Home away from home

I don’t drive a flashy car, own a fancy house, or even watch a big screen TV — but boy, do I have nice computers. When I worked in a cubicle, it chafed me that the equipment I was supposed to use was quite a bit clunkier than what I was used to at home.

One of the many wonderful things about high-speed Internet is that I can get to my home setup from darn near anywhere. It’s easier with Linux or Mac, of course, but since PC laptops are a commodity, the ability to do it with Microsoft Windows is also a good tool to have in the kit.

CGI 101 - What does CGI mean?

Sometimes the toughest thing about learning something new and useful is figuring out what other people call it. You may have wanted to do a small project like the one I’m about to describe, and you would have been able to do it long before this — if only you had known what to type into Google. Read more

Leopard-like “Time Machine” for Linux

Imagine my surprise when I found out that the “Time Machine” backup in OS X Leopard is essentially using the same technique that Mike Rubel documented for use with Linux and BSD Unix almost a decade ago. Apple added a classy graphical interface… but Linux users can also have multi-generation backups that take minimal space, storing new versions of files as they change but keeping the old versions around. Read more

Spam mail bad. Procmail GOOD.

Porkchop <porkchop@example.com> wrote:

>I'm looking to get a procmail thingie setup. I spent a
>few minutes looking at the manpage...seems to be
>written using a non-roman alphabet...!

>Took a quick run on search engines with no luck...so does
>anyone know of a 'procmail for idiots' type webpage?

Automated SSH login with lussh

If you replace passwords with SSH keys, your scripts can access a remote machine more securely; also, you can set your password to something preposterously long and complex, or disable SSH passwords altogether, thus making it flat-out impossible to break your password by “brute force.” It’s not hard to set up key-based SSH access, but lussh makes it even more convenient. Read more

A practical iptables firewall in Linux

“We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone,” and iptables is how we do it. Rather than spend a lot of time trying to explain how ipchains begat iptables, let’s jump in. There are enough comments in the code so that everything will make sense, even if we skip much of the theory.
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Unix 101

In the old days, when people walked to school uphill both ways in the snow, the only way into your computer was by using a Command Line Interface, otherwise known as a console. Ah, just you and a blinking cursor. No wallpaper, no stupid, cryptic icons… that’s how computers were meant to be used! Read more

What is SAMBA?

When you connect a Linux machine and a Microsoft Windows machine to the same Local Area Network, they may not automatically see each other. That is, the Linux machine won’t show up in Windows’ Network Neighborhood nor will the Windows disks be available under Linux. Samba changes that — with it, you can quite easily do both.
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jtest - rotate your procmail log

I’m using GNU grep, which allows me to use the -B option to display a few lines of context before the line where it found a match, and -A to display lines after it. mailstat is a helper program which like formail is included in the procmail package. It automatically moves the log file you feed it to a new file with the same name plus the extension “.old”, so in this case, it moves “pm.log” to “pm.log.old”. Read more

LAN101 - The TCP/IP Network

A LAN is a Local Area Network — it’s a fancy way of saying “the two or three computers in this room, give or take the dozen down the hall.” It implies a fast connection — dozens, hundreds, even thousands of times faster than a dial-up modem. It used to be pretty challenging to hook computers together this way, but the parts got cheaper and the software got smarter.
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