Optimizing Search Engine Coverage of a WordPress Blog

To opti­mize the search engine cov­er­age a robots.txt file placed in the root of the HTML serv­er can exclude some paths of the web­site from being indexed by the Google crawler.

In Word­Press this file can be gen­er­at­ed auto­mat­i­cal­ly. In the case of using Nginx a redi­rec­tion rule has to be imple­ment­ed in the nginx con­fig file so that the query to robots.txt is redi­rect­ed to the Word­Press index.php file.

# generate robots.txt with wordpress
location = /robots.txt {
    try_files     $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
    access_log    off;
    log_not_found off;
}

Now Word­Press is used to gen­er­ate the robots.txt file which is dynam­i­cal­ly edit­ed by plu­g­ins and themes.

Monitoring a Fritz!Box using RRDtool

RRD­tool is a pop­u­lar and ver­sa­tile pro­gram to store and aggre­gate time-depen­dent data in way that the size need­ed for stor­age is not grow­ing indef­i­nite­ly. Fur­ther­more it has a pow­er­ful plot­ting engine to gen­er­ate nice graphs. It is there­fore wide­ly used to mon­i­tor net­work devices.

The pop­u­lar Fritz!Box router can be queried using the TR-064 pro­to­col for the num­ber of trans­ferred bytes. The Fritz Speed pack­age brings these two togeth­er to enable mon­i­tor­ing and graph­ing the WAN traf­fic of the Fritz!Box.

Check the project on GitHub or direct­ly go to the docs.

Simple Samba Configuration for Public Shares

The Aim

Some­times it is nec­es­sary to share files from a POSIX oper­at­ing sys­tem (Lin­ux, FreeB­SD, etc.) with Win­dows com­put­ers via the net­work. For this task Sam­ba is the pow­er­ful inter­op­er­abil­i­ty suite which can han­dle this task. To dis­tin­guish between these two sys­tems I will dif­fer­en­ti­ate between POSIX (that is the sam­ba serv­er) and Win­dows computers.

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Dancing the DHCP Samba

After a hard­ware fail­ure of a Lin­ux com­put­er I took the chance to set up a Debian instal­la­tion from scratch. So I saved the data that was impor­tant to a serv­er, burned the Debian DVD and installed it on the computer.

When it came to net­work­ing it got a lit­tle more com­pli­cat­ed: as the serv­er is using the cor­po­rate net­work, it had to send a spe­cif­ic host name to obtain the IP con­fig­u­ra­tion via DHCP. So that was what I did: I entered the host name and let dhcp­client do its mag­ic. It took some time, but final­ly it was set up. All DNS entries for this host name and its cor­re­spond­ing IP were correct.

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