Enter your MySQL command line with something like:

mysql -uroot -p

Then enter your password.

Once inside the MySQL command line do:

show databases;

and then find your database for the Wordpress blog that you want to change password.

use mydatabase;

where mydatabase should be “your” database.

Then do:

update wp_users set user_pass =MD5(’typenewpasswordhere’) where id=1;

to change the admin password.

That’s it!

You can also do:

SELECT ID, user_login, user_pass FROM wp_users;

to list current users.

To do that it’s rather simple, just type:

sudo /bin/bash

to enter root for good and you won’t have to type sudo in front of every command.

dpkg -l

which will list all installed packages on your web server.

mysqld_safe --log-error=/var/log/mysql.err

Then do:

cat /var/log/mysql.err

to read what went wrong.

cat /etc/passwd

to list all the users in your linux system.

Each DNS request (every time you request from any domain name using an API) takes anywhere between 0 to 500 miliseconds.   Sometimes, adding DNS caching to your web server can make your website load in 1 second versus 10 seconds.

Anyways, it’s easy to do and here’s how to do it on CentOS/Fedora linux servers:  (Ubuntu should be similar, just use apt-get install of yum)

First install Bind-utils:

yum install bind-utils

Do a command:

dig yahoo.com

Do it several times and note how many miliseconds it takes to retrieve the URL. Later, after we install DNSMasq, we will try dig command again to see if your web server has started caching DNS requests.

Install DNSMasq:

yum install dnsmasq

Edit the file in /etc/dnsmasq.conf:

Then add the following lines:

listen-address=127.0.0.1
cache-size=500

Next, edit the file in /etc/dhcp6c.conf:

Then add the following line:
prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;

Next, edit the file in /etc/resolv.conf:

Add the following lines with 127.0.0.1 first:

nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver 208.67.220.220
nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.4

208.67.220.220 is DNS server of Open DNS, which I highly recommend as it’s FAST.
Also 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 are DNS servers of Google, which are also FAST.
You can however, decide to use any other DNS such as your hosting company’s.

You can do a test of how fast they are by doing a ping test such as:

ping 8.8.8.8

to test Google’s DNS server response times.

Next, you can start the DNSMasq so your web server starts caching, do:

/sbin/service dnsmasq start

Also, you will want to add DNSMasq to your chkconfig list so it will start up next time your web server reboots, do:

chkconfig dnsmasq on

To check all the processes running at boot-up, do:

chkconfig –list

That’s it!

Now do a dig command on yahoo.com, you should see 0 miliseconds after the first dig command!

dig yahoo.com

Another great feature is that you can also check the IP address being reported by various different points in the world. What this does is helps you check DNS delegation status of your website during a DNS move.

This can be a big problem if you are moving a website to a new server and you can’t check if you’ve moved everything right.

So, how do you check your website on the new server during DNS delegation?

You can easily do this by changing the DNS servers on your computer.

For Windows, you can go into your network adaptor settings, then right-click on your adaptor, then select “Properties”.

You will see a bunch of options like the above screen shot.  Simply double-click on “Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4).  This screenshot was from Windows 7 and on other Windows, I think it’s simply called “TCP/IP”.

Here, you can set your DNS server to your new web server’s IP address.  In this example, I set it to “47.23.55.24″.

Click okay and try navigating to your URL such as mydomain.com.  Now you should be able to see your website on your browser and make sure your website has been moved successfully before DNS delegation is finished.

Also, any images not from your own domain name (URL) will not load on your browser.   This is because you can only load elements from your domain name as your DNS is set to your new web server.

Now, this might not work if you are on shared server or it could, it depends on your hosting provider.  For dedicated servers, VPS, or hosting servers with your own unique IP address, it should work flawlessly.

Make sure you go through the above process and set your DNS back to “Obtain DNS server address automatically” when you are done testing your new server.

That is one of the ways of doin’ it but there’s also a better way if you want to be able to access the whole internet.

You can edit the hosts file under C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.  Simply edit the file with a notepad program and add the following line at the end of the file:

47.23.55.24 mydomain.com

where 47.23.55.24 is the IP of your new server and mydomain.com is the domain name of your website.

Now save the file and try loading your site on the browser, it will load from your new server.

One more thing, you can also check the IP address of your website (to make sure it’s coming from the new server) by going to command prompt (type cmd under Start->Search programs and files) then typing ping mydomain.com.

By being able to check that everything is working correctly on your new server, you will lose ZERO traffic during DNS delegation because your website will load flawlessly whether on the old server or the new server.

How cool is that?

Well, for those of you who didn’t know, now you know!  Make sure to subscribe for more great free tips on hacking your web server!

For one, you will need a dedicated server/VPS that supports SSH.  Otherwise you won’t be able to do it.

Here’s exactly how I do it.

1) I go to my Wordpress directory using the command cd. ~ 2 seconds

2) I use wget to pull the latest wordpress files, “wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz” ~ 3 seconds

3) Then I unzip the tar file using “tar xvf latest.tar.gz” ~ 5 seconds (see tar command howto here)

4) Then I remove the wp-admin and wp-includes directories by doing “rm wp-admin -rf” and “rm wp-includes -rf“. ~ 3 seconds

5) Next I will copy over the old Wordpress files with the new ones using commands, “cp wordress/* . -rf –reply=yes” ~ 2 seconds.

6) I am done, that’s 2+3+5+3+2=15 seconds.  If you are on at least a quad-core CPU server, downloading and unzipping should be rather fast but for those of you on slower servers, give it couple more seconds as download/unzip will take longer.

This is lightening fast compared to downloading Wordpress files to your computer, unzipping it then uploading them to your website via FTP.  And if you are on shared hosting, sometimes uploading FTP can take forever.

Even if you use built-in upgrade functions in Wordpress, you are not going to beat SSH, not even a chance.

Of course, even better than this is to write a simple bash shell script that will do all the above for you.  Then you could probably do it in just about 5 seconds.  I will try to write a script soon and let you know on that btw.  (I just realize it!)

Word of caution, this hack has worked fine for me for a new Twitter app site I am making that requires use of PHP 5.2 but if you have non-standard customizations to your server, you might want to test it first.

I’ve also found that JSON library that comes with PHP 5.2 is like 20 times faster rather than trying to run separate JSON libraries with PHP 5.1.6.  It made a HUGE difference let me just say in page loading times. (Like .90 seconds versus 0.003 seconds.)

This guide describes how to upgrade the standard PHP 5.1.x packages in CentOS 5.x 32-bit to the current development versions 5.2.x. These instructions were created using CentOS 5.3 32-bit and with the following PHP packages installed:

# rpm -qa |grep php

php-common-5.1.6-15.el5.i386
php-cli-5.1.6-15.el5.i386
php-5.1.6-15.el5.i386
php-pdo-5.1.6-15.el5.i386
php-bcmath-5.1.6-15.el5.i386
php-ldap-5.1.6-15.el5.i386
php-devel-5.1.6-15.el5.i386
php-gd-5.1.6-15.el5.i386
php-xml-5.1.6-15.el5.i386
php-mbstring-5.1.6-15.el5.i386
php-mysql-5.1.6-15.el5.i386
php-dba-5.1.6-15.el5.i386

As long as you’re using the standard PHP packages on your CentOS server you won’t need to do anything extra. If you’re using extra PHP packages that aren’t part of the standard CentOS repositories (like php-mcrypt) you’ll have to remove them or find updated versions of them.

via cent.os