Apr 122015
 

systemd is a suite of system management daemons, libraries, and utilities designed as a central management and configuration platform for the GNU/Linux computer operating system.
It provides a system and service manager that runs as PID 1 and starts the rest of the system as alternative to the traditional sysVinit.
systemd provides aggressive parallelization capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons,

It’s becoming the standard of all the major GNU/Linux distributions and at the moment it’s the default for Arch Linux, Red Hat Enterprise/Centos (version 7), Fedora, Mageia and Suse Enterprise, it’s planned to be used on Debian 8 and Ubuntu 15.04.

There is a lot of people talking for and against systemd on the net as some see it as too intrusive, complex and against the Unix philosophy to keep things simple and make them do just one task.

Using Red Hat 7 at work and Arch Linux on my laptop I’ve started to use it and I must agree that it’s not so simple in the start, but let’s try to take the good thing from it and in this article I’d like to show you some commands that you can use with systemd to manage the processes on a GNU/Linux system and that I’ve found really useful.
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Dec 202014
 

Ns2
For a very long time I wanted an FPS that manages to blend seamlessly the FPS and RTS genre, and this is how I got into Natural Selection 2. This is a multiplayer oriented game where you can take the role of either humans or aliens as you try to survive and lead your race to victory.

Story

Natural Selection 2 comes with a simplistic, yet highly appealing story. The premise in this game is that you and your team of elite marine Frontiersmen have been struggling to find a habitable planet. The one you manage to settle upon is populated by the alien race Kharaa, and you will have to battle them for the complete control over the planet. In Natural Selection 2, players will have the opportunity to choose either one of the two races, and use all the resources at your disposal in order to eliminate the enemy threat.

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Sep 292014
 

The most new and dangerous bug around it’s the one called “shellshock”, this is a security bug in the widely used Unix Bash shell which was disclosed on 24 September 2014. Many Internet daemons, such as web servers, use Bash to process certain commands, allowing an attacker to cause vulnerable versions of Bash to execute arbitrary commands. This can allow an attacker to gain unauthorized access to a computer system.

The bug causes Bash to unintentionally execute commands when they are stored in specially crafted environment variables. Within days, a series of further related vulnerabilities in Bash were found, leading to the need for further patches.

By 25 September, botnets based on computers compromised with this exploit were being used by attackers for distributed denial-of-service attacks and vulnerability scanning, source wikipedia

Let’s see how to check if your computer or server is vulnerable.
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Sep 142014
 

sanctum

I’ve recently bought an offer for Sanctum 2 on Steam, and while at the start I was a bit skeptic, I must say that I like this mix between a Tower Defense and an FPS.

Sanctum 2 is the sequel to the world’s first Tower Defense/FPS hybrid game
Pick from four unique character classes and take up the mission of protecting the Cores from hordes of mysterious aliens. In Sanctum 2 you play your character exactly the way you want through the new and extensive customization system. Pick your own loadout of towers, weapons and perks, and pick well, because you are humanity’s last defense against the hordes set out to destroy it.

The normal cost of the complete bundle that includes the game + 5 DLC it’s around 23 € on Steam, but if you like it I suggest to put it on your wishlits and wait for some offer, the game it’s a bit old and so offers should be frequent, I got it with a discount of the 70%

The game has a great graphics, still it’s playable on my crappy computer, and both the solo campaign and the online co-op multiplayer are funny enough, so let’s see now some detail about this game:

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Aug 292014
 

If you manage a server with many different users or just your family computer you will probably have many different accounts to manage, and one important aspect of any account it’s its password.

In this small article I’ll show you how to use the basic passwd command but also how to do some small bash script or use a web application, if you have a more complex environment, such as a central ldap server that keep all your accounts information.
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