Juliet Kemp

You can do more with httpd than just stop/start/reload Apache. Here are some command-line options that enable you to manipulate your configuration without changing httpd.conf. 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. NB: Some […]

less, the better-featured version of more, which among other things allows you to move backward through its output, is great for paging through text files. But it won’t automatically deal with compressed text files. This can be a nuisance, particularly when many of the files in /usr/share/doc are gzipped. Tip of the Trade: Sometimes, less […]

You may have had the experience of having your SSH connection to another machine drop if you ignore it for too long. Which can be irritating, especially if it’s (say) your e-mail. Tip of the Trade: Ignore your SSH connection to another machine for too long and it will drop. The SSH config option, ServerAliveInterval, […]

Hitting tab to complete commands and filenames is great. Extending this to hostnames is even better. (Does it show that I’m very lazy?) One way of doing this is to switch to the zsh shell, which does this and a bunch of other stuff by default. Happily, though, if you’d rather stick with bash, all […]

Last week’s Tip of the Trade looked at how to stop your SSH session from dropping out, using the .ssh/config file. This file can also set many other settings, either globally or on a per-host basis. Note that SSH uses the first option it encounters, so per-host options should go before global options in the […]

As you’re doubtless aware, Debian Lenny was released last week, which is good and exciting news! There’s a stack of improvements and software updates, as well as an improved install experience. Reading through the release notes, I also found out about a feature that isn’t new, but hadn’t been widely publicized before: proposed-updates. Tip of […]

Sometimes you may want to know which process is accessing a particular file or filesystem — for example, if you get a “device is busy” error message. fuser will provide this information. Tip of the Trade: Because sometimes you need to know which process is accessing a particular file or filesystem. Basic usage is: fuser […]

The amazing versatility of the Linux command-line is a happy and joyous thing, but it also means that however experienced you are, there’s always something that you haven’t come across before. Command-Line-Fu is a one example. It is a collection of user-submitted command lines (from the short to the line-noise long) that web site visitors […]

If you have multiple Debian machines to administer, approx can help you get them updated and upgraded more quickly and using less bandwidth. approx is an archive/proxy server for Debian repositories, fetching packages on demand and caching them locally. This means that you only have to grab the package once for your entire local network: […]

Last week’s tip looked at fuser, which shows which process is accessing a given file. lsof is another tool for locating open files. What makes this especially useful is that in Linux, everything is treated as a file: pipes, directories, devices, inodes, sockets and so on. Tip of the Trade: From pipes to directories to […]

E-mail is one of the most useful areas for encryption – it’s nice to not have to treat e-mail as a postcard! – and also the one where it’s most important that encryption should Just Work. Enigmail offers a very usable GnuPG plugin to Thunderbird. Tip of the Trade: When it comes to encryption use […]

When discussing lsof and open files a few weeks ago, I also mentioned that lsof -i will show you information about which IP sockets are open. 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. This […]