Nov 012011
 

sshguardI’ve already talked about fail2ban and logcheck, 2 tools that can scan your logs and do actions, based on rules that you can give/modify, usually modify your iptables rules to stop active attacks against your server or simply send you a warning if some thing is found in the logs.

Today we’ll see a similar tool, sshguard, it is different from the other two in that it is written in C, so it’s uses less memory and CPU while running, but still achiving the same results.
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Nov 012011
 

After many years of administration of Unix/Linux systems and using bash for many tasks i’ve discovered the command tac, the contrary of cat,
What this command do it’s to concatenate and print files in reverse order, it writes each file to standard output, last line first.

bash$ cat file1.txt
This is the line 1.
This is the line 2.
 
bash$ tac file1.txt
This is the line 2.
This is the line 1.

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Oct 312011
 

by
Frank Harris-Smith

What is Wine and why is Wine “Not an Emulator”? I use Wine to run a Windows application that is a better fit for my purposes than what’s available for Linux. I couldn’t really answer that question. So I went to the source: WineHQ to look it up.

Wine is not an Emulator like DOSbox is, for example. DOSbox allows you to run DOS applications like old games in a Emulated Environment. What the game or program “sees” is a standard DOS PC with Emulated old hardware with the old graphics cards (Tandy, Hercules, VESA) and antique sound cards like the original SoundBlaster or Gravis Ultra Sound. There are versions of DOSbox for post-DOS Windows (NT and later) and Linux because those old DOS games can’t run on either.

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Oct 262011
 

Article
By
Frank Harris-Smith

The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an Open Source Graphic Editing Program. Although it’s not as powerful as Adobe Photoshop, it has one very big advantage over Photoshop – price. Photoshop CS5, the latest and greatest version, is retailing at $500+ American Dollars whereas The GIMP is FREE

So, if it’s not as good as Photoshop, what good is it? It is said that a picture is worth 1,000 words so…

macto

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Oct 212011
 

Article by Frank Harris-Smith

Linux is fundamentally a command line Operating System. Anything and everything can be done through the command line – system configuration, connecting to WiFi access points, even accessing new hardware devices before the Linux Kernel gets a driver for it (like USB Flash Drives before Linux Kernel 2.4 – pre 2001)

A quick example is the iwconfig command. Here is a quick peek at my current WiFi connection as seen from the command line:
wifi

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