unix

Linux comes with many serial text and gui based serial communication programs. My favorite is minicom - friendly menu driven serial communication program. If you are addicted to DOS / Windows TELIX (a telecommunications program originally written for DOS and was released in 1986), minicom is for you under Linux / UNIX. Let us see how to configure minicom for my Soekris net4801 Single Board Computer / embedded Linux device.

One of my responsibilities is backing up UNIX server. HP-UX offers various commands just like any other UNIX system to backup file system, data and applications. How do I backup data under HP-UX UNIX? How do I use mt, fbackup and frecover commands to perform full and incremental backups?

Pound is a reverse-proxy load balancing server. It accepts requests from HTTP / HTTPS clients and distributes them to one or more Web servers. The HTTPS requests are decrypted and passed to the back-ends as plain HTTP. It will act as:

a) Server load balancer
b) Reverse proxy server
c) Apache reverse proxy etc
d) It can detects when a backend server fails or recovers, and bases its load balancing decisions on this information: if a backend server fails, it will not receive requests until it recovers
e) It can decrypts https requests to http ones
f) Rejects incorrect requests
h) It can

netcat utility (nc command) considered as TCP/IP swiss army knife. It reads and writes data across network connections, using TCP or UDP protocol. It is designed to be a reliable “back-end” tool that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool, since it can create almost any kind of connection you would need and has several interesting built-in capabilities.

This howto explain migrating data between two server hard drives using netcat over a network. It is very easy to copy complete dr

smartctl command controls the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) system built into many ATA-3 and later ATA, IDE and SCSI-3 hard drives. The purpose of SMART is to monitor the reliability of the hard drive and predict drive failures, and to carry out different types of drive self-tests.

smartctl is a command line utility designed to perform SMART tasks such as printing the SMART self-test and error logs, enabling and disabling SMART automatic testing, and initiating device self-tests.

This article demonstrates usage of smartctl tool to test if hard disk is going bad.

With this tip you will be able to work from home using VPN and that too from Linux / FreeBSD system for the proprietary Microsoft Point-to-Point vpn server.

Different organization uses different VPN connection options such as SSL, PPTP or IPSEC. When you need to access corporate network and its services, you need to login using VPN.

The Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) is a method for implementing virtual private networks. It works on Data link layer (#2 layer) on TCP/IP model. Personally I prefer IPSEC. PPTP Client is a Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD client for the proprietary Microsoft Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol, PPTP. Allows connection to a PPTP based Virtual Private Network (VPN) as used by employers and some cable and ADSL internet service providers.

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

MySQL database does support C program API just like PHP or Perl API.

The C API code is distributed with MySQL. It is included in the mysqlclient library and allows C programs to access a database.

Many of the clients in the MySQL source distribution are written in C. If you are looking for examples that demonstrate how to use the C API, take a look at these clients. You can find these in the clients directory in the MySQL source distribution.

This tutorial provides a sample MySQL C program and step by step compilation instructions to kick start MySQL programming via C API.

If you're serious about music or DVDs, at some point you cross the threshold of having more than you can keep track of easily. The box full of index cards has served its purpose; it's time to move on to storing information about your CDs and DVDs in a database.

This might seem like more of a pain than you can stand. What's the point of doing a database when you can just type it all into a spreadsheet, for instance? Well, a spreadsheet is a good start but with a database you get a lot more features, including easily printing custom labels for all those legal backups you’ve made. You could also print out a record of all your movies or music, if you keep notes on them such as summaries, who you’ve loaned them to, and anything else you track.

Technology has changed dramatically in the last decade. OpenSSH is one the best project. It allows you to control remote Linux / UNIX server using command line or GUI tools.

Do you miss GUI configuration server management tools such as Debian network-admin or Redhat/Cent os system-config-* tools/utilities while administrating a Linux server? Do you want to run GUI admin tools on a remote Linux server and get display on local desktop or laptop X server system?

This quick howto demonstrate the power of X11 forwarding using OpenSSH.