July 8, 2011
One of my last TechMails to ever be published by TechRepublic is Nagios XI wizards make setup a snap for network monitoring. This tip looks at using Nagios XI, a really slick commercially-backed install of Nagios with a really incredible GUI frontend for configuring Nagios. …
June 25, 2011
Last week’s TechMail was Two-factor SSH authentication via Google secures Linux logins which talks about using Google two-factor authentication with SSH (and PAM in general). I really like it and it works quite well although the comments in the TechMail indicate another …
June 24, 2011
The TechMail from a few weeks ago was Chromium on Fedora Linux is closing in on Firefox which takes a look at using Spot’s Chromium for Fedora repo (thanks Spot!) to get Chromium running on Fedora. I have to admit that in the last month or so, I have thoroughly enjoyed …
May 25, 2011
Last week was my third and final part of my series that introduced SELinux on Techrepublic: Practical SELinux: Port contexts and handling access alerts. This one finishes off what we were looking at in part two, and introduces port contexts (ensuring that a program can only …
May 25, 2011
This week’s mac tip is Two SSH clients to consider for the iPad. In this tip I look at two really great SSH clients for the iPad (and iPhone as well, although I was mostly just looking at the iPad versions which do vary from their iPhone counterpart): iSSH and Prompt. …
May 17, 2011
Last week’s mac techmail was Work some project management magic with Merlin where we look at using ProjectWizards’ Merlin project management software. If you need project management on steroids, Merlin is a good bet. Even more importantly, if you need an easy way to …
May 10, 2011
This week’s techmail is Practical SELinux for the beginner: Contexts and labels which is part two of my series on SELinux. This one talks about how to get started with SELinux (how to turn it on or off), how to view contexts, and how to create new contexts, how to set them, …
April 28, 2011
This week’s mac techmail is Finding uses for the iPad 2: A skeptic gives it another shot in which I write about my experience with the iPad2. Short version: I like it. It’s no replacement for any existing device I have, but it’s definitely useful. Read the tip …
April 26, 2011
This week’s techmail is Introduction to SELinux: Don’t let complexity scare you off. This is the first of a three-part series that introduces SELinux and digs into some of the basics on how to change policies, add policies, troubleshoot SELinux, and basically give you …
April 23, 2011
This week’s mac techmail was Enhance security on your Mac with Hands Off! which is a neat security tool for OS X. I’ve been using Little Snitch for years, and Hands Off! is quite similar except that it provides more features and functionality, including the ability to …
April 23, 2011
Last week’s techmail was Hack the D-Link DNS-323 to get an array of Linux server options. I bought one of these things quite a while ago to use more as a backup box than anything else (in case of fire, small NAS is easier to carry than big computer cases, etc.). But I had …
April 23, 2011
Last week’s Mac techmail was Use Fake to automate web testing on the Mac which takes a look at a neat app for the Mac called Fake. This app is similar to Automator, except instead of automating desktop-related tasks, it automates web-related tasks. With it you can automate …
April 12, 2011
This week’s techmail was Redundancy and flexibility with RAID1+LVM which talks about how to combine RAID1 with LVM for a few rich, flexible storage management solution. The tip describes how to get started with setting up RAID and LVM (although here’s a hint: the …
April 12, 2011
Last week’s mac techmail was Choosing the right Git GUI client for Mac OS X in which I looked at the Tower application, a Git GUI client for OS X. I’ve looked at a few Git clients for OS X and Tower was my application of choice amongst the contenders; the tip explains …
April 12, 2011
Last week’s techmail was Printing to AirPort shared printers from Linux, which looks at how to configure a Linux system to print directly to an AirPort shared printer. This is actually quite easy to do, as the tip explains, but it’s not overly straightforward (hence …
April 3, 2011
I’m a little behind on putting up my recent Mac articles for TechRepublic here, so I’m going to put them all in one post. The first is Introduction to OS X Access Control Lists (ACLs) which introduces you to OS X’s implementation of filesystem access control lists. OS X, …
April 3, 2011
I’m a little behind on putting up my recent articles for TechRepublic here, so I’m going to put them all in one post. The first one is Use Getting Things GNOME to get things done which looks at Getting Things GNOME (GTG), a GTD application for GNOME. It’s pretty …
March 14, 2011
Last week’s techmail was Use APF to manage your firewall which takes a look at using the APF (Advanced Policy Firewall) set of scripts to configure an iptables-based firewall on Linux. I was always a big Shorewall user; used it on my servers whether they ran Mandriva or …
March 14, 2011
The mac techmail from a few weeks ago was How to use CrashPlan for online backups, which looks at getting the CrashPlan client setup on OS X. CrashPlan is pretty neat: you can pay to store your backups on CrashPlan’s servers in the cloud, or you can use the client for free …
March 10, 2011
The Linux tip from a few weeks ago was Nagios monitoring with NRPE allows better tracking of remote systems which talks about using the NRPE daemon on client systems to allow Nagios to get more information from the remote host that would normally be only available to a local …
March 10, 2011
The Mac tip from a few weeks ago was Easily distracted? Mac tools that keep you focused. This was an interesting tip to write because when you sit in front of the computer all day, it’s sometimes hard to quantify how much productive work you get done. Like now, updating my …
February 17, 2011
This week’s mac techmail is How to reassign the primary display on multi-display Macs which is pretty simplistic, but really sweet all at the same time. I’m not sure how to do this in Windows (never done it before) and on Linux it’s pretty straightforward too. …
February 12, 2011
Last week’s techmail was Obtaining network information with netstat where we take a look at some of the nifty little things you can do with the netstat program including listing which ports are being actively listened to and by which programs and what active connections …
February 12, 2011
This week’s techmail was Use Fail2ban to blacklist IP addresses and alert you to attacks which takes a look at the fail2ban tool. Fail2ban is a program that will watch log files and if it notices failed login attempts on any configured services (ssh, smtp, etc.) it will ban …
January 30, 2011
Last week’s techmail was Tips and tricks to help you do more with OpenSSH which is a followup to the previous tip that talked about OpenSSH key management. This one gives you a few one-liner tips to stimulate the imagination (yet are useful on their own) with the kinds of …
January 20, 2011
This week’s mac techmail is Mac App Store pros and cons: What it means for developers and users. This is a bit of an opinion piece (I try to avoid writing opinions, but I couldn’t help it here) that looks at the current state of the Mac App Store, what’s good …
January 20, 2011
This week’s techmail is What you need to know about OpenSSH key management which looks at a few tips and tricks in using OpenSSH public/private keys. It talks about generating keys, using ssh-copy-id to copy keys to servers, and using hashed representations of host keys to …
January 18, 2011
Last week’s mac techmail was First look at the Mac App Store which took a look at the new Mac App Store. It’s pretty much a technical primer on what it does, how updates work, how it works (or doesn’t) with already installed apps, etc.
January 10, 2011
Last week’s mac techmail was Tips for safer web browsing when using Adobe Flash on your Mac which talks about using ClickToFlash on the mac to prevent flash from automatically loading. Since flash is pretty awful and there have been a lot of security holes in it, I prefer …
December 27, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Life with the MacBook Air: The netbook I’ve been waiting for and it’s my review on the new 11" MacBook Air. I love this machine!
December 20, 2010
Last week’s techmail was Create a local Fedora mirror system and get blazing-fast updates which shows you how to use the Fedora mirror manager and associated tools to setup a local private (or public, if you wanted) mirror of Fedora. It’s really quite slick and since …
December 20, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Digital pack rats will love organizing with EagleFiler which talks about EagleFiler, one of my favourite file organization apps on the mac. It has a welcome Finder-like interface, but makes managing files so much easier than simply trying to …
December 13, 2010
Last week’s TechMail was Review of the new Komodo IDE 6: Great new features, one gripe which is a review of the latest version of ActiveState’s Komodo IDE. I’ve been using Komodo on and off for years, but have really been using it the last few years now that …
December 13, 2010
Last week’s Mac TechMail was Get flawless system backups with SuperDuper for the Mac which looks at ShirtPocket’s SuperDuper! tool. This is the one backup tool on the Mac that I have 100% confidence, and the tip explains why and what you can do with it. SuperDuper!, …
December 4, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Enterprise Subversion gets a boost with Cornerstone 2 which looks at my favourite GUI subversion client on the Mac: Cornerstone. The new version has gotten a seriously sweet overhaul with a lot of really nice new features and tweaks. Cornerstone …
November 23, 2010
This week’s techmail is The most important updates in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Disclaimer: I didn’t give it that title. =) It mostly looks at the security features of RHEL6 and what makes it compelling (to me, who is more concerned about security than pretty much …
November 22, 2010
Last week’s mac TechMail was Web page editing and design with Flux for the Mac which looks at the Flux WYSIWYG HTML and CSS editor. I’m really an old-school web designer (using tools like textmate or vim, and hand-coding everything) and you can tell… my web …
November 22, 2010
Last week’s TechMail was Enhance screen with Byobu’s cool functionality which looks at using Byobu to spruce up GNU screen. Byobu adds some nice color and character to screen, and is definitely worth looking into if you use screen a lot.
November 11, 2010
This week’s techmail was Kerberos authentication with NFSv4 which looks at how to get more security out of NFS. By using Kerberos. I’m not sure if this is the definition of insane for a home network or not, but since I’ve got Kerberos running here already, I …
November 9, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Window switching with Witch will boost your productivity which looks at using the program Witch as an alternative to Apple’s baked-in app switcher. Instead of switching windows by applications, Witch brings up a list of all windows, …
November 9, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Stream audio and video from your Mac with Playback which looks at Yazsoft’s Playback software. Out of all the streaming server options for the mac that I’ve found, Playback is the easiest to get up and running and the one that works …
October 26, 2010
This week’s techmail is Set up easy file sharing with NFS on Linux which is a quick primer on getting NFS setup quickly on Linux.
October 26, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was How to set up an OS X OpenVPN client which looks at using the fantastic Shimo VPN client program to setup a client endpoint to an OpenVPN-based VPN (using certificates). It ties in with the other tips in this “series” regarding …
October 13, 2010
This week’s techmail is How to set up an OpenVPN server which is a quick-n-dirty primer on how to get OpenVPN setup. Insider’s tip: it’s part 1 of a 3 part series about fairly basic OpenVPN configuration and usage (OpenVPN has got a lot of neatness and …
October 13, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Get an easy VPN on-the-cheap with ShareTool for Mac which looks at ShareTool, a program that allows you to remotely control your computer when away from home, or work, whatever the case may be. I like that ShareTool uses OpenSSH for a transport …
October 12, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Working with Safari Extensions: A few to try which is a bit of a primer on how to work with Safari’s Extensions, and also gives some of my favourites to try. There aren’t a lot of Extensions as of yet, but there are a few goodies to …
October 12, 2010
Last week’s techmail was Enable spell-checking in Vim and customize default behavior which talks about how to get spell checking enabled in vim. I actually wasn’t even aware that vim could do spell checking natively until a little while ago, and it sure makes for my …
October 11, 2010
The techmail of two weeks ago was The easiest way to set up Samba for file-sharing which discusses a really quick way of getting Samba setup for filesharing. It doesn’t go into all the details of setting up multiple users or different authentication types, but if you want …
October 11, 2010
The mac techmail two weeks ago was Synchronize OmniFocus tasks via Spootnik on the Web which looks at the Spootnik web service. You can do more than just sync OmniFocus using Spootnik (i.e. use it as a remote WebDAV service to sync OmniFocus on two macs); if you use Basecamp than …
September 21, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Turn your Mac into a security surveillance centre which discusses the SecuritySpy software and using it to watch the feeds of remote video cameras. Very cool stuff, and shockingly inexpensive (the cameras I got now monitor the exterior of the …
September 21, 2010
This week’s Linux techmail is How to set up WebDAV hosting on Apache which looks at how to setup your Apache server for use as a WebDAV server. This was a tricky one for me as I’d tried it before and couldn’t get one of my applications that allowed syncing via …
September 9, 2010
As with the Linux tips, I’ve been so busy that I’ve neglected the mac tips, so here they are: Power up your Apple Mail with MailTags and Mail Act-On discusses two very useful plugins for Apple Mail. With these plugins you can put Mail on steroids with some great …
September 7, 2010
I’ve been so busy in the last little while I’ve not had a chance to post the recent techmails that have gone up, so here goes: Cloud-based RSS reading with Google Reader and Liferea looks at using Liferea as a client for Google Reader. The nice thing about using …
July 27, 2010
This week’s techmail is Clear some desk space with cross-platform keyboard and mouse sharing app. The tip is about Synergy+ which is awesome cool. With it, I can share the same keyboard and mouse across as many computers as I want (it’s cross-platform, so I use it …
July 26, 2010
Last week’s techmail was Head off problems by monitoring servers with munin which takes a look at the Munin program. Munin is pretty slick in that you can use it to monitor resource usage on the local machine and networked clients as well. Goes nicely with Nagios when you …
July 26, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Mind mapping with MindNode for the Mac. MindNode is a neat program that lets you do mind mapping, or drawing pictures to represent thoughts or plans or ideas. Mind mapping is quite popular, and with good reason as it gives you a visual …
July 13, 2010
This week’s techmail is GUI scripting in bash which takes a look at a few options for GUIfying your bash scripts: Zenity (for GNOME) and kdialog for KDE. My favourite is Zenity since I use GNOME, and it doesn’t require all this whacky DBUS stuff (although I suppose …
July 12, 2010
Last week’s techmail was My favorite Firefox extensions for Linux which talks about a few of my favourite extensions for Firefox. Read the comments on the tip… I’ve already found another couple that I didn’t know about before that I’m going to have …
July 4, 2010
Falling a little bit behind here… the mac techmail from two weeks ago was Safari 5 boasts speed gains but real improvement is extensions which discusses the new Safari 5. My initial reaction to Safari 5 was “meh…”. Using it now for a few weeks, …
July 4, 2010
Last week’s techmail was Take advantage of full-featured Komodo IDE to boost productivity which looks at some of the cool features of Komodo that can help you get more out of the IDE. I’ve been using Komodo for years, and even though it is pay-to-play, it’s …
June 30, 2010
Last week’s techmail was Increase download speed with Aria2 utility which looks at an incredibly useful and cool file download client. Aria2 is unique because it can grab the same file from multiple sources: http, ftp, bittorrent. It can do it at the same time and then …
June 16, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Send instant messages between Macs on a LAN which discusses using Growl and growlnotify, along with a little help from Automator, to send instant messages between macs on a LAN, without requiring any instant messaging clients. Useful for sending …
June 16, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Simplify Terminal usage on Mac OS X with Visor. Visor is a really neat plugin for the OS X Terminal that allows you to hide and re-open the Terminal with a keystroke. For someone like me who has multiple tabs open, uses mutt and irssi, ssh …
June 16, 2010
Last week’s techmail was DNS querying with dig which is a little bit of a primer on an indispensable tool called dig. dig is a DNS querying tool that can look up all kinds of handy DNS-related information, and is useful for helping to diagnose networking issues.
June 16, 2010
This week’s techmail is Learn more about how you can use SQLite which is a bit of a primer on how you can use SQLite to create your own little SQL databases, or how you can use it to manipulate the data stored in SQLite databases found in other programs, like Firefox. I …
June 5, 2010
This past week’s mac techmail was Transmit FTP client for Mac OS X gets updated to version 4 which looks at the new version of Panic’s Transmit FTP/SFTP/WebDAV/S3 client. Transmit is pretty good; I’ve been using it for years and the new version is a nice …
June 2, 2010
This week’s TechMail is How to pre-upgrade Fedora 13 which shows how to use PreUpgrade (great tool). I used it to upgrade an F12 box and it worked flawlessly, despite the small /boot size. More information on how to use it is also on the Fedora wiki.
May 27, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Fun tricks with Growl and GeekTool which looks at a (probably rather unique) scenario of running an IRC client in a virtual machine (running Linux) and having alerts show up on the OS X desktop. The tip, while relatively specific to one function, …
May 27, 2010
This week’s techmail is Monitoring MySQL with mytop which looks at the mytop perl tool that can help monitor and diagnose problems with MySQL (mytop is essentially a top for MySQL).
May 23, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Get increased password protection on the iPhone which looks at using the iPhone configuration utility to create security profiles. While this isn’t a pure and perfect security solution, it’s another layer in the onion that will keep …
May 23, 2010
Last week’s techmail was Set up Dropbox on a GUI-less Linux server which takes you through the necessary steps of setting up Dropbox on a GUI-less Linux box. I use Dropbox here for keeping certain files in sync between systems, but I also am connected to a secondary Dropbox …
May 15, 2010
This week’s mac techmail was Get cross-platform remote access via LogMeIn and your Web browser which is a really interesting remote login system. With it I was able to control my OS X workstation from a Fedora box, from within Firefox. The downside is that I couldn’t …
May 15, 2010
This week’s techmail was Firewall configuration with system-config-firewall which discusses the niceties of using Fedora’s system-config-firewall to configure iptables. I’m not much of a GUI guy, but the interface for the firewall configuration is really slick. …
May 7, 2010
This week’s techmail was Managing MySQL with MySQL Workbench. I’ve always been a CLI guy when it comes to MySQL (as with most things: mutt, irssi, etc.), and when I needed something GUIrific I went with phpMyAdmin. However, I’ve looked at MySQL Workbench and I …
May 7, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Advanced tips for using LaunchBar shortcuts with Mac. I love LaunchBar and have talked about it before. I absolutely could not imagine life without it, and I’m still learning new things to do with it, so this tip mentions some of that …
April 29, 2010
This week’s techmail is Work on remote Subversion repositories locally with Git which talks about using Git locally to interface with a remote (or local, even) subversion repository. Involved in a project that uses Subversion as their version control system, but prefer to …
April 29, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Upload your old email to Google Apps. If you have a Google Apps account, rather than a GMail account, you can use the Google Email Uploader tool to upload old/existing emails from a local client to Google Apps. This is great if you want to have …
April 29, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Protect your privacy with Little Snitch for Mac which talks about Little Snitch, one of my absolute favourite and essential mac software tools. Little Snitch is an outbound firewall, so it will alert you if any applications try to make outbound …
April 21, 2010
This week’s techmail is System monitoring with Zenoss takes complexity out of configuration (not quite sure why my original title got changed, as this one doesn’t make much sense to me, but ok…). Anyways, I’ve been a long-time fan of Nagios, still use it, …
April 21, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Use Microsoft Remote Desktop from a Mac with CoRD. It talks about using the CoRD application to remotely control Windows systems (or Linux systems using xrdp). I’ve been told that Microsoft provides a Remote Desktop Client for the mac, but …
April 21, 2010
Last week’s techmail was Using rsnapshot to back up and retain snapshots. Rsnapshot is pretty slick; the tip goes into the how and the why, but now that I’ve found this thing I think it’s going to replace my home-brew rsync backup solution. I use subversion to …
April 7, 2010
This week’s techmail is Setting the record straight on sudo which I wrote as a rebuttal to another, rather ignorant, rant against the use of sudo. I get it, the author uses Ubuntu and probably doesn’t give much thought to the fact that Ubuntu really shouldn’t …
April 7, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Mounting NFS volumes in OS X which takes a bit of a tour on how to mount NFS volumes on a mac (which is not nearly as user-friendly as it should be).
April 1, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was How Thunderbird 3 works on Mac OS X: Better than Apple Mail? which took a look at some of the improvements in the latest Mozilla Thunderbird 3 and how it compares to Apple Mail in Snow Leopard. Is one better than the other? I look at a few areas …
April 1, 2010
This week’s techmail is Using smartctl to get SMART status information on your hard drives. Smartctl is awesome, and having it monitor your drives on a constant basis will likely give you the early warning “oh crap, something is wrong, backup NOW!” that people …
March 23, 2010
This week’s TechMail is Replace a failed drive in Linux RAID which goes into the fun I had on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago replacing a drive in my backup box at my mother’s place. All-in-all it was dead simple and very painless, which just goes to show how …
March 20, 2010
This week’s mac TechMail is Install open source software on your Mac easily with Fink. I love Fink. One of the first things I install on any OS X computer I setup is Fink. It gives me all the goodies I’m used to on Linux and makes the CLI so much more bearable (using …
March 20, 2010
This week’s TechMail is Enhanced history searching in zsh because I seem to always be doing the same thing over and over again and it’s good to save keystrokes. =) I imagine other people are in the same boat as well, so there you go… something simple yet …
March 11, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Create your own SSL CA with the OS X Keychain. This talks about how you can use the Certificate Assistant on OS X, to create your own SSL Certificate Authority for a local network or internal organization. The tool is quite slick, if a little …
March 9, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Remotely wake a sleeping Mac which explains some tricks on how to wake up a local Mac that is asleep. Useful if you want to have a file or media server that is also energy efficient so it’s only on when it needs to be.
March 9, 2010
This week’s techmail is Convert CVS repositories to Git which goes into the how, and possibly the why, of converting a CVS repository into a git repository, retaining all commit and history information.
March 4, 2010
This week’s TechMail was How to create LXC system containers to isolate services which goes into further details on using LXC, using an OpenVZ template to create a new LXC container for use, and a brief rundown on how to configure it, start it, etc.
February 27, 2010
This week’s mac techmail was Using ExpanDrive to mount remote file systems which takes a look at the ExpanDrive tool, which sits in the menubar and allows you to connect to remote SFTP, SSH, FTP/FTPS, or Amazon S3 file systems and mount them on the computer as if they were …
February 27, 2010
This week’s techmail is Introducing Linux virtual containers with LXC. I played with LXC for the first time a little while ago when writing this tip, and it’s pretty slick. It’s not quite as feature-complete or as robust as OpenVZ, but it’s very close. It …
February 20, 2010
This week’s mac techmail was 1Password for Mac OS X: One program to store them all which is an introduction to the immensely useful 1Password program. If you have a mac and you don’t have 1Password, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice. 1Password stores …
February 20, 2010
This weeks’s techmail was Use Live USB Creator to install Fedora 12 from a USB stick which looks at using the Live USB Creator tool to build a bootable USB stick that can be used to run or install Fedora (or any other Live CD Linux distro). Very slick stuff. Worked great …
February 13, 2010
This week’s Linux techmail is Learn and use regular expressions with Kodos which is a slick little app written in python that lets you learn regular expressions and build them in a nice GUI interface. This is a great tool for testing regular expressions outside of your …
February 13, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Enhance Safari with Glims plug-in which discusses the free Glims plugin for Safari. This plugin adds a bunch of features that should have been in Safari to begin with as far as I’m concerned: automatic re-opening of tabs when you start …
February 2, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is completely non-technical and is a bit of an opinion/rant piece: iPass on the Apple iPad: It’s no netbook killer and it pretty much sums up my feeling about the much-touted iPad. I get what Apple has in mind with this thing, thinking …
February 2, 2010
This week’s techmail is FreeBSD 8.0 installation walk-through where I take a look at a quick install of FreeBSD 8.0. I’ve toyed with FreeBSD for many years and it’s never really appealed to me beyond a curiosity because Linux is so capable. I’ve also …
January 25, 2010
This week’s techmail is Why PostgreSQL is a better enterprise database than MySQL which takes a look at what makes PostgreSQL a compelling database, when compared to MySQL. Particularly in light of the whole Oracle/MySQL thing, I think it’s good to remind people that …
January 25, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Managing SSL Certificate Authorities on OS X which takes you through adding a CA to the OS X keychain to verify SSL certificates. This is mostly useful for internal networks that use their own CA and it (obviously) doesn’t come bundled with …
January 21, 2010
This week’s techmail is Manipulate monitor displays easily with the xrandr extension which talks about how to automatically resize, re-orientate, and reconfigure your monitors using xrandr. xrandr is really cool and shines especially bright when used with laptops and …
January 21, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Using Cornerstone to handle Subversion on the Mac. Subversion is my favourite VCS; I moved to it from CVS years ago. Git is still pretty new to me and one day I may invest more time into using it more fully, but subversion still has my heart, so …
January 12, 2010
Last week’s mac TechMail was Save time and avoid errors with Typinator for the Mac which looks at one of my favourite productivity tools: Typinator (a text expansion utility). Typinator is one of those things that now that I’ve been using it for a few years, I …
January 12, 2010
This week’s TechMail is Set up rsyslog to store syslog messages in MySQL which gives a brief rundown of how to setup rsyslog to log messages in a MySQL database so that you can use a viewer such as phpLogCon in order to view/filter them. For me, this is a novelty thing more …
January 9, 2010
This week’s TechMail was Change default applications easily in GNOME which looks at how you can configure GNOME to use your preferred applications to open certain file types (i.e. if you had a specific IDE you wanted to edit PHP or Python files with, or a specific media …
January 3, 2010
Last week’s techmail was 2009: A Linux year in review in which I took a (brief) look at some of the happenings in 2009. Of course I had to add the obligatory “year of the desktop linux” routine but don’t worry… I didn’t make any silly …
December 23, 2009
This week’s mac techmail is Syncing The Hit List with Daylite gives you all-access pass to your data anywhere you go which looks at combining The Hit List with DayLite to handle task management. I’m a huge fan of Daylite; it’s the CRM I’ve been using for …
December 16, 2009
This week’s mac TechMail is Sync application preferences with Dropbox which talks about the fantastic file syncing tool/service known as DropBox (disclosure: yes, that is a referral link and I get a small amount of added space if you sign up using it). Dropbox is great, and …
December 16, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Learn to use extended file attributes in Linux to boost security which takes a look at using chattr, getfattr, setfattr, getfacl, and setfacl; tools that can be used to offer more granular security to files and directories. Being able to use SELinux …
December 10, 2009
This week’s TechMail was DIY pfSense firewall system beats others for features, reliability, and security which takes a look at pfSense which is, in my opinion, one of the best open source firewall systems around. I’ve used quite a few, and for a long time when I was …
December 10, 2009
This week’s mac tip is Cross-platform Dropbox provides easy backups and file-syncing between computers which looks at using DropBox to synchronize files between computers in an easy fashion. DropBox is cross-platform, which makes it even nicer.
December 3, 2009
This week’s mac TechMail is Easy application syncing with Mac’s Daylite CRM which talks more about using Daylite on the mac as a contact-relationship management software. I love Daylite and use it daily, and it’s ability to sync with other applications makes it …
December 3, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Don’t need groupware? Organize your life with Osmo which looks at using Osmo as a pretty basic, yet useful, personal information manager. Osmo is quite basic, but if that’s all you need (i.e. don’t need Outlook or Zimbra or …
November 26, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Learn to use Git version control for added flexibility which talks about some of the basics of using Git. This was good for me since I’m a subversion monkey, but since a lot of projects are using Git now, I really needed to get the basics down …
November 23, 2009
Two new mac tips on TechRepublic… last week’s is Configure OS X for Kerberos single sign-on authentication which talks about how to configure Kerberos with OS X. This week the tip is Get to know Daylite CRM for Macs which talks about the Daylite contact management …
November 17, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Fedora 12 boasts enhanced performance, improved reporting, better graphics which is a great big gushy welcome to Constantine! The tip highlights some of my favourite new features in Fedora 12. I’ve been running the beta on my new HP machine for …
November 10, 2009
This week’s techmail is Snoop on your own network with ntop, which discusses the many uses for the ntop application and why you want to use it, particularly if you need to keep an eye on your network traffic and throughput. ntop is a great analysis tool that deserves a …
November 10, 2009
This week’s mac techmail is Get creative with Automator workflows in Mac which discusses some of the new Automator-related features of OS X 10.6, particularly in regards to the new Services menu and easy-to-get-started Automator templates. Combining Automator and the …
November 8, 2009
Missed two mac-related techmails from the previous weeks. The first is Learn to use the improved Snow Leopard Services menu which talks about the OS X 10.6 much overhauled services menu and some of the cool things you can do with it such as making your own Automator actions that …
November 8, 2009
Last week’s techmail was Using BitlBee to consolidate instant messaging into one client which talks about the really neat BitlBee program which brings your instant messaging to IRC. It’s got a few rough edges, but it’s really quite neat and worth checking out if …
October 28, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Keep IMAP email messages locally using OfflineIMAP. OfflineIMAP is an extremely cool program that lets you treat IMAP mail as local with two-way synchronization. Works awesome with mutt and allows you to keep a local copy of stuff for grepping or …
October 23, 2009
This past week’s mac TechMail was Use Shimo to create VPN connections in Mac OS X which talks about using the Shimo VPN client tool on OS X. I’ve tried a few VPN clients to connect to a Cisco VPN, and Shimo is the one that works the best for me. It also supports other …
October 20, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Configure Apache to support multiple SSL sites on a single IP address which talks about the new SNI (Server Name Indication) feature in Apache 2.2.12. This is a really welcome feature as previously if you wanted more than one SSL-secured site, you …
October 14, 2009
And this week’s mac techmail is about one of my all-time favourite applications: Optimize your Mac experience with the LaunchBar multitasker. Launchbar is probably the first thing I install after the OS itself. I’ve been using it for years and can’t live without …
October 14, 2009
Last week’s mac techmail was Get system display options with GeekTool for the Mac. GeekTool is one of my favourite tools for the mac. Kinda like Conky on Linux, but more flexible since you can have multiple windows all over the place doing various things (i.e. my GeekTool …
October 14, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Setting up a Cisco VPN connection with Network Manager which shows just how easy it is to setup Fedora to connect to a Cisco VPN using Network Manager (other distros too, I suppose). Also mentions OpenVPN as well. At any rate, this is an introduction …
October 6, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Using Corkscrew to tunnel SSH over HTTP which talks about creating an SSH tunnel using HTTP and the Corkscrew tool. Very cool and interesting stuff. Fortunately I’ve never been in such a restrictive environment where I’ve needed to use …
September 30, 2009
Last week’s mac TechMail is Use The Hit List to get things done with Mac, which talks about using The Hit List as a task manager. It works quite well with the GTD methodology, although it’s not necessarily geared towards it (you can use THL without following GTD). …
September 29, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Get network versatility with SSH tunneling and netcat which talks about using netcat as a proxy tool to bounce transparently through a bastion host to a secure end point. It’s not something that you may use a lot, but if you need to be able to …
September 22, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Configuring VOIP in Twinkle which talkes about how to setup Twinkle, a SIP softphone, for VOIP. It’s ugly, but it works really well. =)
September 22, 2009
So I am now also writing for TechRepublic’s new Mac blog. Same format as with the Linux tips, but they’re geared towards “macs in business”. Should be interesting and give me something else to write about as well. So my first foray here is Lay the …
September 8, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Save time on downloads with delta RPMs in Fedora 11 which discusses the delta RPM feature in Fedora, how to set it up and use it, and why you would want to. Delta RPMs don’t make sense for everyone, but they will for quite a few people (i.e. …
September 1, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Mirroring Web sites with wget which discusses using wget to mirror… websites! Pretty simplistic, but a lot of people miss some real goodies by ignoring CLI applications.
August 25, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Monitor your system for threats with rsec alerts which discusses the rsec tool I forked from Mandriva’s msec years ago (for Annvix). It’s been updated and is available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (and CentOS 5) as I think it’s …
August 18, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Tweeting from the command line. Basically it discusses using a shell script to send out tweets to Twitter. Interestingly enough, one of the comments posted on that tip from a TechRepublic member discusses how he setup a private twitter account so he …
August 11, 2009
This week’s TechMail is How to use Virtual Machine Manager on Fedora 11 which discusses my first foray into using Virtual Machine Manager and KVM. It’s no surprise that I’m a big virtualization fan, but this is the first time I’ve used something baked …
August 4, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Secure remote firewall administration via SSH which talks about using ssh to create a secure tunnel to a remote network/system to use with configuring a remote firewall. I use this quite a bit with remotely-deployed pfSense boxen to configure it …
July 28, 2009
This week’s TechMail is System monitoring with Conky which gives a quick introduction to the conky tool. I’ve come to like conky so much that I’ve replaced gkrellm by it. Really useful tool. If you use a mac, it’s a lot like geektool (another tool I love), …
July 21, 2009
This week’s Techmail is Setting up a dynamic DNS service part 2: dhcpd which wraps up the two part piece on setting up a dynamic DNS service, specifically covering dhcpd and tying it all together.
July 19, 2009
This past week’s TechMail was Setting up a dynamic DNS service part 1: named which discusses setting up a local intranet dynamic DNS service. This is the first of two parts: the first deals with named, the second deals with dhcpd. I was put in a position where this had to …
July 8, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Hacking Vim covers the basics and reveals tips for power users, which is a book review of “Hacking Vim” by Packt Publishing. If you’re a (serious/wanna-be) vim user, this is a really useful book to read. I learnt a lot of tricks …
June 30, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Use Makefiles for more than handling source code which takes a quick look at how you can use make for more than just handling source code. The example provided uses make to update remote websites (which is moderately related to source code I guess), …
June 30, 2009
Last week’s Techmail was Manage dotfile configuration with subversion which goes into use subversion to manage all those pesky little .foo files in $HOME. It uses a combination of subversion and make to handle it and works quite well, although the Makefile could probably be …
June 16, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Two hours (and counting) with an upgrade to Fedora 11, in which I describe my initial experience with the upgrade of my laptop from Fedora 10 to Fedora 11. All-in-all, the upgrade was good and has worked great. I have no complaints, except for two …
June 9, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Use tabs to open multiple files in vim which pretty much discusses how to use tabs in vim so you can have multiple files open at once. Using some nice key mapping, you can navigate tabs with simple keystrokes and have vim act like any good GUI text …
June 2, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Create custom keybindings in vim which goes into how to tweak vim’s keybindings to make them more familiar if you come from another editor. It’s also useful to create shortcuts for things such as moving to the end of a line. I’ve …
May 22, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Gain fine control in OpenVZ with resource management which discusses how to setup and manipulate resource management in OpenVZ. As with any other virtualization solution, OpenVZ allows you to assign resources to your containers so they cannot exceed …
May 19, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Create an OpenVZ container which discusses how to create your own OpenVZ container using pre-built templates. I’ve really fallen in love with OpenVZ; I find it much simpler and much faster than VMware or other full virtualization solutions. …
May 12, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Create your own yum repository which pretty much discusses the createrepo tool and how to use it to create your own custom yum repository. Handy little tool; this came about when I was figuring out how to make a yum repository for my Annvix packages. …
May 7, 2009
This week’s techmail is Store passwords with pwsafe which looks at the pwsafe CLI application that can keep track of all your passwords and login credentials in a safe and secure manner (and throws in strong password generation as a bonus). Really useful app.
April 29, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Get a handy multi-item clipboard with Glipper which talks about using Glipper to manage a multi-item clipboard. When I started using Fedora daily for work, this was one of the first things I had to find for it simply because I’ve been using …
April 21, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Install OpenVZ on CentOS to create a virtual container which discusses using the OpenVZ virtualization software. I have to admit, I’ve become extremely fond of OpenVZ. I stumbled upon it as the open source version of Virtuozzo which is used by …
April 14, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Dodge the challenges of a dual-head display setup with Fedora 10 which discusses setting up a dual-head display on my Lenovo T61 and how insanely easy it ended up being… once I knew what I was doing. Truth be told, I haven’t setup a …
April 7, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Use encrypted filesystems with Linux Logical Volume Manager which discusses how to setup LVM with encryption right at install-time. I’m finding for myself that having information, particularly on laptops, encrypted is becoming increasingly …
April 1, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Get a stable and secure server setup with CentOS, RPMForge, and Utter Ramblings which talks about setting up extra repositories in CentOS. As was pointed out in the comments on that blog, I neglected to mention EPEL (in all fairness, when I wrote …
March 24, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Converting Subversion repositories to Git. This is a small primer on how to migrate from using Subversion for version control to using Git instead. I’m still quite a big fan of subversion, but git is pretty cool too… I can definitely see …
March 17, 2009
This week’s TechMail is How does Ubuntu’s Upstart system initialization compare with runit? which looks at the upstart system vs runit. I really like runit; so much in fact that with Annvix I rewrote the entire init system to take as much advantage of runit as …
March 13, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Getting started with the yum package manager which goes into some of the basics of using yum. This was good reference for me coming from years of urpmi, so digging into the use of yum was a good exercise for how I’m going to be dealing with …
March 3, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Set up RPM Fusion with Fedora to shore up multimedia support which looks at adding extra multimedia codecs to work with Fedora that don’t come “in the box”; things like MP3 support or watching protected DVDs on your system, or …
March 1, 2009
Last week’s TechMail was Set up a bluetooth keyboard and mouse in Fedora 10 which, as the title indicates, goes through setting up a bluetooth keyboard and mouse in F10. Much different from the last time I did it (much easier, much faster, a whole lot less frustration). In …
February 15, 2009
This week’s TechMail is A Mandriva user kicks around Fedora Core 10: How does it compare? (not the title I chose, but I guess my editor figured it needed my “flare”). Basically talks about my first impressions of using Fedora 10, considering I’ve more or …
February 10, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Check out subversion repositories with ViewVC which is pretty much just about installing and configuring the ViewVC web-based tool to view subversion repositories (works with cvs too).
February 4, 2009
This week’s TechMail is: Get started with the security tool OSSEC, a quick run-down of what OSSEC is and how to use it. It’s a pretty big “package”, so I couldn’t cover everything, just a single-server-use scenario which I think is what the majority …
January 28, 2009
This week’s TechMail is VMware Server 2.0 offers handy new upgrades which takes a look at the new(ish) VMware Server 2.0. When I wrote it, it was pretty much the first time I’ve looked at VMware Server for a while… it made a decent alternative to VMware …
January 20, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Remotely monitor servers with the Nagios check_by_ssh plugin which discusses using the check_by_ssh plugin in Nagios to get local plugin results from remote systems, via ssh. I use this to monitor my VPS and other remote systems so I can see things …
January 15, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Learning more about Nagios for server monitoring which reviews the book Learning NAGIOS 3.0 published by Packt Publishing. This is a pretty decent book for anyone interested in learning more about Nagios. It taught me, who’s been using Nagios …
January 8, 2009
This past week’s TechMail is Firewall MySQL with GreenSQL which talks about a really cool little application-level firewall that sits between your database-accessing code and MySQL. Really neat concept and although I’ve played with it a bit, I need to find some time …
December 23, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Save time managing multiple systems with Parallel SSH, which discusses using pssh (or Parallel SSH) to do similar operations on multiple systems at the exact same time. Very useful little program indeed.
December 17, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Monitor your server with Monitorix which discusses the Monitorix web package that provides a nice almost-real-time monitoring interface for your system that is accessible via the web. On a side note, why is it that almost everytime I write these …
December 9, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Using pam_mount to automount filesystems at login, which essentially discusses using the pam_mount PAM module. A lot of people use it to mount encrypted partitions or loopback devices, which is great, but it can also be used to mount samba shares, …
December 2, 2008
This week’s Techmail looks at some of the new features of ActiveState’s Komodo IDE and asks Is the new Komodo 5 toolset worth the upgrade?. Personally, I think it was. Others may or may not agree… someone else has already posted about using a “real” …
November 18, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Use Dovecot for POP3/IMAP services which discusses how to setup and use Dovecot to provide POP3 and IMAP services. I’ve become quite the fan of Dovecot after having used it for a while; I used to use Courier-IMAP for the longest time and much …
November 14, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Tips and tricks for working on the command line which points out a few simple things you can do on the CLI to make life easier for yourself, such as renaming files or dealing with history, and some lesser-known character sequences you can use. Funny …
November 4, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Using dnsmasq for DNS and DHCP services, which discusses using dnsmasq in place of software like BIND and ISC’s dhcpd (or other similar packages). I had actually never heard of dnsmasq before poking around looking for something interesting to …
October 28, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Use DropBox to seamlessly sync files which discusses the DropBox service to synchronize files seamlessly and automatically between Windows, Mac, and Linux computers. This service works fantastic, BTW. 2GB of free storage with paid upgrade options. …
October 24, 2008
This week’s techmail is Improve MySQL performance with MySQLTuner which discusses how to use the MySQLTuner perl script to tune the MySQL server to ensure you’re not over-committing resources, that your configuration is sane, and giving helpful pointers on how to …
October 16, 2008
Last week’s TechMail was Searching with GNOME Do, which discusses the application launcher GNOME Do, a fantastic little application. The thing I love about this is that on the mac I’m used to and spoiled by Launchbar, so this is something similar on the Linux side …
October 7, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Listen to music with open source Banshee which is a brief introduction to the Banshee music player. I actually quite liked the player, despite it not being able to connect to my iTunes library (which I had hoped it would do). Was also a little irked …
October 1, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Control Apache with the apachectl command which pretty much gives a brief primer of the different commands and cool things you can do with apachectl to control Apache.
September 23, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Consider these Linux file management alternatives which discusses three alternatives to the “traditional” file managers (namely Nautilus and Konqueror). It discusses Midnight Commander, Gentoo, and Krusader (and to be honest, I really …
September 22, 2008
Last week’s TechMail was Try command-line looping for added efficiency which discusses using loops in the shell to iterate over a number of items while using particular commands (i.e. for loops in the shell). Extremely useful stuff if you’ve ever needed to repeat …
September 9, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Expanding text with Snippits in Linux, which discusses using Snippits (a ruby app) to do text expansion. Unfortunately, I went hunting for something that worked as well as Typinator or TextExpander on OS X and this was the only thing that seemed to …
September 9, 2008
Last week’s TechMail was Send messages and alerts from the command line which discusses using the mail and wall commands. Two very simple, yet infinitely useful, programs.
August 28, 2008
This week’s techmail is One-time scheduling of tasks with At which discusses one-shot scheduling with the ‘at’ tool, rather than using something like cron. Alternatives to at include uschedule (which I personally like as it follows a djb service/run-script style …
August 27, 2008
Last week’s techmail was Schedule periodic tasks with cron, a title that pretty much summarizes what the tip is about. All about cron and how it can schedule stuff.
August 12, 2008
Last week’s techmail was Customizing the Joe text editor which goes into some detail regarding customizing Joe, specifically about how you can change key bindings to make shortcuts or other modifications. Joe is one of the first text editors I’ve ever used with Linux, …
August 12, 2008
This week’s techmail is Get a complete security toolkit with BackTrack 3. I was approached a month or so ago by an individual who does forensic work, mostly on Windows and Mac computers and he was in need of something to do forensics with Linux, and wanted a tool that could …
August 2, 2008
This past week’s Techmail was Install extra packages on the ASUS Eee PC which discusses adding extra Xandros repositories to get more packages on the Eee PC than what the standard install provides.
July 25, 2008
This week’s TechMail is entitled Installing Mandriva 2008.1 on the ASUS Eee PC, which, as the name implies, discusses Mandriva 2008.1 on the ASUS Eee PC. When I wrote it, I had installed Mandriva onto an SDHC card, but I’ve since replaced Xandros with Mandriva on the …
July 15, 2008
This week’s Techmail is ASUS Eee PC is a good option for a lightweight laptop which is a basic summary of the little EeePC and why I like mine. =) This one basically covers the Xandros OS that comes with the Eee, but a future one (probably next week I’m suspecting) …
July 12, 2008
Last week’s Techmail was GUI scripting with Zenity which discusses using Zenity to display GUI widgets from scripts. I’ve used such things for a full blown menu driven CLI app before, but Zenity is quite cool in that you get all the power of a shell script with a nice …
July 3, 2008
This one is over a month old and got lost in my inbox, so I’m posting it now. A month ago’s TechMail was Dig for more data in the /proc directory which pretty much shows some ways of mining for info in the /proc pseudo-filesystem.
July 2, 2008
Haven’t been keeping up with the TechMails, so here’s the last three works worth. This one is entitled Use Fuse to mount remote ssh directories and it discusses how to use Fuse (user-space filesystem) to mount remote ssh directories as “local” filesystems. …
July 2, 2008
And finally, this last week’s Techmail was Send mail with eSMTP for a simple, single-user system which discusses using eSMTP to send email instead of setting up a full-blown postfix or exim or whatever server.
July 2, 2008
Last week’s TechMail was Chroot users with OpenSSH: An easier way to confine users to their home directories which discusses the new chroot capabilities of newer openssh. Chrooted sftp is very very cool and a welcome addition to openssh, although it would be neat if …
June 16, 2008
The last TechMail is Realize the flexibility of OpenSSH which talks about some of the basics of using OpenSSH, from setting up keys to modifying sshd_config for user/group access controls and different features per group/user. OpenSSH is another of my favourite tools. Of course, …
June 16, 2008
Last week’s TechMail is about one of my favourite programs, sudo: Delegate privileges to users with sudo. It’s just a short primer on how to use sudo so for those that do know how to use it and manage /etc/sudoers, it’s nothing special, but for those who …
May 21, 2008
Last week’s Techmail is Log Linux services with runit (although I’m pretty sure that’s not the original title I submitted). Anyways, it discusses logging various services running under runit using svlogd, so you can completely separate services from each other. …
May 21, 2008
In light of the recent Debian debacle and to get the word out to more people, this week’s Techmail is Find and fix weak OpenSSL/OpenSSH keys: Debian-based Linux vulnerability which more or less reiterates what happened with the Debian OpenSSL… fun… and points …
May 7, 2008
This week’s TechMail is about one of my favourite programs, runit: Use runit to supervise Linux services. I can’t recommend runit highly enough, but ever since I started with qmail years ago and djb’s daemontools, supervised services have been a bit of a thing …
May 7, 2008
Last week’s TechMail tip was Learn to use the openssl command-line program which goes into the use of… openssl… on the command-line. Stuff like generating hashes, doing general file encryption, etc.
April 24, 2008
And this week’s TechMail is Try IRC with Irssi to communicate via chat, which essentially looks at irssi being the superior IRC client to anything else you can find out there. Couple screen, irssi, and mutt and you’ve essentially got my “command center” on …
April 24, 2008
Been busy redoing my office this week and was busy with Mandriva release stuff last week so I forgot to put up the new TechMails. Last week’s techmail was Using vi key bindings in bash and zsh, which looks at using, you guessed it, vi keybindings instead of the default …
April 9, 2008
Last week’s TechMail was Securely delete files with shred, a quick introduction to the shred tool in order to securely delete files on a Linux box.
April 9, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Use command-line MySQL for additional flexibility which delves into some quickie commands useful on the MySQL CLI client, such as setting prompts, using mysql output in scripts, etc.
March 26, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Configure Snort to log packets to MySQL which looks at using MySQL to store snort logs and BASE to view them. Already there’s a comment there about someone wanting to know how to do it on Windows. I’m sure it’s possible, but my …
March 23, 2008
This past week’s TechMail tip is Detect intruders on your network with Snort which is a quick primer on how to use the Snort IDS (Intrusion Detection System). Snort is pretty cool if you have the patience to deal with it and the time to invest in setting it up properly. The …
March 14, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Set up a TFTP server for easy network boots and firmware upgrades, which pretty much explains the process of setting up your own TFTP server. I had to figure this one out a while ago in order to upgrade the firmware on a Netgear router I bought from …
March 4, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Set up ISC’s dhcpd server which discusses setting up dhcpd, and how you can use it to assign static IP addresses – using the convenience of DHCP-supplied configurations with the convenience of static IP addresses for client machines (and …
March 1, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Secure temporary files in Linux which discusses how to properly secure temporary files, using things like loopback filesystems, separate partitions for /tmp and using appropriate mount flags. It’s pretty simplistic stuff, but can make a huge …
March 1, 2008
Last week’s TechMail tip was Encrypting and decrypting files with GnuPG, which covers some stuff about using gpg to deal with encryption of files (instead of just using gpg for mail).
February 12, 2008
This came through as this week’s techmail, although I’m not sure why.. this was originally posted back in June, but since that was before I started linking to the tips I figured I’d note it here anyways. Tuning the Linux kernel for more aggressive network …
February 6, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Get started with GnuPG, a quick primer on another of my favourite tools: GnuPG. Learn the basics of getting your own GPG keypair created and learn a little bit about fingerprints and signatures and what they all mean. And if you want to get more into …
February 1, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Use tcpdump for network debugging which goes over some of the basics for, yes, using tcpdump to debug your network (or, if you’re curious, just to watch packets sling around your computer).
January 26, 2008
This week’s TechRepublic tip is on Auto-reboot Linux after a kernel panic. It’s a pretty simplistic post regarding automatically rebooting the Linux kernel if it encounters a panic. The posts on it are good too, indicating on how to tell the kernel to treat an oops …
January 17, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Learn to use a serial console on Linux which walks through the steps needed to use screen as a serial console client and setting up the remote system to answer to serial login requests. Handy for those headless servers when ssh stops working for some …
January 10, 2008
This week’s TechMail tip is Use OpenNTPD for time synchronization, which discusses using OpenNTPD (from the OpenSSH team) instead of the older (and more bloated) NPTD.
December 21, 2007
These are older tips I wrote for TechRepublic but I found myself needing to look them up before and realized they weren’t linked on my blog. Of course, with over 200 articles written for TechRepublic over the last 7-8 years, that’s not surprising. =) Anyways, Automate …
December 18, 2007
This week’s TechRepublic tip is Filter for unwanted mail and mailing lists with procmail, which goes into procmail recipes a little more in depth than last week’s tip (size restraints on these tips sucks sometimes, so we end up with two-parters). Shows how to build …
December 13, 2007
This week’s techmail is Filter mail with powerful procmail, a brief introduction to using procmail. For those who don’t get to use procmail, I feel sorry for you. Procmail is the best filtering system for email, bar none.
December 4, 2007
Today’s TechMail is Get more e-mail flexibility with Fetchmail, which discusses the use of fetchmail. It doesn’t go into too much depth, more of a primer on fetchmail than anything. I think an upcoming tip will discuss procmail a little bit more.
November 27, 2007
This week’s TechMail is pretty basic, but one of those “hidden gems” that the average person probably isn’t aware of. Of course, it’s one that the average person may not care about either but… regardless, this week’s techmail is …
November 20, 2007
This week’s TechMail is Secure Connections to PostgreSQL which goes a little bit into the many different possible authentication methods you can use with the PostgreSQL database server, how it differs from MySQL, and illustrates why, at least from a security standpoint, I …
November 18, 2007
Another Techrepublic tip is up, entitled Specify who can log in via OpenSSH. I love writing about OpenSSH… it’s probably, weirdly enough, one of my favourite programs. I can’t imagine not having it or even surviving one day (of work) without it. This tip talks …
November 6, 2007
This week’s TechMail is Define disk quotas to keep users from hogging drive space. Already the comments associated with it are amusing. I wonder where people get the idea that anyone (I mean, seriously, anyone) would pay some guy $2000/mo to be a “junior disk quota …
October 30, 2007
This week’s TechMail tip is Authentication caching with nscd which talks about how to keep authentication credentials cached for disconnected operations (i.e. if you auth against an LDAP server and it goes down or you take your laptop home). It’s missing some bits …
October 23, 2007
This week’s TechRepublic tip is Configure GNU Screen to handle multiple terminals. Screen is an awesome program that works great on Linux on OS X. The tip is pretty much platform-agnostic; it works well for both Linux and OS X (I use it on both). The really great thing is …
October 16, 2007
This week’s TechMail is Power Linux with pipes and redirection; a little discourse on how to use pipes and redirects and how they make the CLI way more kick-ass than any GUI.
October 2, 2007
This week’s TechRepublic tip is Using FileZilla on Linux.
September 25, 2007
This week’s TechMail is Getting things done with mutt, a look at using the GTD concepts with my favourite email client.
September 18, 2007
Today’s tip over at TechRepublic is Obtaining file information with RPM. Gives a bit of an overview of some of the commands you can use with rpm, regardless of which frontend you use (urpmi, apt, yum, etc.).
September 11, 2007
Another week, another tip, this one is Locate files with the find tool, a quick run-down on using find to… well… find stuff.
September 4, 2007
Another week, another TechMail tip. This week’s is Learn to search with grep.
August 28, 2007
New article on TechRepublic from yours truly about Configuring wireless support in Mandriva with ndiswrapper.