How to set up usable shell access on Plesk VServers

Imagine you set up a new domain on your VServer. After filling in all the data, Plesk creates a directory /var/www/vhosts/FOODOMAIN which is the home directory for the domain’s ftp user as well. This makes sense for FTP access as the directory contains all the important subdirectories such as httpdocs, conf, statistics and more. [...]

Installing MoinMoin Wiki on a Ubuntu VServer with Plesk

I just spent a day getting MoinMoin Wiki to run my vserver. Since I had rather spent this time otherwise and I assume the same holds for you too, I give you a step-by-step tutorial about how to get it running quickly. If you have root access to a vserver running plesk and want [...]

How to plot a single graph from multiple files using Gnuplot

Assume you have a lot of data files where any line in each of those files refers to a common entity. If you don’t want to merge the files by hand you can directly plot them from inside Gnuplot using a pipe:
plot ‘< paste FILE1.dat FILE2.dat’ using 2:4
In the example, both files have two columns [...]

How to get an entry out of a tab delimited file

Insert the following function into your .bashrc:
# Function that gets a column and row from a tab separated file
tableEntry()
{
sed -n “$1p” $3 | awk ‘{print $’$2′}’
}
You are then able to write
tableEntry 2 5 file.txt
to get the 2nd row and 5th column from any file.

Deploying webapps has just become easy

Remember the time when creating web applications was tedious and involved thousands of lines php code? Ruby on Rails was the first popular framework that strongly simplified this process. Releasing the webapp, however, is still sophisticated, as obtaining a fast, stable and scalable Rails application requires some webserver configuration.
But now, even the deployment of webapps [...]