Securely Wiping Disks With DBAN
Juliet Kemp introduces DBAN (Darik's Boot And Nuke), a self-contained boot disk (floppy, CD, USB) that securely wipes hard disks. It is operating system independent and meets a number of government security standards; read on to learn more.
Monday, December 29, 2008 11:42:48 AM EST

Don't Get Fried on Cheap Power Supplies
It doesn't pay to pinch pennies on computer power supplies, because inferior power supplies cause slowdowns, lockups, crashes and worse. Here are some tips for how to pick quality power supplies.
Thursday, December 18, 2008 06:45:29 PM EST

Magic Tricks To Get Out of Trouble With the Sysreq Key
The sysrq key sits quietly at the top of your keyboard, usually sharing space with PrntScrn. sysrq is a direct hotline to the kernel and gets you out of trouble when your system is getting tangled up in itself; Juliet Kemp shows how.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008 01:45:48 PM EST

cURL, the Swiss Army Knife of Download Utilities
cURL is just what the guru ordered when you want an all-purpose downloader that supports practically every file-transfer protocol there is, and it's invaluable for getting behind pretty but uninformative GUIs when you need to see what's really going on. This tip shows you three useful ways to use it, and how to find out more.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008 11:55:33 AM EST

Conquering Character Encoding Chaos With GNU Recode
In the beginning was ASCII. Computers only spoke ASCII, and life was simple and good. Except for all the peoples of the world who did not use the English alphabet. Along came Unicode and life became even better, though somewhat more complicated. Carla Schroder introduces us to GNU Recode and convmv, two great little utilities for converting character sets.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008 03:27:15 PM EST

OpenSSH Speed Tips and Tricks
OpenSSH is still the primo tool for fast, secure remote administration. Carla Schroder shares some tips to make it even faster and more convenient: fast safe key transfers and management, and accessing remote filesystems in a fast, convenient way.
Friday, November 21, 2008 01:54:31 PM EST

Tip: Simple Regular Expressions For Reviewing Log Files
LinuxPlanet Classics: With a few simple regular expressions you can quickly search your logfiles for problems, nasties, and even good news. These regexps are also useful for all kinds of text searches; Carla Schroder shows you how.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008 06:51:58 PM EST

Zeroshell Delivers Big Network Services in a Small Package
What gives you a firewall, load-balancing, QoS, 3G support, RADIUS, wireless access point, HTTP proxy, VPN, VLAN, PPPoE, captive portal, and a host of other useful security, authentication, and network applications, all in a hundred megabytes? Zeroshell, the built-from-scratch Linux network appliance.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008 01:56:54 PM EST

m0n0wall: Big Friendly Firewall Power in a Tiny Package
m0n0wall is a popular, specialized implementation of FreeBSD + ipfilter designed for routers and firewalls. This Tip introduces us to its friendly natural-language ipfilter rules syntax, which has all the power and flexibility of iptables, but is much easier to understand.
Friday, November 14, 2008 01:11:12 PM EST

How to Not be a Shamefully Bad Time Server Abuser
LinuxPlanet classics: The folks who run NTP servers are generally providing a free service, so it's rather crass to repay their kindness with thoughtlessness when you're setting up your own NTP clients. Carla Schroder shows how you can be smarter than famous big commercial vendors and set up your timeservers the right way.
Monday, November 10, 2008 01:55:30 PM EST

Quick Firefox Tip: Word Count Bookmarklet
Authors need to count the words in articles. But when it's an HTML document all full of tags, you don't want to count the tags. Akkana Peck shows a fast way to count only the words.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008 02:03:20 PM EST

Bash Tips: Speedy Keyboard Shortcuts
The Bash shell is famous for having more great features and shortcuts than we can ever learn. Juliet Kemp shares some shortcuts to speed up common tasks.
Friday, October 31, 2008 11:30:47 AM EST

Monitor Hard Disk Health With Smartmontools
Carla Schroder introduces smartmontools, to test and monitor drive health as well as issue early warnings of possible failures
Tuesday, October 14, 2008 10:17:51 AM EST

TechNotes: Fixing SuSE 7.3
SuSE 7.3 shipped with a few problems in the form of kernel problems for G-400 videocard owners, truetype support that was switched off because of concerns over Apple's patents where the freetype libraries are concerned, and a puzzling inability to mount ext3 filesystems. In this edition of TechNotes, Dennis E. Powell explains how to beat the wait for fixes from SuSE by sharing his recipe for building a G-400-friendly kernel, and flipping the switch for anti-aliasing back to 'on.'
Friday, November 2, 2001 03:48:16 AM EST

Network security basics
Two "must do" points: install ssh and shut off services in inetd.conf.
Wednesday, November 3, 1999 03:11:39 PM EST

See which sockets belong to which processes
lsof | grep -i "program"
Sunday, October 31, 1999 06:11:39 AM EST

Find all the configuration scripts on a system
With this handy perl one liner
Saturday, October 30, 1999 05:59:12 AM EST

Get your disk back quicker after a crash or powerfail
Get your disk back quicker
Friday, October 29, 1999 05:05:12 AM EST

Power down from software
Compile in APM kernel options.
Thursday, October 28, 1999 05:59:12 AM EST

See what network services are really running
netstat -vat
Wednesday, October 27, 1999 12:11:39 AM EST

Quick and dirty net sniffing
Analyse tcpdump output with a perl "one liner"
Tuesday, October 26, 1999 02:59:12 PM EST

Distribute /etc/passwd among several machines securely
Use rsync, ssh and cron.
Tuesday, October 26, 1999 06:37:28 AM EST

Random Passwords
head -c8 /dev/random | uuencode -m - | sed -n '2s/=*$//;2p'
Monday, October 25, 1999 10:37:28 AM EST

Disable external X11 for greater security
Turn off this often overlooked service
Sunday, October 24, 1999 05:35:35 AM EST

Put the path in your xterm titlebar
export PS1=$PS1"\[\e]0;\H:\w\a\]"
Saturday, October 23, 1999 08:20:28 AM EST

Update debian slink to XFree86 version 3.3.5
Install XFree86 version 3.3.5, with Matrox G400 support and other great features.
Friday, October 22, 1999 05:37:28 AM EST

Use wildcards to get directories
Shell globs work through directories!
Thursday, October 21, 1999 04:37:28 PM EST

list all files in directory tree that contain a search string
find . -type f -print | xargs grep -li "find me"
Thursday, October 21, 1999 09:47:26 AM EST

boot an alternate kernel for one reboot only
lilo -v -R old
Wednesday, October 20, 1999 08:11:31 AM EST

Undo an untar in the wrong place
tar tfz filename.tar.gz | xargs rm
Tuesday, October 19, 1999 05:47:26 AM EST