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• TIP: Automating Website Backups 1 year, 3 months ago
  
  Your online abode is so difficult to keep secured. It can get hacked, you may install something wrong, a wrong configuration can wreak havoc, the server hard disk might crash, natural calamities, and what not. Your best option to secure yourself against all this is summarized in just one word “BACKUP”.
• Bash prompt basics 1 year, 3 months ago
  
  When managing a linux/unix operating system with command line, users and interacting with the system via shell. This article will explore some of the basic features of the bash shell prompt.
• Bash Sub Shells 1 year, 3 months ago
  
  When writing bash scripts you sometimes need to run commands in the background. This is easily accomplished by appending the command line to be run in the background with an ampersand "&". But what do you do if you need to run multiple commands in the background? You could put them all into a separate script file and then execute that script followed by an ampersand, or you can keep the commands in your main script and run them as a sub-shell.
• Passive Checks and NSCA (Nagios Service Check Acceptor) 1 year, 3 months ago
  
  Nagios is a very powerful platform because it is easy to extend. A great feature that Nagios offers is the ability for third-party software or other Nagios instances to report information on the status of services or hosts. This way, Nagios does not need to schedule and run checks by itself, but other applications can report information as it is available to them. This means that your applications can send problem reports directly to Nagios, instead of just logging them. In this way, your applications can benefit from powerful notification systems as well as dependency tracking. In this article we will see how this mechanism can also be used to receive failure notifications from other services or machines—for example, SNMP traps.
• fdupes - Command line tool to find and list/delete duplicate files 1 year, 4 months ago
  
  fdupes is a simple Command Line utility to find and list duplicate files in the specified directories. fdupes can also delete the found duplicate files if instructed. fdupes can follow Symlinks and can be instructed to ignore hardlinks. fdupes can also show the size of the duplicate files. fdupes is a simple and very efficient tool, easy to use.
• Bash: Redirecting Input from Multiple Files 1 year, 5 months ago
  
  Recently I needed to create a script that processed two input files. By processed I mean that the script needed to get a line from one file, then get a line from the second file, and then do something with them. Sounds easy enough, but it's not that easy unless you know about some of bash's extended redirection capabilities.
• Colourful man pages 1 year, 5 months ago
  
  Linux man pages are the most important resource for a Linux freak. By default man pages are formatted using the ‘less’ utility. ‘less’ shows the man pages in black & white, something like this :
• Bash Parameter Expansion 1 year, 5 months ago
  
  If you use bash you already know what Parameter Expansion is, although you may have used it without knowing its name. Anytime you use a dollar sign followed by a variable name you're doing what bash calls Parameter expansion, eg echo $a or a=$b. But parameter expansion has numerous other forms which allow you to expand a parameter and modify the value or substitute other values in the expansion process.
• Installing Linux apps: A few good tips 1 year, 5 months ago
  
  Under Linux, installing new applications isn't a particularly hard task, but installations do come in several different varieties, so it's worth understanding the differences and what you'll need to know to make them work.
• Change Volume From a Bash Script 1 year, 5 months ago
  
  If you use ALSA for sound on your system the functions contained in the script presented here can be used to get and set the volume on your system. You might use this if you had a monitoring script running and wanted to raise the volume when you signal an alarm and then lower it again to the previous volume.
• 36 Items To Capture For Practical Hardware Asset Tracking 1 year, 6 months ago
  
  If you are managing more than one equipment in your organization, it is very important to document and track ALL information about the servers effectively. In this article, I have listed 36 attributes that needs to be tracked for your equipments, with an explanation on why it needs to be tracked. I have also provided a spreadsheet template with these fields that will give you a jumpstart.
• Floating Point Math in Bash, Part 2 (Wait for System Load) 1 year, 7 months ago
  
  If you run scripts that require a lot of execution time it's a good idea to try to avoid letting them overload your system. You can run them via nice, but if for example your script is sending a bunch of emails your email daemon isn't running via nice and it may itself get out of control. One way to deal with this is by using the values in /proc/loadavg to pause when your system load gets too high.
• 10 Ultimate Rules for Effective System Administration 1 year, 7 months ago
  
  The following 10 items are guidelines more than rules, that I have learned over the years doing intensive work on the IT infrastructure. These guidelines are mostly common sense and can be helpful for anybody who administers an IT system, including Linux/Windows Administrator, Network Administrator and DBA.
• Network monitoring with Zenoss: A reluctant administrator's guide 1 year, 7 months ago
  
  My wife and I have been using (and collecting) computers for years. Now my household now has four physical computers, one of them dual boot. All are on a single internal local area network with five real users plus sundry administrative ones on each. Some of the computers are also running services. I also have two computers sitting in a box, which will probably be added to this mess soon, plus my wife plans to get a laptop. I now manage a network bigger than many small businesses! But I can’t afford to pay a system administrator, and the tedium of “network plumbing” is my least favorite part of computer technology. Surely, there must be a way to automate this mess? Enter Zenoss.
• 10 ways to make Linux boot faster 1 year, 7 months ago
  
  Linux rarely needs to be rebooted, but when it does, it’s often slow to boot. Fortunately, there are ways to speed things up. Some of these methods are not terribly difficult (although some, unfortunately, are).
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