Today I had to recover a Debian server after the /var partition was accidentally deleted. All the user generated data (primarily website content and databases) was backed up, and I also had access to a backup copy of the installed package list as generated by dpkg --get-selections. The instructions below don’t go into full detail, but hopefully they will set you on the right track. They should also work for Ubuntu installs.

If this happens to you, don’t panic, and whatever you do, don’t shut down or reboot the server!

In this post, I describe how to upgrade the firmware on an LSI MegaRAID SAS controller to the latest version. Upgrading the firmware is recommended before making certain changes, e.g. installing a battery backup unit. These instructions have been tested on an LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-4i but should also work for other models using LSI’s 2108 chipset.

In this article I'll walk through how to set up Composer, Drupal 8, and Drush in a way that means we can have multiple users running the same centralised version of Drush when appropriate (ie. when a Drupal site isn't set up as a Composer project, or a project doesn't include its own copy of Drush) which means that our team can keep using Drush seamlessly without having to install a separate copy of Composer and Drush for each user or each project on our servers. This approach should also make it easy to keep things up to date and change the configuration later on if needed.

Email commonly includes the sender’s address in two places. The From header in the message body is the one that most people are aware of, and this is the address that email recipients see. However, the sending mail server also adds a Return-Path before the message body. Recipients don’t generally see this address, but it is important for two reasons. First, it is used in a number of anti-spam checks. Second, it’s the address that typically receives non-delivery reports if a message can’t be delivered for any reason.

Here’s how to set up a VPN that has all these features:

• Works natively on iOS and macOS
• Doesn't require you to manage certificates or keys
• Automatically connects when your device is online

It should also work on Windows*, and Android via the StrongSwan app, but I haven’t tested it. Please post about your experiences using this guide with other devices in the comments!

At some point in the last few months, ProFTPd stopped working on several of the servers we maintain. Since it was working before, we didn’t change any of the configuration files, and it stopped working on several servers independently, I’m guessing that this was due to a change in the default config of ProFTPd, or at least the Debian Jessie version of ProFTPd. There’s an easy workaround but not a real solution at time of writing.

Windows versions prior to Windows 8 cannot view the content of CD/DVD images such as .iso files without the use of an external program. A long time ago I used to use a free program called Daemon Tools to open/mount CD image files. Nowadays there are several alternatives out there, but nearly all of them seem to have issues on Windows 7. Old versions of Daemon Tools don’t work. Newer versions allegedly include browser toolbar spyware, as do most other free alternatives.