tips

biosdecode is a command line utility to parses the BIOS memory and prints information about all structures (or entry points) it knows of. The DMI table doesn’t only describe what the system is currently made of, it also can report the possible evolutions such as the fastest supported CPU or the maximal amount of memory supported. In this tip you will learn about decoding BIOS data (dumping a computer’s DMI ) and getting all information about computer hardware without rebooting the server.

FTP is insecure protocol, but file-transfer is required all time. You can use OpenSSH Server to transfer file using SCP and SFTP (secure ftp) without setting up an FTP server. However, this feature also grants ssh shell access to a user.

In this article series we will help you provide secure restricted file-transfer services to your users without resorting to FTP. It also covers chroot jail setup instructions to lock down users to their own home directories (allow users to transfer files but not browse the entire Linux / UNIX file system of the server) as well as per user configurations.

Adobe Acrobat is a commercial tool for manipulating PDF files. Earlier I was using CUPs - printing system, to export PDF files. I’ve also tried out gv for the same purpose. However, I needed complete editing of pdf documents. My search ended with PDFedit software, which is free and open source editor for manipulating PDF documents. The software available in both GUI and CLI (commandline) interface.

Your Debian / Ubuntu Linux box security depends upon access to system services (one of many aspects). For example, you may need to provide a web server (Apache service) to serve web pages. However, if you do not need use a service, you should always turn off all unused services to avoid exploits.

Traditionally, Debian provided various tools to manage services. There are various methods for managing access to system services:
a) /etc/init.d/service
b) rcconf
c) update-rc.d etc

Under Red hat and Centos Linux you can use chkconfig command (ntsysv command) to configure Sys V style init script links. There is also service command to stop / start / restart services.

Internet SCSI (iSCSI) is a network protocol that allows you to use of the SCSI protocol over TCP/IP networks. It is good alternative to Fibre Channel-based SANs. You can easily manage, mount and format iSCSI Volume under Linux. It allows access to SAN storage over Ethernet. Open-iSCSI project is a high-performance, transport independent, multi-platform implementation of iSCSI. Open-iSCSI is partitioned into user and kernel parts.

The problem of cooling the computer is not new. The more powerful and faster computers become, the "hotter" they get. Coolers inside computer cases, video card and power supply units are quite common nowadays. However, hard disk has no additional means to cool them. Most hard disk manufacture recommends 35-40°C working temperature for a hard drive. Once it crossed the limit safety of your data and hard disk becomes critical. Computer hard drive is the main storage media for your data.

This article explains how to monitor hard disk temperature and prevent the loss of data under Linux using automated scripts.

Sometime by mistakes all file permissions get changed and you need to restore file permission. For example a shell script or some sort of corruption could change the permissions for packages (installed files), it may be necessary to reset them.

For example a long time ago my shell script run chmod and chown commands on /usr and changed the permission. Luckily rpm command can reset package permission. Sun Solaris pkg command and IBM can also reset permissions.

Most of us work with a shell prompt. By default most Linux distro displays hostname and current working directory as a prompt. You can easily customize your prompt to display information important to you. You change look and feel by adding colors. In this small howto I will explain howto setup:

a] Howto customizing a bash shell to get a good looking prompt
b] Configure the appearance of the terminal.
c] Apply themes using bashish
d] Howto pimp out your shell prompt

It is possible to mount your remote filesystem as a local filesystem on your Red hat/CentOS Linux system using sshfs.

FUSE is a Linux kernel module also available for FreeBSD, OpenSolaris and Mac OS X that allows non-privileged users to create their own file systems without the need to write any kernel code.
SSHFS command utilizes FUSE to mount a file system using ssh.

This tutorial will describe installing FUSE, and using sshfs to mount your remote filesystem as a local mount point on your Linux system.

AcetoneISO is the disk image emulator that mounts images of DVD and CD media. Both Mac OS X and Linux / other UNIX like oses can mount and use ISO images using loopback device. It is a DAEMON Tools (Microsoft Windows disk image) clone / emulator program with a lot more features.

Using this cool open source software means a user does not have to swap discs to run different programs on local or network computer. You can access software distributed (over Internet) as a disk image such as ISO, DAA, BIN or many other formats (no need to burn a CD/DVD to use disk image).