LAMPdocs: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP

Yesterday I’ve purchased my first communicator. Certainly, I need it to have SSH access to my servers. As my passwords are not so simple, I’ve decided to read about key authentification in order to prevent entering long user passwords without the loss of security.

I’ve found two good articles and I won’t copy their content to my site: they are too great for this and contain all the necessary screenshots. Following this guides you won’t have any problems setting up your key authentification.

Here are these great links: Public Key Authentication With PuTTY and Key Authentication with PuTTY. I’ve followed the second one to tune it on my home PC and then transferred to my communicator. Hope these articles will help you to secure your connections too.

Today I would like to talk about software that could be used for LAMP administration. As a typical LAMP administrator does not have physical access to his server, he should use some programs to access it. If you are on Linux, there is no problem as you can run any console application you like and ssh to your server. You are welcome to use Midnight Commander to easily transfer and edit your files. But what to use when you’re on a Windows machine, that has no standard software to interact with Linux?

Most administrators are using PuTTY. It is an easy, lightweight application that allows you to take full control over your Linux server. The only thing I have to say that it does not work with Windows password managers, so, if you have many servers, is is quite difficult to remember all your passwords. You’ll either have to store them in a text file, either make them simple (I suppose, you’re not writing them on the paper).

I found an open source solution that combines the power of PuTTY and allows to have as many servers as you like. It’s WinSCP. It is a free ssh client, translated into many languages, and it allows you to have as many server sessions as you like. On Windows I am using a password manager, it’s Sticky Password. WinSCP has PuTTY in it and it allows to easily transfer files between your server and your local machine. It has Norton Commander and Explorer-like interface, a plenty of settings, that allow you to customize it in the way you like. Take a look at the program Interface:

WinSCP with PuTTY in it are enough for a system administrator. Both are free of charge, accessible and very useful. If you need more functionality, e.g. ability to connect your server as a Windows drive, there is a shareware named SftpDrive. It allows you to have a new drive to easily transfer files. You don’t have ability to use the command line, but this could be helpful in editing files, as you can use them with your favorite Windows viewers and editors. You can try it for 6 weeks and if you decide it is worth $39, you can buy it.

That’s all for today. Next time I am going to present some tools written on PHP, that allow to work with text files. Bye-bye!