The Amanda backup system is a great resource for backing up your Linux system. One of the things I noticed with the latest version is that the exclusion list has been breaking. For instance, Amanda backups are now backing up the /tmp folder, which causes it complain with the PHP session lock files. All was needed to fix was adding a leading dot in front of each folder.

The fastest way to trim down large web log files is through UNIX/Linux shell. Large files exceeding 1 GB (millions of lines of logs) are not easily editable using a GUI interface, so the fastest way is to parse them is via command line. You can trim them down according to a time range, remove internal requests from within the company, and remove bots/crawlers data from the log files.

For instance, I have a 4GB log file with about two years worth of info (2007-2009) in there. What if I just wanted the logs from 2008? First, run the “head -10″ command …

If you ssh into your server and the text is stuck at 80 characters per line, you will need to check the sshd setting in /etc/ssh/sshd_config (Debian)

Make sure the X11 setting is set to yes. This will allow you to expand your terminal window to beyond 80 characters per line.  Otherwise, it will be limited to the display settings in console.

X11Forwarding yes