The default php configuration comes with a hard cap of 2MB on the size of uploaded file determined by the php.ini directive upload_max_filesize in conjunction with post_max_size. The maximum uploading size of a file is the lower. Therefore, to increase the uploading cap and raise uploading limit, you will need to edit those 2 directives in php.ini.

The location of php.ini varies distribution by distribution, in this example, with Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty, php.ini is located at /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini, so

sudo vi /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

Press / to find upload_max_filesize and change it to, say 8M:

upload_max_filesize = 8M

Press ESC, :, wq and Enter. Now the php.ini is saved with the new uploading file limit. Reload apache2 to read the new configurations:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Now you should be able to upload any file up to 8MB in size, in case you need larger uploading limit, in addition to change upload_max_filesize to, say, 16M, you must also edit post_max_size to more than or equaling to 16M because file uploads are processed through HTTP POST method.

The default colors for comments (texts in /* */ or following // or #, …) in vi code highlighting are a little too dark. Ever wanted to make it more recognizable in SSH console?

Find and edit /etc/vim/vimrc with vi:

vi /etc/vim/vimrc

And add in this line:

colorscheme desert

Wherein desert is one of the available color schemes vim comes with. Now we will need to edit the actual color scheme file and change the highlighting colors:

/usr/share/vim/vimcurrent/colors/desert.vim

Change:

hi Comment ctermfg=darkcyan

To:

hi Comment ctermfg=blue

Save the change and exit. Run:

source /etc/vim/vimrc

And the changes will now take effect.

The default directory color of ls –color is also too dark, you can learn how to change the default directory color of ls –color.

After you have enabled the color switch of ls command in shell console, it’s nice but some may complain that the deep blue color of the directories are too dark to recognize sometimes. Let’s change that.

Just open up the .profile or .bash_profile file under your home directory and put this line in it:

export LS_COLORS='di=01;34'

Done! Now the color of the ls directory listings is much lighter and easier to recognize. There’s also a tip of how to change the default dark color for comments in vi text editor.

Below are a few general commands found in most popular Linux distros which you can use via SSH to check the status of your hosting server.

To show used and available RAM memory and swap space usage:

free -m

To show current disk storage usage by mounted device:

df

To show disk usage statistics of the current directory by directories and files:

du

To show the hard disk space a directory or a file takes up:

du filename

To show the length of time this server has been up and the server loads in the past 1 minute, 5 minutes and 15 minutes:

uptime

To display a real-time updated server resource usage including: server uptime, user logged on, load average, current tasks, CPU usage, memory usage and swap usage:

top

To display a list of real-time active or sleeping processes your server is up to:

ps

To show some information about the current status of virtual memory, CPU usage, I/O usage:

vmstat

This is also a good tool to find out system performance bottlenecks.

To display currently logged on users on the system:

w

Or

who

To print a full screen text graph of the server load refreshed every few seconds:

tload

If you are on shared hosting, chances are your server usage has been imposed some hard limits such as the largest amount of files / directories possible and the hard storage limit. View them by:

quota