While getting a Matrix chat server up and running is a relatively easy and well documented task, managing and maintaining the server is somewhat nebulous as far as existing documentation is concerned. For example, when my wife asked me to reset her password on our server, I quickly realized that I had no idea how to do such a thing. After some digging around on the net, it became apparent that other people were having similar problems. Regardless of which method used to install a Matrix server, a homeserver.db file is always present after installation. This file represents all data associated with the server such as rooms, users, their passwords, and their attributes. By default, Matrix uses sqlite3 to access this .db file....

In order for a user to connect to a remote SSH server, the user needs the following three bits of data: A valid username The correct password The port SSH is configured to use on the remote server As a server admin, if you are able to obfuscate any of these three items your server becomes infinitely more secure from brute-force style attacks. While this style of attacks are generally for dummies, you'd be surprised by how often they are successful. Side node: most of the time the attacking IP addresses are from the other side of the planet (which is kind of neat). As an example, here is one of many IP addresses that was constantly attempting connections to the machine running this website. If you're worried that your machine is being...