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CDs and DVDs don't have the eternal life, so you might want to back them up as ISO images. All the files and properties of the original disc, stored in a single file. You can also create ISO images and store them on your network for easy distribution of software installations. Here's how to create and mount ISO images on Linux.

Every time a request hits your server, PHP has to do a lot of processing, all of your code has to be compiled & executed for every single visit. Even though the outcome of all this processing is often identical for both visitor 21600 and 21601. So why not save the flat HTML generated for visitor 21600, and serve that to 21601 as well? This will relieve resources of your web server and database server because less PHP often means less queries.

Recently two of my articles reached the Digg frontpage at the same day. My web server isn't state of the art and it had to handle gigantic amounts of traffic. But still it served pages to visitors swiftly thanks to a lot of optimizations. This is how you can prevent heavy traffic from killing your server.

Making sure your system is up to date is a key attribute to its security. Furthermore Ubuntu releases updates pretty often and you probably don't want to miss out on added stability and features. You could run updates manually, but why not schedule the updates in the background to make sure you are always running the latest stable versions, without ever having to worry about it.

If you've got a website that's heavy on your web server, you might want to run some processes like generating thumbnails or enriching data in the background. This way it can not interfere with the user interface. Linux has a great program for this called cron. It allows tasks to be automatically run in the background at regular intervals. You could also use it to automatically create backups, synchronize files, schedule updates, and much more. Welcome to the wonderful world of crontab.