Set Up a VNC Linux Server in 5 Easy Steps
[March 1, 2010] Tip of the Trade: VNC makes it easy to log into a full desktop on a remote server. Follow these steps, and your Debian Linux server will be up and running in no time.

Making Linux Server Directories More Readable, Add to Perl's @INC Array
[February 22, 2010] Tip of the Trade: Anyone who has encountered the Perl @INC array in the context of a 'cannot find module' error knows the value of being able to see a list of directories on you Linux server. Here's how to access @INC and find obscurely located modules before they are lost.

Meta on a Mac Delivers Efficiency Boost
[February 16, 2010] Tip of the Trade: Tired of stretching your fingers to hit the ESC key on your Mac? There's a simple way to fix that.

Tweaking Linux Library Settings Within Readline
[February 8, 2010] Tip of the Trade: Readline is the library that handles Linux command-line input as well as input for applications. Most of the default settings work perfectly well, but some change the way tab-completion behaves and thus require modification.

Resolving the /etc/hosts localhost Issue in Apache
[February 1, 2010] Tip of the Trade: The default values in /etc/hosts used in several Linux distributions have long been known to cause issues. Here's how to fix them in Apache 2.

Shell Scripts and Here Documents
[January 25, 2010] Tip of the Trade: A here document, or heredoc, is one way to get text input into a script without feeding it from a separate file. If the data or script is complicated, however, keeping the two separate is generally a better idea.

Monitoring Disk Usage With Iotop
[January 19, 2010] Tip of the Trade: Hard disk thrashing? Check out Iotop, a Python program similar to top that enables you to keep an eye on disk I/O.

SpamAssassin's Y2K10 -- Whoops, We Did It Again
[January 4, 2010] Mail server admins are quietly living out a past that never happened: A rule in SpamAssassin intended to stop spam dated outrageously in the future is snaring anything with a 2010 date.

6 Really Cool Linux Stocking Stuffers
[December 28, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Feeling like the only one stuck in the office this week? Here are some Linux command-line 'Christmas' Eggs to help you while away the hours.

'Tis the Season: The Perl Advent Calendar
[December 21, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Less chocolatey, but more useful. Since 2000, the Perl Advent Calendar has been providing a useful Perl module each day from December 1 through Christmas Eve.

Perl and the Flip-Flop Operator
[December 14, 2009] Tip of the Trade: The flip-flop operator in Perl is quite useful for comparing arguments, but it does have some surprising quirks.

More Special Variables in Perl: Outputs
[December 7, 2009] Last week we looked at special Perl variables for reading things in; this week we look at the other side -- variables that are useful when you want to write things out.

Dealing With Records in Perl
[November 30, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Perl is a great tool for reading in information from a file. Several useful special variables can be used to neaten up code or alter the default behavior when reading in records.

Dealing With Strange Filenames
[November 23, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Have typos in your email file names. Hey, it happens to the best of us! Normally, it's an easy fix, but if you have a file with a name starting -, it's not so easy. To fix this, you need an escape sequence for rm itself, not the shell.

Laptop Backups With anacron
[November 16, 2009] Not every scheduled task can take place on an always-on machine. For those we have anacron. With anacron, like cron, you schedule a job to run at specific intervals. Unlike cron, when the computer is switched on the anacron daemon checks whether a task should have run and if one was, it runs it.

Dealing With Mail in Mutt
[November 9, 2009] Tip of the Trade: The command-line mail client mutt may be old school, but it features a wide range of keyboard commands that can be used for various useful tasks.

Saving ssh Keys on Mac OS X Leopard
[November 2, 2009] Tip of the Trade: ssh-agent makes it possible to avoid having to type in a passphrase for each login. Helpfully, since the Leopard release on Mac OS X this functionality is built straight in.

Automatic Indenting With Vim
[October 26, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Indentation may seem an insignificant step when coding, but Vim makes it automatic with its indent option, indentexpr. This powerful yet flexible tool indents based on expression.

Forwarding a Postfix Virtual Alias to /dev/null
[October 19, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Sometimes you want to use a "do-not-reply" type of email address and you don't want to have to mass-delete the mailbox at intervals. Here's an easy way to add a Postfix virtual alias to /dev/null.

Matching Newlines in Vim
[October 12, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Want vim to share newlines? You're only two characters away.

Linux Google Chrome Shines
[October 5, 2009] Tip of the Trade: When it comes to Linux, Google Chrome may be far from gold, but it sure is shiny -- and fast.

Graphical Disk Usage With Baobab
[September 28, 2009] Tip of the Trade: If df and du are getting you down, consider Baobab. This graphical alternative, installed by default in most Gnome-based Linux distros, gives you a clear picture of your disk usage.

Topics for Mailman
[September 21, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Juliet Kemp discovers and explores Topics in the mailing list server, Mailman. With Topics, subscribing to a list becomes more than an all or nothing proposition.

The Many Uses of Screen
[September 14, 2009] Tip of the Trade: There's much to love about Screen. Besides enabling cutting and pasting, the utility can be used to monitor a window for output, mirror another session, lock the screen and more.

Cut and Paste With Screen
[September 8, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Mouse-clicks may be synonymous with cut-and-paste, but in a non-graphical environment, they won't help you. Enter Screen, which among its many useful tricks, enables non-graphical cut-and-paste.

Why Cron Is Better Than a String Around Your Finger
[August 31, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Mailing reminders to yourself is an easy way to remember something that easily slips your mind. Using Cron with mail is one way to facilitate this.

Top 3 Non-graphical Browser Options
[August 24, 2009] Sometimes you need Web access but don’t want a graphical browser. Here are three programs, some of which you probably already have, to get you started.

[e|c]tags With Emacs and Vim
[August 17, 2009] Tip of the Trade: With exuberant-ctags you can take advantage of any IDE's source code navigation features -- without ever leaving the comfort zone of Emacs or Vim.

Run Multiple Debian Versions Simultaneously
[August 10, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Meet apt -- the best-kept secret for keeping up with the Debian release cycle.

Bash, in Color
[August 3, 2009] Tip of the Trade: A little color on the command line makes things easier to read.

Mutt on the Android G1
[July 27, 2009] Tip of the Trade: An adapted version of ConnectBot makes it easier to access email on your mobile devices using Mutt and SSH.

Tail More Than One File at a Time
[July 20, 2009] Tip of the Trade: MultiTail makes it possible to watch two files simultaneously in real-time.

System Monitoring With Atop
[July 13, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Atop makes it easy to keep on top of system monitoring. This useful tool displays system load information alongside process information in a style similar to top.

Useful Tricks With Screen
[July 6, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Screen brings multiple console screens to the same window, enabling several tasks to be performed simultaneously and simplifying troubleshooting.

xclip: Command-Line Clipboard
[June 29, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Think command line precludes using the X clipboard? Think again. xclip makes it possible to interact with it directly from the command-line -- if you're using Debian or Ubuntu.

Make It Snappy With Vim
[June 22, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Learn how to set your own abbreviations and mappings in the ever-useful Vim.

Unicode Characters in Vim
[June 15, 2009] Tip of the Trade: The editor Vim supports unicode natively. There are three ways to take advantage of unicode's capabilities via Vim. The one that's best for you will depend on your setup and needs.

SSH From Your Mobile Device
[June 8, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Today's mobile phones and PDAs deliver sophisticated data and internet connectivity, making it easy to keep an eye on your servers while you're out and about.

Recovering Deleted Files With lsof
[June 1, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Accidentally deleted files are easily recovered with lsof.

The Various bash Prompts
[May 26, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Most likely, you already have a personalized setting for PS1, the default bash interaction prompt. Here's what to do with PS2, PS3 and PS4.

Disk Encryption With TrueCrypt
[May 18, 2009] Tip of the Trade: TrueCrypt, open source disk encryption software for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, makes it easy to tighten security. Among its many useful features is the ability to create a hidden encrypted volume inside a standard encrypted one.

Protecting Your Root Password
[May 11, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Last week's tip showed how to get into a system when you don't have the root password. Helpful, but not always a good thing. This week, we look at the flipside: password-protecting all GRUB entries.

Rescuing a Lost Root Password
[May 4, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Ever take over a machine for which the root password has been lost? Here are three possible ways to get the information you need to be up and running.

lsof, sockets and trojans
[April 27, 2009] Tip of the Trade: lsof is a handy way to check for security problems or keep an eye on how your machines are interacting with the wider internet.

E-mail Encryption With GPG and Thunderbird
[April 20, 2009] Tip of the Trade: When it comes to encryption use cases, e-mail is a slam dunk. The downside of its criticality, however, is the expectation that it "just work." iEnigmail offers a usable GnuPG plugin to Thunderbird that makes this possible.

Upgrading Multiple Machines With approx
[April 13, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Multiple Debian machines to administer? approx can help you get them updated and upgraded more quickly, and it uses less bandwidth.

lsof Seeks All Open Files
[April 6, 2009] Tip of the Trade: From pipes to directories to sockets, lsof is able to locate all open files.

fuser, files, and processes
[March 30, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Because sometimes you need to know which process is accessing a particular file or filesystem.

Files and Attributes: chattr
[March 23, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Don't just talk about it. Change some of the attributes of files in ext2 and ext3 Linux filesystems with chattr.

Command-Line-Fu, Because Knowledge is Power
[March 16, 2009] Tip of the Trade: This social networking site makes broadening your command-line knowledge fun and easy.

Remote Desktop With GDM
[March 9, 2009] Tip of the Trade: With GDM, the standard Gnome display manager, setting up a remote desktop is a snap.

Debian's proposed-updates Feature
[March 2, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Debian Lenny hit the streets last week. Although the proposed-updates feature is hardly new, it is hardly known. This hidden gem is the mechanism used to prepare point releases for "stable" (lenny) and "oldstable" (etch).

Host Completion in bash
[February 23, 2009] Tip of the Trade: One way to get the most out of bash's programmable parameter completion is to set up hostname completion. Here's how to code it yourself.

More Fun With SSH
[February 17, 2009] Tip of the Trade: SSH can set a host of settings on either a global or per-host basis. Check out these especially useful ones.

Keeping Your ssh Connection Alive
[February 9, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Ignore your SSH connection to another machine for too long and it will drop. The SSH config option, ServerAliveInterval, remedies this for those times when you really want to maintain the link.

3 Apache/httpd Command-Line Options
[February 2, 2009] Tip of the Trade: httpd can do more than just stop, start and reload Apache. With these command-line options, you can manipulate your configuration without tinkering with httpd.conf.

Reading Compressed Files With less
[January 26, 2009] Tip of the Trade: Sometimes, less really is more. In the case of the app less, it is also the better-featured version of its bigger sibling, more.

tune2fs Makes It Easy to Play With Filesystems
[January 20, 2009] Tip of the Trade: With the tune2fs command you can set assorted filesystem parameters on a mounted ext2 or ext3 filesystem.

LDAP and Kerberos, So Happy Together
[January 12, 2009] Tip of the Trade: LDAP organizes information and provides access to it. Kerberos is designed to handle authentication. Separate they are useful; together they offer a powerful and secure solution.

Things to Do With 'kill'
[January 5, 2009] Tip of the Trade: 'kill' doesn't just kill processes dead, it also can send processes a variety of other signals.

Windows to Unix With PuTTY and Xming
[December 29, 2008] Tip of the Trade: Combine the Win SSH client PuTTY with the Win server Xming and you have an easy way to log in from a Windows box to a Unix box to run an X session remotely.

Wiping Disks With DBAN
[December 22, 2008] Tip of the Trade: Deleting old data isn't enough, you need to make it irretrievable. DBAN is a downloadable and self-contained boot disk that wipes disks -- fully and securely.

Using UUID to Deal With Disks
[December 15, 2008] Tip of the Trade: UUID notation is one way to access your disks when using Linux. But first you must find the identifier.

Magic Tricks With the Sysreq Key
[December 8, 2008] Tip of the Trade: Remember the Sysreq key? It's in the same spot it's always been. Get reacquainted with it, and rediscover all the useful things it can do.

A Recovery Plan for a Superbad Superblock
[November 24, 2008] Tip of the Trade: Learn how to recover your filesystem after a "bad superblock" error.

Further Notes on proc
[November 17, 2008] Tip of the Trade: Learn more about proc, how it works and how to get the most out of it.

Proc and Processes
[November 10, 2008] Tip of the Trade: The /proc directory provides a text-based way of interfacing with system settings and processes. Sure, it looks complicated at first glance, but it is incredibly helpful when troubleshooting.

Synch Up With Rsync for Quick-Restore Backup
[November 3, 2008] Offsite backup and historical backup have their place, and their limitations. When it comes to rapid access to backed-up data in the event of a major disk crash, an instant slot-in replacement is needed, and rsync is well set for the task.

Memopal Online Backup
[October 27, 2008] Tip of the Trade: Memopal recently released a Linux version of its online backup service. Should you take it out for a spin?

ssh-xfer for Transferring Files
[October 20, 2008] When it comes to file transfers, ssh-xfer brings together the best of the useful ssh and the ever-capable scp.

Bash Command Line Shortcuts
[October 13, 2008] Tip of the Trade: Bash has a wide array of available command line keyboard shortcuts. Here are some to post near your monitor.

LDAP Master Server Problems
[October 6, 2008] Tip of the Trade: Finding and fixing master server issues isn't always easy, especially when the slave servers seem to be working fine. With careful searching, ldapsearch handily resolves issues.

Make Perl Scripts More Readable With perltidy
[September 29, 2008] Tip of the Trade: Even if it's not your own, messy code is a fact of life for every programmer. Clean up messes with perltidy, an app generated from the Perl module Perl::Tidy.

Monitoring Network Traffic With IPTraf
[September 22, 2008] Tip of the Trade: Check out the traffic passing through your machine with this useful and easy-to-use ncurses-based app.

Setting Password Policy With PAM
[September 15, 2008] Tip of the Trade: Establishing a good password policy from the start is just as critical to security as testing the strength of passwords already in use. The PAM module pam_cracklib can enforce both length and complexity.

Cracking Passwords
[September 8, 2008] Tip of the Trade: Find password weaknesses before it's too late. john-the-ripper offers three cracking modes to evaluate passwords.

Aliases and Variables Keep Things Short and Simple
[September 2, 2008] Tip of the Trade: To save on keystrokes, set up aliases that take command line variables as an argument.

rsnapshot: rsync-Based Filesystem Snapshot
[August 25, 2008] Tip of the Trade: Snapshot filesystems may be great, but migrating to a new filesystem is a major deal. If you're not up for it, rsnapshot makes achieving snapshot-like functionality a snap.

Tip of the Trade: Nagios Plugins
[August 18, 2008] Nagios is set up to use plugins to do the actual work of checking services. From cron-apt to check_jabber and more, here are some to get you started.

Tip of the Trade: ps Options
[August 11, 2008] Look beyond the basics of ps, and you'll find a wide array of options for managing system processes.

Tip of the Trade: Dragonfly BSD and the Hammer Filesystem
[August 4, 2008] Got clusters? Need a filesystem? If you're running Dragonfly BSD, consider Hammer. It may be a few months shy of a gold stamp, but its usability makes it worth checking out.

Tip of the Trade: Clusters with Condor
[July 28, 2008] Condor makes clustering and distributed computing possible for budget-conscious enterprises.

Tip of the Trade: Fruity Nagios
[July 21, 2008] Fruity, a PHP-based HTTP configuration front-end, helps Nagios taste better.

Tip of the Trade: QEMU
[July 14, 2008] Hungry for an open source virtualizer that is a full-meal deal? Consider tasting QEMU.

Tip of the Trade: Ext4
[July 7, 2008] Linux's Ext4 is almost ready. Take this new filesystem out for a test drive and see what its new feature sets offer.

Tip of the Trade: Linux Easter Egg Fun
[June 30, 2008] All work and no play is dull, so let's have some summer fun with apt, cowsay and more.

Tip of the Trade: Phoronix Test Suite
[June 23, 2008] Need to run some Linux benchmarks? The Phoronix Test Suite eliminates the need to search out benchmarking utilities. The comprehensive and easy-to-use test suite is designed to be both customizable and extensible.

Tip of the Trade: Assign Multiple Addresses to a Network Interface
[June 16, 2008] Still using ifconfig and route commands? Today's network environments require functionality beyond their capabilities. Consider using the ip command, which is part of the iproute2 suite of TCP/IP networking utilities, and is trying to muscle in.

Tip of the Trade: OpenSolaris liveCD
[June 9, 2008] Want to test drive OpenSolaris but don't want to deal with the convoluted installation? OpenSolaris liveCD from the OpenSolaris team streamlines the process and brings a raft of add-ons from the GNU/Linux world.

Tip of the Trade: Squid
[June 2, 2008] Visitors to your Web site don't care about exotic database backends or fancy scripting tricks. They just don't want to die of old age waiting for your pages to load. Turbocharge your Web servers (and eliminate this issue) with Squid.

Tip of the Trade: Specto
[May 27, 2008] This excellent little Python script can monitor changes throughout the network and report back on all manner of events. And you probably already have it -- Specto is included in most Linux distributions, including Fedora and Debian.

Tip of the Trade: Web Console
[May 19, 2008] Need universal server administration? Forget Webmin. Web Console is a fast, light-weight AJAX-based interface that facilitates execution of desired commands.

Tip of the Trade: Gibraltar Security Gateway
[May 12, 2008] Gibraltar Security Gateway offers solid-as-a-rock security at several price points. The code for the open source solution is available as a free download and as a free-for-personal-use edition for up to five network devices.

Tip of the Trade: Siproxd
[May 5, 2008] Escort SIP traffic through NAT with open source Siproxd.

Tip of the Trade: Vyatta
[April 28, 2008] Looking to save on networking costs? XORP-based Vyatta makes it possible to replace expensive gear with commodity hardware at a fraction of the cost.

Tip of the Trade: Cryptmount
[April 21, 2008] Need strong file encryption for underprivileged users? Cryptmount puts a friendly face on the technology.

Tip of the Trade: Grsecurity
[April 14, 2008] The venerable Grsecurity is one option for closing Linux security holes.

Tip of the Trade: lm-sensors
[April 7, 2008] lm-sensors make it easy to monitor computer temperatures, no matter how little you paid for your hardware.

Tip of the Trade: psad
[March 31, 2008] Turbo-charge your intrusion detection with psad, the port scan attack detector.

Tip of the Trade: SATA Storage Servers
[March 24, 2008] SCSI drives may be the toughest and most reliable, but oftentimes SATA drives are equally good. From price point to form factor and feature options, they offer a plethora of advantages.

Tip of the Trade: ZFS on Leopard
[March 17, 2008] Coming soon to a Mac near you -- the power of ZFS for Mac OS X Leopard is now in beta.

Tip of the Trade: GRUB2
[March 10, 2008] With GRUB2, the venerable GRand Unified Bootloader for Linux and Unix has finally entered the new millennium.

Tip of the Trade: IP Address Management
[March 3, 2008] IP Address Management has historically been restricted to Windows shops and organizations willing to pay in the five-figure range for the integrated network discovery tool. This is changing, now that three recent prefab open source IPAM apps have hit the market.

Tip of the Trade: OpenSSH Speed Tips and Tricks
[February 25, 2008] Using public key authentication is a great way to make SSH transfers more secure. Transferring SSH identity keys can be a royal pain, however. Fortunately, ssh-copy-id, a slick utility included with OpenSSH, simplifies the process.

Tip of the Trade: Smartmontools
[February 11, 2008] Got S.M.A.R.T. drives? Consider adding smartmontools to test and monitor drive health as well as issue early warnings of possible failures.

Tip of the Trade: VirtualBox
[February 4, 2008] VirtualBox could easily be dubbed, 'the best virtualization program you've never heard of.' Its polish and ease-of-use set it apart from other free-of-cost, x86-based solution virtualizers.

Tip of the Trade: SplashTop
[January 28, 2008] Tired of twiddling your thumbs after your computer boots up? With Splashtop, you can be up and running in as little as five seconds.

Tip of the Trade: IPv6 and Wise DNS Configuration
[January 22, 2008] In two weeks, DNS servers will support IPv6 hosts connecting directly across the Internet without an IPv4 infrastructure buffer. What does this mean for you, and what steps can you take to ensure reliable DNS performance?

Tip of the Trade: m0n0wall
[January 14, 2008] Packet filtering need not be complicated. For both power and ease of use, consider a BSD-based packet filer, like ipfilter. When coupled with m0n0wall, a specialized implementation of FreeBSD + ipfilter designed for routers and firewalls, it is even easier to use.

Tip of the Trade: Cobbler
[January 7, 2008] When Kickstart isn't enough to get your network going, consider cobbling together a network installation solution with the universal boot server, Cobbler.

Tip of the Trade: ZFone
[December 31, 2007] Advanced encryption has come to VoIP, with ZFone stopping sniffers in their tracks.

Tip of the Trade: Fine-Tuning SpamAssassin
[December 26, 2007] SpamAssassin is a vital tool for keeping spam at bay. Its effectiveness decreases over time, however, as spammers figure out ways to elude its rules. The solution? sa-update, which lets you download (and tweak) updated rules without waiting for a SpamAssassin upgrade.

Tip of the Trade: Linux Firewall Builder Roundup
[December 17, 2007] Need to get a firewall up stat and don't have time to learn the ins and outs of iptables? Firewall Builder, Firestarter and Shorewall are three excellent firewall-building tools to get you started.

Tip of the Trade: E-mail Encryption
[December 10, 2007] PGP and GPG ensure e-mail stays between the sender and its intended recipient.

Tip of the Trade: Solaris BrandZ
[December 4, 2007] If you're looking for an easy way to run Linux applications on Solaris and aren't ready to go whole hog with virtualization, consider Solaris BrandZ. The flexible framework lets you play host to unmodified non-native userspace application binaries.

Tip of the Trade: Cryptsetup
[November 26, 2007] Cryptsetup is an easy and secure Linux disk encryption utility. It runs at the block device level, which makes it possible to mix encrypted and unencrypted partitions on the same drive.

Tip of the Trade: AppArmor
[November 19, 2007] SELinux has long reigned as the unchallenged champion of super-secure Linux systems. The emergence of AppArmor is changing this, as it simplifies the permissions management process.

Tip of the Trade: FileBench
[November 12, 2007] Push Solaris filesystem testing to the limit with FileBench, a comprehensive and customizable framework that measures and compares file system performance.

Tip of the Trade: Xserve
[November 6, 2007] With its stability, power and security, Apple's Xserve serves up a real treat.

Tip of the Trade: Ubuntu's Prefab Server Stacks
[October 29, 2007] Ubuntu streamlines the server install process by offering a prebuilt server stack. With the latest version, a click of a mouse leads to a complete setup for whichever servers you want, including, DNS, mail server, PostgreSQL and OpenSSH.

Tip of the Trade: Project Indiana
[October 23, 2007] For years, package management solutions have been a valuable tool for Linux and FreeBSD users. When Project Indiana goes live next spring, Solaris, too, will offer this functionality.

Tip of the Trade: Fixing Filename Encodings
[October 15, 2007] Unicode is the accepted computer language standard, but inconsistencies and messes remain. To help with the cleanup, Linux and Unix users can use convmv, for converting the encodings of filenames, and iconv, for converting the contents of files.

Tip of the Trade: Hardware Discovery From Outside
[October 8, 2007] With lshw, Linux admins can find out what's under the hood -- without actually going under the hood. The "List hardware" command spits out a lot of information, including model numbers, motherboard features, chipsets, memory and drives.

Tip of the Trade: SELinux
[October 1, 2007] SELinux makes it easy to prevent privilege escalation, and it's not as difficult to use as you probably think.

Tip of the Trade: Nepenthes Honeypots
[September 24, 2007] What's sweeter than finding out how secure your servers really are before hackers get to them? With a simple and easily set up honeypot from Nepenthes, much useful data is trapped with little effort.

Tip of the Trade: eGroupWare
[September 17, 2007] For an open source powerhouse Web-based messaging suite, look no further than eGroupWare. The groupware suite's feature set includes shared contacts, calendaring, e-mail, a tracker application, Gallery and InfoLog.

Tip of the Trade: PC-BSD
[September 10, 2007] If you're considering running FreeBSD on your servers, or just want to familiarize yourself with a new operating system, PC-BSD is an easy and pain-free way to do so.

Tip of the Trade: Linux-Based E-mail Scanners
[September 4, 2007] If you're in the market for an e-mail scanner, consider MailScanner or ClamAV. Together, they offer stout protection against viruses, spam, phishes and all manner of e-mail-borne malware.

Tip of the Trade: cURL
[August 27, 2007] The "client for URLs," or cURL utility, is a deceptively simple download and copying utility that recognizes a host of transfer protocols. Its capabilities expand with the user's familiarity.

Tip of the Trade: Kismet
[August 20, 2007] Wireless discovery and monitoring can be complex and time consuming. Kismet makes rooting out rogue wireless access points a cinch.

Tip of the Trade: SystemImager
[August 13, 2007] SystemImager makes it easy to send the clones in to all Linux systems.

Tip of the Trade: Strong Passwords Made Easy
[August 6, 2007] Add Linux users to your network more securely with a series of simple scripts. A script in pwgen generates a random 8-character password that can use openssl to create an MD5 hash, which the useradd command then uses to enter the new hashed password into /etc/shadow.

Tip of the Trade: Darkstat
[July 23, 2007] Darkstat is a lightweight network traffic grapher run from a router that collects traffic statistics, exports them to HTML pages and serves up the pages on its own mini-HTTP server.

Tip of the Trade: Saving on Power and Cooling
[July 9, 2007] Energy conservation can be as simple as shutting off servers at the end of the day or using efficiency ratings on power supplies to guide purchases. To get started, the Kill-A-Watt cumulative kilowatt-hour monitor is a quick and inexpensive way to measure how much energy you're saving or consuming.

Tip of the Trade: Managed Switches
[June 25, 2007] Now that managed switches are no longer a big-ticket item, it's worth giving them a second look.

Tip of the Trade: Avoid Getting Fried on Cheap Power Supplies
[June 18, 2007] Power supplies are one area where going cheap doesn't pay. Inferior power supplies can cause slowdowns, lockups, crashes and worse. The right product is one way to ensure systems remain healthy and stable.

Tip of the Trade: Edubuntu
[June 11, 2007] While it's targeted at the classroom, Edubuntu is a dandy Linux terminal server for all occasions.

Tip of the Trade: Voyage Linux
[May 29, 2007] If you're looking for a tiny yet easily customized Linux, consider Voyage Linux for its big power in a little package.

Tip of the Trade: Osiris Network Integrity Monitor
[May 22, 2007] In the market for a network-capable integrity monitor? Osiris offers easy manageability through its three primary components, a management console, a scan agent and a CLI management application.

Tip of the Trade: Conserver
[May 8, 2007] If your Ethernet quits working on a headless server or you want to fix a server problem with minimal disruption, a console server may be just the ticket. Conserver is a serial console that includes SSL encryption, multiuser capabilities, access controls and remote logging.

Tip of the Trade: Zenoss
[May 1, 2007] In the jungle of network monitoring, the Zope-based network manager Zenoss delivers excellent (and free) navigation.