Protect Your Web Server With Ipset

Posted on April 18, 2016 by Jim

The Linux packet filter provides an easy way to protect against unwanted network intrusions. Often referred to simply as “iptables“, it is a basic firewall built into the Linux kernel. Iptables is most useful, perhaps, on those servers most susceptible to attack, such as LAMP systems, content management servers and blogging platforms like WordPress, especially where they are Internet facing.

Ipset is a fairly recent addition to Linux, having been introduced into kernel version 2.6.32. This means it is supported in Debian 7 and 8, as well as Red Hat 6 onwards. In short, ipset allows a large number of IP addresses to be blocked in an efficient way, as demonstrated below. Continue reading →

Speed up WordPress by Renaming wp-login.php

Posted on February 10, 2015 by Jim

Here is a tip for speeding up WordPress, especially if you are running it on a low power server. I made the change to WordPress running on a small ARM server, resulting in an immediate and dramatic speed up. It works because it prevents bots on the Internet from wasting your server resources. Continue reading →

Install WordPress Blog on Raspberry Pi

Posted on September 25, 2013 by Jim

The Pi’s low power consumption makes it well suited to the role of always-on web server. This post describes how to install WordPress on the Raspberry Pi and get a blog going. Hosting your own blog means you keep ownership of your data, and you are not dependent on blogger.com or whoever. This procedure was UPDATED on 11th march 2020 for Raspbian 10 / Buster.

If you have already installed WordPress and just want to upgrade it, perhaps because a new version has been released, please see my article How to Upgrade WordPress on Linux

Install Apache

Install the Apache web server with these commands. It might take 10 minutes or so to complete. A few other packages will also be installed. Continue reading →

WordPress WP-Super-Cache vs Quick Cache

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Jim

Joomla, Drupal and WordPress are the world’s most popular blogging platforms. Right now I’m staring at the WordPress “Add New Post” page, because this blog is built on WordPress. WordPress is great. And incredibly slow.

Here’s One I made Earlier

This post appeared quickly in your browser ? Great. You have been served a page that was built several hours ago. Without the pre-fabricataion, you would have had a 5 or 10 second wait while WordPress created the page from scratch. Who waits 10 seconds for a page to load these days ? Nobody, that’s who. This post compares two WordPress caching plugins and finds that WP-Super-Cache is the best because of its ability to cache compressed pages. Continue reading →

WordPress Login Hangs: Fix with MySQL

Posted on March 20, 2013 by Jim

Having problems logging into WordPress ? It’s a tricky area, with a seemingly endless list of problems, causes and recommendations. In my case, the “login” link would hang before even asking for a user name or password. The browser window would eventually give up saying “no response from server”. The blog was up and healthy, but logging in as admin (or any other user) was not possible. Continue reading →

Repairing the MySQL WordPress Database

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Jim

You can recover a running MySQL database with the mysqlcheck command.

After a power cut, I found these errors in /var/log/daemon.log. This was on Debian Squeeze running WordPress 3.3.1 and MySQL 5.1.61.

Mar 22 11:22:16 debian /etc/mysql/debian-start[2153]: Triggering myisam-recover for all MyISAM tables Mar 22 11:22:17 debian mysqld: 120322 11:22:17 [ERROR] /usr/sbin/mysqld: Table './wordpress/wp_commentmeta' is marked as crashed and should be repaired Continue reading →

Unix etc.

Unix, Linux and related technologies.

Tag Archives: wordpress