Introduction When it comes to operating systems, Linux and Windows are two of the most widely used platforms. While they both serve the same fundamental purpose of managing computer resources and providing an interface for users to interact with the system, there are significant differences in how they structure and organize their file systems. In this article, we’ll explore the contrasting…
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Nixtutor takes you from an intermediate computer user to an advanced Linux user by providing full step by step guides to the most common computer problems. By using the Linux operating system you can take advantage of some of the most advanced computer technologies for free. Nixtutor will show you not only how Linux can become your primary operating system but also how you can be more productive…
I originally created a simple site monitoring Python script and posted it up to github as a “gist”: 177420 . It was then improved by Eric Wendelin who forked my original gist and made it better in this gist: 187610 . Eric had made the script much more “pythonic” and really made the code more usable and expendable which he explains in his blog post, Site monitoring with…
If you already have Dropbox you already know that it has a Public folder where you can save files for everyone to download. If you are using the GUI version of Dropbox you can even right click on the file and get a public link to hand out. Although this works great, we can automate this process and make it easier. Requirements Dropbox scrot - Screenshot utility gqview - To optionally preview the…
Create a Central Repository Create a folder on a large hard drive or raid your main computer/server For example: mkdir /meda/drobo/inhouseDropbox On the repository machine install Unison sudo apt-get install unison On the local machine connect via SSH and test that the install went ok ssh yourhostname unison -version You should see something like, “ unison version 2.27.57 ”. Create a…
What is rsync? Rysnc helps you transfer data from one location to another in an efficient manner. It is one of those tools that you learn to use and wonder how you lived without it. Rsync is the de facto standard in backup solutions because of its flexibility and power. Rsync checks each file and transfers only what has changed. What does this mean exactly? Rsync will actually look and see what in…
Here are a few tasks that you might want to consider using the command line for. 1. Resizing images Unless you are doing some sort of cropping there is no reason to load up Photoshop or the Gimp. A simple command will usually suffice for almost all your image resizing needs. convert -resize 300 image.jpg image-small.jpg If you finding yourself doing lots of image resizing during the day, this…
The Commands Here are a few example of all the ways we can shutdown and reboot on a nix machine. Power off the Machine Now sudo halt Shutdown 10 Minutes From Now sudo shutdown -h +10 'Shutting down in 5 minutes!' Reboot at 11pm sudo shutdown -r 23:00 Cancel That If you decide you don’t need to shutdown after all you can issue a cancel command like this: sudo shutdown -c Give a Shutdown…
We talked about some of the benefits of setting up an email server in Linux and how you can use python to send email . Now we are going to look at how you can send email from Perl. The Code use Net::SMTP::TLS; my $mailer = new Net::SMTP::TLS( 'smtp.gmail.com', Hello => 'smtp.gmail.com', Port => 587, User => 'username', Password=> 'password'); $mailer->mail('from@domain.com');…
Cron is the Linux task scheduler that is responsible for making sure scripts run at their specified times. Cron is often used for things like, log rotation, backup scripts, updating file indexes, and running custom scripts. In the event a task runs into problems or errors Cron generally tries to email the local administrator of the machine. This means it tries to send an email to itself instead of…
Setting up an email server on Nix machine is invaluable to keep an eye on multiple machines. Lets face it, often times Nix machines run so well that we sometimes forget to login and check on them every once and awhile. Why not make them check on their selves by scripting them to email you when they need some maintenance love? We can have our Nix boxes report: Security concerns Hardware failure…
Good system admins get to know scripting languages well and sometimes use them for all kinds of purposes, from scripts that do backups to complex automated tasks. Often times it would be nice to get an email notification when the script finished or completed OK. Cron does a good job of sending emails when scripts run into errors or problems, but sometimes it is necessary to get custom email…
Sometimes we want to enable our servers/desktops to be able to send email without setting up a full featured mail server or configuring postfix to route through Gmail . sSmtp is an extremely simple, resource conserving, SMTP server that will allow your desktop or server to send email. In this article we are going to use sSMTP to send outgoing email through Gmail. Install sSMTP Debian/Ubuntu users…
You might prefer to have a clean system on reinstall but sometimes it is nice to reinstall applications from a previous machine/setup. Keeping a backup list of packages will make this a snap. Just give your package manager a list of all the packages you want it to install and let it rip. Here are the backup and restore methods for each of the major distros/package managers. Debian / Ubuntu Backup…