Remote terminal application that allows roaming, supports intermittent connectivity, and provides intelligent local echo and line editing of user keystrokes.

Mosh is a replacement for SSH. It's more robust and responsive, especially over Wi-Fi, cellular, and long-distance links.

Mosh is free software, available for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X.

Learn from my mistakes as I figure out how to gather forensics data on an ext4 filesystem.

One great thing about writing technical articles is that you have a nice collection of documentation you can turn to. I tell people that I probably reference my books and articles more than anyone else, because although I may not always remember specific steps to perform a task, I do always remember whether I wrote about how to do it.

One article I find myself referring to now and then is the "Introduction to Forensics" article I wrote in Linux Journal back in the January 2008 issue (my first feature article in Linux Journal). In that article, I walk through how to use Autopsy, a front end to Sleuthkit, to perform your own forensics investigation on a server that has been hacked. Recently, I had to perform an investigation on a server that fell victim to an SSH brute-force attack (use SSH keys!) and discovered that my personal documentation no longer worked. In this article, I walk through the symptoms of this problem and ultimately how I was able to work around it.

Our Raspberry Pi cases are designed and manufactured in the United Kingdom using state of the art 3D Printing, and all cases are made from tough, strong and durable ABS Plastic. We are currently finalising our designs, and aim to start case production at the end of March. You can register your interest now by subscribing, and we’ll email you when we release our Raspberry Pi cases and set-up kits. Alternatively you can pre-order your case or set-up kit now on our Products page to avoid disappointment and be the first on the list to receive them.

ModMyPi’s aim is to make our range of Raspberry Pi cases fully customisable, so you can add unique features to your case and really give it that personal touch. We would also love to build a repertoire of customer designed cases. Head over to our products page to see the cases we’re currently producing, or alternatively head over to Uploads where you can upload your own design and have us create it for you!

Free Manuals for Free Software.

Tweaking a Dedicated Virtual Web Server

Tarsnap is a secure online backup service for BSD, Linux, OS X, Solaris, Cygwin, and can probably be compiled on many other UNIX-like operating systems. The Tarsnap client code provides a flexible and powerful command-line interface which can be used directly or via shell scripts.

At the present time, Tarsnap does not support Windows (except via Cygwin) and does not have a graphical user interface.

aria2 is a lightweight multi-protocol & multi-source download utility operated in command-line. It supports HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, BitTorrent and Metalink. aria2 has built-in JSON-RPC and XML-RPC interface. You can manipulate aria2 via these interfaces.

Sorry for the lame title. I was thinking the other day, about how awesome SSH is, and how it's probably one of the most crucial pieces of technology that I use every single day. Here's a list of 10 things that I think are particularly awesome and perhaps a bit off the beaten path.

Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) creates a secure end node from trusted media on almost any Intel-based computer (PC or Mac). LPS boots a thin Linux operating system from a CD or USB flash stick without mounting a local hard drive. Administrator privileges are not required; nothing is installed. The ATSPI Technology Office created the LPS family to address particular use cases. LPS-Public is a safer, general-purpose solution for using web-based applications. The accredited LPS-Remote Access is only for accessing your organization's private network.

One thing I hated about WebHostingTalk is how much bad advice the so-called “professionals” are giving out to the world. Some poor college student asked in the VPS forums whether he is able to run 18 static HTML sites on VPSLink.com Link-1 plan (64MB RAM, 2.5GB storage & 100GB/month data), and the typical responses are:

“I do not believe you can host 18 websites on 64MB of RAM. I’d bump that up to at least 128 or 256.” –nexbyte

“I really wouldn’t advise anything lower than 265MB RAM for website hosting.” –RikeMedia

(Well, there are some more optimistic comments but I mainly list out those “with things to sell”)

So, just trying to prove the point that yes, 64MB is more than enough to host 18 static sites, I decided to add a Link-1 Xen to my account and document the process. Btw, thanks to Dan @ VPSLink for getting my billing issue resolved :) You can get 10% recursive discount here, or 66% off for the first 3 months here.

Time to be honest here for a minute. The open source community really has outdone themselves coming up with some very obscure names for packages. Let's take this list of packages for instance: emacs, gimp, gcc, mutt, grub, kyle rankin, parted, tar, mutt, vim. Nine times out of ten, a common person is going to look at that list and become utterly confused over what package does what. That's just the beauty (and beast) of naming software in the open source community. But every so often a tool comes across my screen with such a blatantly obvious name that I just have to run a 'man' to make sure my eyes are not deceiving me. In this case, it's ethtool. Yes, a simple name, for such a powerful utility. The name itself tells you what it does, an Ethernet Tool. Tada! That's it, ethernet tool.

e4rat ("Ext4 - Reducing Access Times") is a toolset to accelerate the boot process as well as application startups. Through physical file realloction e4rat eliminates both seek times and rotational delays. This leads to a high disk transfer rate.
Placing files on disk in a sequentially ordered way allows to efficiently read-ahead files in parallel to the program startup. The combination of sequentially reading and a high cache hit rate may reduce the boot time by a factor of three, as the example below shows.

e4rat is based on the online defragmentation ioctl EXT4_IOC_MOVE_EXT from the Ext4 filesystem, which was introduced in Linux Kernel 2.6.31. Other filesystem types and/or earlier versions of extended filesystems are not supported.

Qataki is a command line Identi.ca/StatusNet/Twitter client. It's a shell script that, besides usual UNIX utilities (like sed/awk/grep), depends on curl and ELinks (or Lynx if ELinks is not installed).

reptyr is a utility for taking an existing running program and
attaching it to a new terminal. Started a long-running process over
ssh, but have to leave and don't want to interrupt it? Just start a
screen, use reptyr to grab it, and then kill the ssh session and head
on home.

trickle is a portable lightweight userspace bandwidth shaper. It can run in collaborative mode (together with trickled) or in stand alone mode.

I've 10Mbps server port dedicated to our small business server. The server also act as a backup DNS server and I'd like to slow down outbound traffic on port 80. How do I limit bandwidth allocation to http service 5Mbps (burst to 8Mbps) at peak times so that DNS and other service will not go down due to heavy activity under Linux operating systems?

Learn how to use the open source Clonezilla Live cloning software to convert your physical server to a virtual one. Specifically, see how to perform a physical-to-virtual system migration using an image-based method.

There are some misconceptions that shell scripts are only for a CLI environment. You can easily use various tools to write GUI and/or network (socket) scripts under KDE or Gnome desktops. Shell scripts can make use of some of the GUI widget (menus, warning boxs, progress bars etc). You can always control the final output, cursor position on screen, various output effects, and so on. With the following tools you can build powerful, interactive, user friendly UNIX / Linux bash shell scripts.


Creating GUI application is not just expensive task but task that takes time and patience. Luckily, both UNIX and Linux ships with plenty of tools to write beautiful GUI scripts. The following tools are tested on FreeBSD and Linux operating systems but should work under other UNIX like operating systems.

dwm is a dynamic window manager for X. It manages windows in tiled, monocle and floating layouts. All of the layouts can be applied dynamically, optimising the environment for the application in use and the task performed.

Make a quick backup of a file before changing it:

cp /path/to/your-file{,.bak}
Make some changes, then compare the newly-edited file and its backup:

diff /path/to/your-file{.bak,}
Don’t like...

Medibuntu (Multimedia, Entertainment & Distractions In Ubuntu) is a repository of packages that cannot be included into the Ubuntu distribution for legal reasons (copyright, license, patent, etc).

How do I reload the partition table in Ubuntu Linux without rebooting the systems?

Billix is a multiboot Linux-based distribution for use with a USB key. It derives from distros such as Damn Small Linux, and Puppy Linux. It also enables network installation of several Linux distros via the USB key.

In the ongoing saga of What doesn't work after the upgrade? I tried to run my logo-overlay script the other day to add the Linux Journal logo to a video and, as you may have guessed, it didn't work. In this case I'd been forewarned...

x2go is an open source terminal server project offering a comprehensive "server based computing" solution. Combining the advantages of existing systems it features ease of use, performance and scalability. x2go provides you with access to your desktop as an individual as well as a corporate user - from within your own network and via the internet. x2go is not limited to any particular hardware, it supports a variety of devices and architectures. x2go is open source and open minded. The project also offers you a command line client for you to implement your own client applications and ideas. Like any open source project we welcome your support.

A utility to multiplex ssh dynamic tunnels. Frequently, for instance when proxying a torrent client through a tunnel established with ssh -D, the tunnel will be swamped by traffic. sshsplit spawns multiple instances and distributes the load among them.

Software RAM disks use the normal RAM in main memory as if it were a partition on a hard drive rather than actually accessing the data bus normally used for secondary storage such as hard disk. How do I create and store a web cache on a RAM disk to improve the speed of loading pages under Linux operating systems?

Tesseract is a quirky command-line tool that does an outstanding job

This page contains the rest of the tools. They don't fit on any specific category.

These little open source tools were coded when I needed a specific solution for a specific task so they are very minimal and focused on only one thing. They are mostly quick hacks that I put together fast, so the code is not very beautiful or optimized.

They are all released with the full source, under the GPL. If you make changes or enhace the tools I'd love to have a copy.

linuxjournal: Host Identity Protocol for Linux http://tinyurl.com/yb8lspc

linuxjournal: Tech Tip: Periodically Update Your MOTD with update-motd - This tech tip provides you with information on how to cu... http://ow.ly/169u44