Linux @ Silicon Dales

WordPress Problem: Image could not be processed. Please go back and try again.

If you have recently installed WordPress, or you have just started tinkering with some image or other (such as the header image in the default WordPress theme) on a new installation, you might have run into the following problem: Image could not be processed. Please go back and try again. When the above comes through, …

Linux & Apache Server – Set Local Time to London, UK, Europe

A quick and simple command you might need from time-to-time if you’re running apache webservers in one or other Linux flavour. We often grab EC2 instances on Amazon, for example, for our clients and, for various reasons, we want the server to know what time it is here in the UK! So here’s the command …

Installing APC on Amazon EC2 Instance

Some time ago, I wrote a short blog post explaining how to go about installing XCache on an Amazon EC2 instance to help with opcode caching. More recently, we’ve begun using APC for similar reasons, with excellent results, including on Amazon EC2 Micro instances, which can be used under their free usage tier to run …

PHP 7.0 Reaches End of Life on 3 December 2018

If you, like us, were thinking Christmas comes round faster and faster each year, then you’ll no doubt think it was only yesterday that the awesome improvements PHP 7.0 brought along with it hit our servers and started powering up our WordPress sites way better than PHP 5.6, which was itself cool for its era.

Installing PHP SOAP – Need soapclient?

The tutorial below explains how to install Soapclient for PHP in a Linux system which is showing that this is not included. This may, for our clients, show up in your WooCommerce status page, and some plugins rely upon this to go about their business. The commands below will allow sysadmin to get this installed. …

How to Get Size of Folder (and all its contents) in Linux / Unix via PuTTy / Terminal

If you ever wanted to know “how big is that directory?” and by this you mean the entire directory, and you have access over SSH, via PuTTy or your command line terminal of choice, to your Linux server or VPS, then there is a little command which will tell you, in useful units, exactly what …

How to Use Sky Go (and other Silverlight 5+) Video on Ubuntu (and other) Linux

This tutorial describes how to get SkyGo working on Ubuntu Linux. Other linux distros may work, as may other video services, such as Netflix, NowTV, though it will be most successful for those that use Silverlight. As my long winded title suggests, this tutorial will allow the potential online video viewer who has made the …

Silicon Dales Managed Hosting Servers – Dirty COW Free!

There is a Linux vulnerability known as Dirty COW which surfaced a week or so ago, for which there have been frequent warnings around the Linux community pretty much as soon as the vulnerability was uncovered, as it is a particularly nasty one which can, in some circumstances, allow malevolent forces to gain control of …

How to find file creation / modified date using Unix commands in terminal window

If you’re ever using PuTTy or another terminal window to SSH into your server and you want to know “how old is that file” (or, at least, what date was it last modified) then the command below will allow you to find out just that information! How to find file creation date using Unix ls …

How to Update Linux on Amazon EC2 with Yum

It’s really quite straightforward to update your Amazon EC2 instance to the latest versions: Login with your secure key via your terminal window; then Type “Sudo -i” and hit enter Type “yum update” and hit enter Hit “Y” to agree to the updates Wait for the software to carry out the update. That’s it! The …