For those of us who are anti-Windows and anti-Mac, we will benefit from learning how to make Ubuntu run super fast.

Here’s some great tips on minimizing processes to make your Ubuntu run faster than ever:

1. Remove Network Manager if you do not need it “sudo apt-get remove network-manager”. If possible give yourself a static IP in /etc/network/interfaces like so:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.150
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.1.100
broadcast 192.168.0.255
gateway 192.168.1.1

Having a static IP helps with boot time as your machine doesn’t have to communicate with the router/dhcp server as much to obtain an address.

2. Also remove firestarter or whatever graphical firewall frontend you’re using. Learn to control iptables at boot up and shutdown. It’ll be much snappier.

3. Install bum, “sudo apt-get install bum” and run it with root access. Shut off all unnecessary services. If you’re not sure about a service research it before shutting it off. Also, install sysv-rc-conf. Run the application as root. This will allow you to control, in an easy way, what services start at which run level. It’s like bum, but more detailed. Be very careful with which services you are removing from which run-level. If you don’t know what you’re doing here, research it or don’t touch it. After you do this you may want to reboot to make sure you didn’t break anything.

4. Turn off usplash in grub. (Mind you, you’re bootup won’t be as pretty as the splash will go away).

• vim /boot/grub/menu.lst
• on the kernel line delete the words “splash” and “quiet”
• Reboot to see the changes.

5. If you have a dual core processor, you can decrease your boot time with concurrency.

• sudo vim /etc/init.d/rc
• and find the line CONCURRENCY=none and change it to: CONCURRENCY=shell
• Reboot to see the changes. (tired of rebooting yet?)

6. Remove some TTYs

I could easily do this by editing /etc/inittab and then commenting the extra TTYs there. With the new upstart mechanism in place, things are a little different.

You have to edit /etc/default/console-setup file. This file defines how many ttys should you get.

Change ACTIVE_CONSOLES=”/dev/tty[1-6]” to the number of consoles you want. Lets say, 3 ttys, then change it to “/dev/tty[1-3]“.

And then goto /etc/event.d/ and change the ttyx files that you DONOT want. Edit them and comment lines starting with “start on runlevel”. So, in this case, you’ll comment the start line in tty4..tty6 files.

Rebooting shoud minimize the number of consoles for you. Worked for me!! Good luck, NOTE: Even though you’ve reduced the tty number, X is still on Alt-F7. Again, go ahead and reboot to make sure you didn’t break anything.

more via tuxtraining

I have been reading the following book called, Linux Server Hacks, which shows you many ways you can hack your Linux server so your server doesn’t die.

This actually works since we just had a DoS attack about 5 minutes ago. (It seems like we are getting more and more DoS attacks these days. You can refer to the DDOS Deflate script also)

Here’s HACK #47 I read about last week in my bath room from the book and I just used it to prevent DoS attackers from bringing my precious Quad-CPU dedicated server down.

Enter the following commands and you will limit number of TCP connections to your server to 12 connections per second after 24 connections have been seen. (It means that no matter what, your server will not try to serve more than 12 visitors during one second of period when your server gets digged, farked, stumbled, or whatever)
iptables -t nat -N syn-flood

iptables -t nat -A syn-flood -m limit —limit 12/s —limit-burst 24 -j RETURN

iptables -t nat -A syn-flood -j DROP

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i $EXT_IFACE -d $DEST_IP -p tcp –syn -j syn-flood
I think you can increase the values steadily if your server can handle more. But it seems to have brought our server load from 33.00 somethin’ to under 1.0. Yey!

If you are a hacker, sorry dude. You are gonna have to try a little harder hacking Zedomax since we are hackers too.

P.S. You know what I try to do when I find out where the hackers are coming from, I do a DoS attack back on them. This usually pisses them off enough to DoS me more but I kinda enjoy the battle so bring it on! :p

Here’s a cool DIY I stumbled onto today that shows you how to setup a custom firewall using iptables. This might not be for those of you who already have a GUI server management system but it’s good to know just in case your GUI goes down…

After getting some problems with firestarter i decided to get knowledge about iptables and how to set my own firewall script and want to share this experience for users who want to set a custom firewall up quickly.
The purpose of this guide is to provide a basic knowledge about iptables and then help to create a firewall script.
The final step will be to make the script running on each boot.