Journald is a logging system used in modern Linux-based operating systems to record system events. It collects information about the operation of various services, applications, and system processes to help administrators monitor system health and diagnose errors.

Unlike standard text logs, journald stores data in a binary format. This allows logs to be stored more compactly and managed more efficiently, but at the same time, you cannot simply open these logs in a text editor. Special tools are required to view and analyze them.

In this article, we will look at how to view the records maintained by journald and how to clear them to save disk space.

Search engine bots (crawlers) are special programs that scan websites on the Internet. Search engines need them to find, index and display pages in search results. But not all bots are useful!

Sometimes your site may be visited by unwanted bots that:

• Collect data without your permission.
• Consume server resources, slowing it down.
• Are used to look for vulnerabilities.

If you want to protect your site from such bots, it’s time to configure Nginx! In this article, we’ll show you how to easily and quickly block them using a special configuration file.

Log management is a crucial part of any server administrator's job. Logs that are not rotated can quickly occupy all available disk space, slow down the server, and cause unpredictable errors. In this article, we’ll explain how to configure and use logrotate for automatic log cleanup and rotation on a server. 

Logs are files that store information about server events: application and operating system activity, various errors, user requests to websites, and more. Over time, logs can take up a significant amount of disk space, especially under heavy load or if there are software errors.

One critical aspect of log files is that, in most cases, deleting them can cause issues for the program generating them — whether it’s a web server or even the operating system itself.

Additionally, logs often contain valuable diagnostic information that can help identify software issues on your server and prevent larger problems. Therefore, it’s important to handle them properly and carefully.

Running out of space on your server? This may cause the site and database to malfunction. To free up space, you need to identify the files taking up the most room and delete them. In this article, we’ll explain how to easily accomplish this using the ncdu utility and how to safely clean up logs.

Forgot your MariaDB root password? Without it, you won’t be able to manage users, databases, or perform critical configurations. In this article, you’ll learn not only how to quickly reset the MariaDB root password but also how to reset the password for regular users. 

For MySQL please, refer to our separate guide.

Forgot the MySQL root password? Don't worry, it happens even to experienced administrators. In this article, we’ll explain how to reset the MySQL root password for different versions: MySQL 5.7 and MySQL 8.0+. Additionally, we’ll cover how to reset the password for a regular database user. 

For MariaDB please, refer to our separate guide.

The TAR format is extremely popular in the Linux world and is the de facto data archiving standard. It can’t compress files by itself but perfectly cooperates with such compression utilities as gzip or bzip2. Therefore, most archives packed with this format that you can find on the web will look as archive_name.tar.gz.

If you also work with ZIP or RAR archives, check out our guides on handling them in the Linux command line.

The RAR format is famous for its high compression level, support for data recovery, and high tamper resistance, which made it quite popular in the Windows community. But yet, it’s less popular among Linux users and administrators than a number of other archives. However, you may need to be able to work with it on the server, so let’s take a look at the basic commands and options you’ll need to confidently work with RAR archives in a command prompt.

If you also work with ZIP or TAR archives, check out our guides on handling them in the Linux command line.

ZIP is one of the most popular archiving formats. Unlike a home PC that allows you to work with such archives in a convenient graphical interface, most servers don’t provide such an opportunity. So, be sure to know the basic commands to perform typical tasks via a command prompt.

If you also work with TAR or RAR archives, check out our guides on handling them in the Linux command line.