Connecting to your home computer from work, a friend's house, or while on vacation in another country is very simple — if you know how to use a small handful of tools. Ken Hess shows you how to connect securely and tunnel traffic using SSH.

Improve system security by expiring user passwords from time to time. The command passwd -x 30 joe forces joe to change his password after thirty days.

Here's the start of a series on little-known topics that wizards should know. Knowledge of the Harry Potter series not required.

Facilitate fine-grained file permissions with ACL editor Eiciel.

Sooner or later, every Perl hacker ends up wanting to process a collection of files contained within a directory, including all the files in all the subdirectories. Thankfully, Perl comes with the File::Find module to perform this task in a tested, portable manner.

Squid is often used as a reverse proxy to spare web servers from repeated requests for the same content. But Squid can also be used to spare you from interminable delays when requesting content. Deployed as a local caching proxy, Squid can reduce your site’s bandwidth consumption and make browsing more responsive. Learn how it works, and start saving time and money today.

Some of the thorniest concepts in the GNU General Public License (GPL) revolve around the engineering concept of linking. Here’s how and when the GPL applies to combinations of code.

If you want to run a command every time your machine boots, but don't have access to the init scripts, use cron's @reboot qualifier.

Use mkdir -p to create a hierarchy in one fell swoop. For example, mkdir -p a/b/c/d makes directory d in directory c in directory b in directory a.

If you haven't built a local area network lately, you may have forgotten just how painful a project it can be. But what if your users could just plug in, power on, and connect, building their own ad-hoc network? Zeroconf, the basis of Apple's Rendezvous product and an emerging networking standard, puts the play back into 'plug-and-play.' Here's how Zeroconf works.

For decades, sort has been extended over and over again to make it more and more useful. Here’s the fifth in an ongoing series about new features in familiar utilities.

Pick up a few pointers on optimizing your MySQL install.

Last month, we looked at MySQL's new storage engine, NDB (also known as NDBCluster or MySQL Cluster). Now it's time to look at the compilation, installation, and configuration process.

In March's "LAMP Post" column, we started to look at MySQL's replication subsystem. We covered how replication works, as well as putting it to use by configuring the master and slave(s). This month, in this inaugural "MySQL" column, let's spend some time looking at the lesser known aspects of MySQL replication, including filtering and log inspection.

MySQL is great for building database-driven Web sites of all shapes and sizes. It's fast, easy to configure, and incredibly reliable. But MySQL lacks a mature, easy-to-use GUI administration tool. Yes, you can use the mysql command-line, but that's rather tedious and you don't get a good overall picture of your server without doing a lot of typing.

Get under the hood of MySQL to find out how you can speed up your database applications.