When you cannot monitor your server for service availability, it is better to take help of automated monitor and restart utility. Last 4 days I was away from my server as I was enjoying my vacation. During this time due to load my lighttpd webserver died but it was restarted automatically within 2 minutes. I [...]

If you are using zoneedit.com or dyndns.org for your DNS service so that you can access your server using a URL, then you might have to update your DNS record at the service periodically whenever the IP address of your computer changes.Now here is simple solution for this ddclient.Update IP addresses at dynamic DNS services.A [...]

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 [...]

The main configuration file for cron, /etc/crontab, contains the following lines:

SHELL=/bin/bash
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
MAILTO=root
HOME=/

# run-parts
01 * * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.hourly
02 4 * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.daily
22 4 * * 0 root run-parts /etc/cron.weekly
42 4 1 * * root run-parts /etc/cron.monthly

The first four lines are variables used to configure the environment in which the cron tasks [...]

The cron daemon is a long running process that executes commands at specific dates and times. To schedule one-time only tasks with cron, use at or batch. For commands that need to be executed repeatedly (e.g. hourly, daily or weekly), use crontab, which has the following options:

crontab filename
Install filename as your crontab file.

crontab -e
Edit your [...]

Cron is the Unix/Linux event scheduler. It’s great for automating a multitude of administrative tasks like backing up your data. See Wikipedia: Crontab. When I examined the man pages I found that it is relatively straightforward but has complicated options and rules that take quite some unraveling to appreciate properly. And they’re so hard for [...]