Configure exim4 to send mail to other hosts

If you have just installed Debian (or other Linux) you might be stumped as to why sending e-mails from web software (such as forum activation e-mails) is not working. The reason is that by default the exim4 mail software is setup not to forward any mail to any remote hosts. This of course is an […]

Solving “IPv6 addrconf: prefix with wrong length 48” permanently

If you have a recent distribution of Linux, you might find the message “IPv6 addrconf: prefix with wrong length 48” repeated a lot in syslog. If you Google this error message you’ll quickly find that this is because IPv6 auto configuration (sort of like DHCP) is failing. Now if you don’t want to bother with […]

How to prevent cron & PowerDNS clogging syslog

On a default Debian installation both cron and PowerDNS will log into /varlog/syslog. If you are running very frequent cron jobs (like every 5 minutes) or an active PowerDNS server (or recursor), you’ll find syslog will be completely clogged with mostly unimportant messages. The solution of course, is to have these two services output log […]

Multiple DNS servers with PowerDNS and MySQL replication

With DNS it is essential to have at least two and preferably more DNS servers for your domains in geographically separated locations. Putting all your DNS servers on the same server is asking for trouble: even if your server goes down for only a little while (like a reboot) some visitors may perceive your sites […]

Keep WordPress & phpMyAdmin up-to-date with a single command

Notice: see this follow-up post for better ways of keeping WordPress & phpMyAdmin up-to-date. Keeping up-to-date with the latest versions of commonly used web software such as WordPress and phpMyAdmin can be a bit of a drag if you would have to manually download, unzip and upload new files through FTP each time a new […]