After an upgrade from Debian 3.1 (sarge) to Debian 4.0 (etch), awstats stopped automatically updating.

Awstats was complaining that the log files could found. By logging in to the server, user www-data was able to open the files, but still awstats was complaining.

On Debian based systems such as Ubuntu... Apache comes with mod_status compiled in by default.
mod_status provides information on your apache server activity and performance.
This tutorial will show you how to enable this feature in such a way that only requested issued from localhost will be accepted and served.

Apache, the most popular web server, is a stable and reliable software for providing web pages to the world. But sometimes, it happens that Apache will struggle under high loaded traffic.

Here is an overview on how you can optimize apache so it can cope with higher loads. Those tips are not meant to be exceptional but should be sufficient to increase your web site performance by handling more traffic.

This article will show how-to install, configure and set up apache's mod-security module on a debian based system. This was done on Ubuntu Dapper and should fit any Debian based system.

Mod_security is an Apache 1.x/2.x module whose purpose is to tighten the Web application security by shielding the applications from attack. The idea is to filter request and web content before passing it to apache core.

Once installed, mod-security needs to be defined some rules matching patterns, filter request and HTTP stream and in the end do different actions like allowing, denying, log...

Effectively, it is an intrusion detection and/or prevention system for apache web server.

While running a HTTP server such as Apache, there is a few step an administrator have to take in order not to get easily hacked. The very basic one is to hide from the outside which software version and operating system version are running.

Apache is usually suitable out of the box for most common used. The apache structure under debian based systems is actually really well made as it is really easy to activate or deactivate module.

This how-to will show how to activate or deactivate available modules under a debian system running apache2.

Subversion is an application used for version control, it is meant to become a replacement of CVS Concurrent Versions System. Subversion is also known as svn.

This how-to will show how to setup svn repositories accessible throught http by using apache2 and the DAV module.

Awstats is a great web log analyser. It gives really usefull statistics about traffic on your web sites.

Installing awstats in debian/ubuntu still needs so tweaking to produce neat statistics.

In this articles, I'm going to show you what needs to be done.

Virtual Hosting allow web servers to host more than one website on a sing machine. This is how sharing hosting works. I become pretty handy as well while develloping different web project on the same machine and allows you to access to your local repository using addresses such as http://dev.mysite.com instead of http://localhost/~myuser/myproject/ :) .
This tutorial is based on a machine runnning ubuntu/linux but should be the same on any debian based distribution and almost the same on other distributions.