Juliet Kemp

Last week’s tip covered some ways of getting into a system when you don’t have (or have forgotten) the root password. Obviously, being able to do this has disadvantages when the person doing it is an attacker trying to get at the system for nefarious reasons. (Or even users fiddling with the system without authorization.) […]

One of the more neat things you can do with the versatile utility lsof is use it to recover a file you’ve just accidentally deleted. Tip of the Trade: Accidentally deleted files are easily recovered with lsof. A file in Linux is a pointer to an inode, which contains the file data (permissions, owner and […]

Vim is still one of the most powerful text editors out there. One of its more useful features is that it allows you to set up your own abbreviations and mappings. These can speed up the typing of stock phrases or do far more complicated things. Enter these in command mode to try them out, […]

Ever been logged on via console and wanted to get Web access without firing up a graphical browser? I most often need this when setting up apps with Web interfaces and wanting to check the state of the interface locally. Sometimes you need Web access but don’t want a graphical browser. Here are three programs, […]

More on open source software This week, I’ve been experimenting with gnome-do, the Gnome application launcher that also allows you to specify particular actions to take on whatever file or application you’ve found. Very much like Quicksilver on the Mac, for anyone who’s familiar with that. Gnome-do is an open source software solution to getting […]

More on open source servers GroupServer is an open-source (GPL) mailing-list manager that doubles as a forum/bulletin board. Email posts are mirrored on the web, and vice versa — in other words, it’s more than an archive. Need both mailing list and forum software but don’t want to chose one over the other? Consider this […]

The WebDAV protocol enables users to store and share files via HTTP. This is particularly valuable in cases where HTTP is usually read-only, as WebDAV allows writing as well. In addition to accessing documents, users can (with suitable permissions) edit and re-upload them. Think of it as a networked file-system run over http: or as […]

More about open source software Most admins know WebDAV, but davfs2 isn’t as well known. With this open source software tool, you can connect to WebDAV server as a regular filesystem, thus allowing applications that don’t support WebDAV to access shared resources via WebDAV. I had a request this week to check out davfs2. This […]

If you’re using Sudo, you’ve probably already discovered that the increased privileges apply only to the first command typed and don’t extend to any input or output redirection. For example: With Sudo, a sys admin can allow certain users to run commands as root or another user while providing an audit trail of the commands […]

I recently came acrossexpect (the expect package in Debian and Ubuntu): a powerful utility that can script interactive operations. Tip of the Trade: The Expect package found in Debian and Ubuntu is a powerful utility that can script interactive operations. If you’re not familiar with TCL syntax, you can get autoexpect from Wi-Fizzle.com. This spawns […]

I often find myself wanting to email someone an attachment of some sort – PDF, doc, jpg, or whatever. As a rule I’ll do this by scping it to the machine I use for mail (or uploading to gmail), but I’d far rather save time with a command-line oneliner. Tip of the Trade: Uuencode is […]

This week’s column has been written a little more slowly than normal because on Wednesday, I tripped over the dog and broke my left thumb. Under strict instructions to keep it elevated, and concerned not to put too much strain on the remaining good hand, I went looking for resources for one-handed keyboard operation. Here […]