On Amazon EC2, the instance type you choose determines the amount of physical memory (RAM) that you get. Larger instance types with lots of RAM are more expensive. So if you want more RAM on a medium or small EC2 instance, you can define some storage space on your disk to act as RAM when needed. The disk area you use for this purpose is called a swap file. This article explains swap files and demonstrates how to set up a 2GB swap file using ephemeral storage on an m3.medium instance of Amazon EC2 that has only 3.75GB of RAM by default.
Linux & Servers
What is life without Linux? Browse this category to explore content I have created relating to Linux and Servers. This section is pretty broad. It promises content on Ubuntu, cloud VMs, server automation, bash scripting, PowerShell, system/website administration, AWS, etc. Watch this space for my existing and future content on the aforementioned technologies.
Setting Up WordPress On Amazon EC2
WordPress on Amazon EC2 makes a very flexible and powerful web development combo. WordPress is a great choice because it has a huge theme and plugin ecosystem, and it is very user-friendly (non-technical people can use it comfortably). Amazon EC2 is highly scalable and practically unlimited and Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a whole suite of website and application management tools that most people find useful at one point or another.
Customize Your Bash Prompt
Most Linux systems have a default bash prompt in one color that tells you your user name, the name of the machine you’re working on, and some indication of your current working directory. This is all useful information, but you can do much more with the prompt. All sorts of information can be displayed. You can even change the colors either to make it look interesting, or to make certain information stand out. You might also want to customize your bash prompt if you have difficulties using the terminal because the prompt isn’t visible enough.
VNC For Ubuntu On Amazon EC2 – A GUI To Your Server
So you want to access your Ubuntu Server like you would a regular desktop – with a graphical front end instead of just a terminal. This tutorial explains how you can do this using Virtual Network Computing (VNC). Since I’m a big fan of Amazon Web Services (AWS), I will be explaining how to set up VNC for Ubuntu on Amazon EC2. However, the general procedure described here will work for any normal Ubuntu server setup.
WordPress Updates & Installations Via SSH
SSH provides a significantly more secure way of updating WordPress files and plugins or performing new plugin installations. Here, I explain how to enable WordPress to use SSH for all updates and installations.
Install SSH2 For PHP Shell Connections
A general overview of SSH2 for PHP can be found at the official Secure Shell2 reference. If you look at the requirements section, you will see that two other libraries are required for it to work. They are OpenSSL and libssh2. I explain here how to install both of these first. And then we proceed to actually install ssh2 for PHP shell connections.