Some tricks covered in the article include: using passwordless, key-based login; setting up local per-host configurations; exporting a local service through a firewall; accessing a remote service through a firewall; setting up a SOCKS proxy for Firefox; executing commands remotely from scripts; transfering files to/from remote machines; mounting a filesystem through SSH; and triggering admin [...]

& – This causes the application to run in the background. You will get a new shell prompt after issuing this command. nohup and disown – Both of these prevent SIGHUP (hangup) signals so the application isn’t killed when the terminal session is closed. nohup does this when the job starts. disown can be used [...]

Now here’s a really interesting feature article on Unix history and how it came to be. It’s quite amazing how successful a piece of software has become and how it came to influence the world of computing in the past (roughly) 40 years. “They say that when one door closes on you, another opens. People [...]

Now here is a good article (mainly for Unix beginners) that outlines some of the most useful basic Unix commands available.  Read the article here: Unix Command Line Fu (via kresimirbojcic.com). The article covers commands such as: cut, grep, sort, uniq, cat, tac, join, tail, head, etc. It also tells you a bit about how [...]

“The best candidate I have been able to come up with is the C/Unix/Posix use of NUL-terminated text strings. The choice was really simple: Should the C language represent strings as an address + length tuple or just as the address with a magic character (NUL) marking the end? This is a decision that the [...]

I do quite a bit of Linux/Unix systems administrator on a day-to-day basis. Over time you sort of find out that there are quite a few ‘common traits’ that apply to your usual set of Unix admins. Some examples: the use of Vi, use of Perl, restrained use of sudo, etc. I found a list [...]

I’ve been messing around with rsync lately on one of my linux machines. I’ve been looking for a simple solution that would provide something similar to Apple’s Time Machine software. There are obviously some open source packages that could provide this functionality for me, but I just wanted something really simple that could be automated. [...]