SSH

Secure Shell (SSH) is a cryptographic network protocol for using network services securely over an unsecured network. This is also known as “tunnelling in” – because a secure “tunnel” is created between client and server, with encrypted communications, which may not (easily) be intercepted.

The best known example application is for remote login to computer systems by users, for example to remotely access a server in order to add or edit the server configuration remotely.

SSH is now the de facto standard for remotely logging into servers, and is more secure than plain FTP or Telnet, both of which are basically “insecure”. You should try to use good hosts, who support access via SSH and SFTP.

How to Migrate to Kinsta

Kinsta logo grey turquoise

Kinsta is Silicon Dales’ favourite managed WordPress + WooCommerce hosts when it comes to the support, available features and admin panel. Though they’re traditionally a little more expensive than most other hosts, they nicely combine the things business owners need to know with a developer friendly approach (they allow SSH access and WP CLI, by …

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How to Setup FTP (FTPS (not SFTP)) on an AWS EC2 Instance

Below are the commands required to setup FTP (well, FTPS in fact, and specifically not SFTP, which you can most easily use by adding your security certificate to your FTP program and accessing over SSH) on your AWS EC2 cloud instance. I’m assuming you use the AWS flavour of Linux. If you do not use …

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Installing the GD Library

Because I just posted this description in the post I wrote on how to make WordPress Auto-Thumbnails work, I thought I would also post those instructions straight up as a pointer for anyone out there who is looking for the command required to install the GD Library in their LAMP setup, so here it is: …

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How to Make WordPress Auto-Thumbnails Work

If you’re recently installed WordPress onto a new server (we do this a lot on Amazon EC2 instances of varying sizes) and you notice that your image uploads aren’t auto-thumbnailing (when WordPress “crunches” your images into “thumbnail” “medium” and “large” sizes for use throughout your website) then chances are your server doesn’t have the GD …

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Tutorial: Use WP CLI to recount WordPress taxonomy terms

Sometimes in WordPress or WooCommerce website, you find that (for example) some custom post type or other content has been removed, but the taxonomy terms are still registering the “old” content, and therefore the term numbers are all wrong. Well, heck, what to do?! In this situation, there are a few steps you can take …

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How to convert colours to black in images using ImageMagick

If you want to convert PNG (or similar) files containing, for example, icons which are in one colour (say green) to black, then the command below will do this. This can be especially useful for updating logos or icons on the fly in a file system, without breaking stride, over command line (SSH). Note you …

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Transport HTTPS traffic to HTTP with .htaccess

The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that we very recently updated a couple of things here at the Silicon Dales website, and one of those steps has involved switching from delivering pages via HTTPS, now that we have retired the online shop section. The precise mechanism for doing this on a LAMP setup using …

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Tutorial: Fix Magento upgrade fails with “Unknown cipher in list: TLSv1”

Have you tried to upgrade Magento from the command line (or some other way) and discovered the delicious error message: Unknown cipher in list: TLSv1 Returned to you in your terminal window? There is a fix which can work for this, below. Edit the file downloader/lib/Mage/HTTP/Client/Curl.php, type the following command from the Magento installation directory: …

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