RHEL 9

How to Monitor Nginx with Prometheus nginx-exporter on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Monitor Nginx with Prometheus nginx-exporter on RHEL 9

Prometheus is a time-series metrics collection and alerting system widely used for monitoring cloud infrastructure and web servers. The nginx-prometheus-exporter (nginx-exporter) is a lightweight Go binary that reads Nginx’s built-in stub_status page and exposes the metrics in Prometheus format — active connections, total requests, connection states (reading, writing, waiting), and request rate. Combined with Grafana […]

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How to Harden Nginx: Security Headers, TLS 1.3, OCSP Stapling on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Harden Nginx: Security Headers, TLS 1.3, OCSP Stapling on RHEL 9

A default Nginx installation serves content, but many security hardening steps are not enabled by default. Hardening Nginx means configuring HTTP security headers to prevent XSS, clickjacking, and MIME sniffing attacks; enforcing TLS 1.3 and strong cipher suites to eliminate outdated protocol vulnerabilities; enabling OCSP Stapling so clients can verify certificate validity without a round-trip […]

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How to Configure Nginx WebSocket Proxying on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Configure Nginx WebSocket Proxying on RHEL 9

WebSockets provide full-duplex communication channels over a single TCP connection, enabling real-time features such as live chat, push notifications, collaborative editing, gaming, and live dashboards. Unlike standard HTTP, which is request-response, WebSocket connections are persistent and bidirectional — the server can push data to clients at any time without a client request. Nginx can act […]

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How to Configure SSL/TLS with OpenSSL and Self-Signed Certificates on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Configure SSL/TLS with OpenSSL and Self-Signed Certificates on RHEL 9

Even when free trusted certificates from Let’s Encrypt are available for public domains, self-signed certificates serve important roles: development environments, internal network services, IoT devices, automated testing pipelines, and machine-to-machine communication within a private network. Unlike Let’s Encrypt certificates, self-signed certificates require no domain ownership verification or outbound internet access — they can be generated […]

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How to Set Up a LAMP Stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Set Up a LAMP Stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) on RHEL 9

A LAMP stack — Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL (or MariaDB), and PHP — is the original and most widely deployed open-source web hosting stack. It has powered millions of websites since the early 2000s and remains the default for hosting control panels (cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin) and many shared hosting environments. Apache’s .htaccess support, mod_rewrite, […]

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How to Set Up a LEMP Stack (Linux, Nginx, MySQL, PHP) on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Set Up a LEMP Stack (Linux, Nginx, MySQL, PHP) on RHEL 9

A LEMP stack — Linux, Nginx, MySQL (or MariaDB), and PHP — is the standard modern web server stack for hosting PHP applications such as WordPress, Laravel, Drupal, and Magento. Compared to the traditional LAMP stack, Nginx handles concurrent requests more efficiently under high load due to its event-driven non-blocking architecture, making it the preferred […]

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How to Install and Configure OpenLiteSpeed Web Server on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Install and Configure OpenLiteSpeed Web Server on RHEL 9

OpenLiteSpeed (OLS) is the open-source version of LiteSpeed Web Server — one of the highest-performance HTTP servers available, purpose-built for serving PHP applications. OpenLiteSpeed uses an event-driven architecture similar to Nginx but includes a built-in PHP engine (LSAPI) that processes PHP requests 3–5x faster than PHP-FPM behind Nginx, eliminating the socket overhead of the FastCGI […]

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How to Configure HAProxy for HTTP and TCP Load Balancing on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Configure HAProxy for HTTP and TCP Load Balancing on RHEL 9

HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a battle-hardened open-source load balancer and proxy for TCP and HTTP workloads. Where Nginx load balancing is sufficient for simple round-robin HTTP distribution, HAProxy provides a richer feature set: advanced health checks with multiple failure thresholds, ACL-based routing, Layer 4 TCP load balancing for non-HTTP protocols (MySQL, Redis, SMTP), detailed […]

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How to Set Up Varnish Cache as a Reverse Proxy on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Set Up Varnish Cache as a Reverse Proxy on RHEL 9

Varnish Cache is a high-performance HTTP reverse proxy designed specifically for caching. Unlike Nginx FastCGI cache which caches PHP output files on disk, Varnish stores cached objects entirely in RAM and can serve tens of thousands of requests per second from memory. Varnish operates in front of your web server: it listens on port 80 […]

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How to Configure Nginx FastCGI Caching on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Configure Nginx FastCGI Caching on RHEL 9

Nginx FastCGI caching stores the output of PHP-FPM (or any FastCGI backend) responses as files on disk and serves them directly without hitting PHP for subsequent requests. For a WordPress site or PHP application serving the same page to many users, this can reduce PHP execution from 200ms to under 1ms and cut server load […]

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