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Here are some useful utilities to check out what hardware you have installed on your linux server and how it is performing ...

cat /proc/cpuinfo
cat /proc/meminfo
dmesg
lspci

Here is a crib sheet for the most common and useful commands needed when migrating or backing up a linux server. Thes tools make the work easy and fast. The trouble is that unless you are backing-up manually or migrating servers for a living, must of us only have to deal with these commands occasionally and the exact usage becomes a little hazy over time. below are the basic usage details of tar, wget,mysql and mysqldump ...

To change file permissions to 644 use ...

# find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

To change directory permissions to 755 use ...

# find . -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;

Every now and then I have needed to delete a whole directory tree.  This is the correct command BUT TAKE WARNING! It will delete the whole directory tree without warning, ALL sub directories and files- so make sure you get it right or you can cause SERIOUS damage to your installation. rm -rf folder_name

Having been notified by go-daddy that all my vhost servers were going to need to be rebuilt ( what a major PAIN!), I decided the time had come to move to a dedicated server. Part of this process was to create a back-up archive of the important parts of the server. To archive all my web data I simply create a tar archive of my vhosts directory.

Using FC6 and SSH into the server, I installed phpMyAdmin using yum. Very straight forward. To access phpMyAdmin you need to enter https://my-server-name/phpMyAdmin This failed with "Access Forbidden". It turns out that the rpm creates a 'phpMyAdmin.conf' file in /etc/httpd/conf.d/ and this file only permits access to 127.0.0.1 by default for security. Because I only ever access remotely, simply modifying the allow directive to my remote ip was sufficient for my needs. Alternatively you could secure your connection using SSL.