Joe Brockmeier

Last week, I looked a couple of lesser-known features for working with Debian packages, using dpkg, apt-file and aptitude. This week, I want to look at a

Many system administrators make a practice of using GNU Screen or tmux to manage jobs running in the terminal. If you have a long-running job that you

Whether you're in a small shop or larger IT environment, issue tracking is a critical component of system administration. Still looking for the right

If your system has been rooted, you can't trust utilities like ps to show processes from the rootkit. For ferreting out nasties, you'll want to check out

The tail utility is one of the most useful tools an admin has -- but it's also a bit limited and dated. For watching two or more logs at once, and much

In the age of Firesheep and other network nastiness, you must be careful how you connect to remote networks. Setting up or connecting to VPNs can be a

Gist, a Pastebin-type service from Github, is really useful and powerful for folks who like to collaborate using git. Vim users can "kick it up a notch,"

Last week I introduced tmux, a handy "terminal multiplexer." This week, we'll take a look at basic tmux usage and configuration. If you need to manage

Want a quick and easy way to write to system logs? Check out logger, a shell utility that works with syslog. Want a quick and easy way to write to system

Last week, I covered OfflineIMAP to sync IMAP for use with Mutt or other applications. Continuing with that theme, I want to talk about another tool I use

Coming up with good passwords is never easy. One of my favorite tools for creating secure passwords is Password Generator, also known as pwgen, a utility

Last week's column introduced Linux Control Groups (or cgroups), a feature initially developed to limit resource usage in the Linux kernel. But it can do