Your Debian / Ubuntu Linux box security depends upon access to system services (one of many aspects). For example, you may need to provide a web server (Apache service) to serve web pages. However, if you do not need use a service, you should always turn off all unused services to avoid exploits.
Traditionally, Debian provided [...]

Here is a simple shell script tested on CentOS / RHEL / Fedora / Debian / Ubuntu Linux. Should work under any other UNIX liker operating system. It will check for httpd pid using pgrep command
Pgrep command
pgrep looks through the currently running processes and lists the process IDs which matches the selection criteria to screen. [...]

When setting up your OpenDNS dashboard, if you are a home user on a Internet provider that gives you a dynamic IP address, you need to tell OpenDNS your IP address has changed or there will not be any relevant stats for your domain. In fact, it may report erroneously that a BotNet or Malware [...]

ProFTPD is a proven, high-performance, scalable FTP server written from scratch, with a focus toward simplicity, security, and ease of configuration. Naturally, ProFTPD powers some of the largest sites on the Internet. It features a very Apache-like configuration syntax, modules, and a highly customizable server infrastructure, including support for multiple ‘virtual’ FTP servers, anonymous FTP, [...]

Cron has many uses. I have used cron to create nightly backups, update server room temperature web pages at various intervals, generate new email ‘.signature’ files every five minutes, and syncronize files nightly via SSH over the internet. I am sure there are many more.
Cron Documentation
Cron documentation is not bad (not [...]

Cron
Cron is a daemon that executes scheduled commands. Cron is started automatically from /etc/init.d on entering multi-user runlevels. Cron searches its spool area (/var/spool/cron/crontabs) for crontab files (which are named after accounts in /etc/passwd); crontabs found are loaded into memory. Note that crontabs in this directory should not be accessed directly - the crontab command [...]

Note: On most systems, you must get permission from the system administrator before you can submit job requests to cron. On some shared systems, because there is only one crontab file, only the administrator has access to the crontab command. To request that cron be enabled on your Webserve account, see the Indiana [...]