System & Network Admin

The Linux extended-attribute mechanism allows the attachment of metadata to files within a filesystem. It tends to be little used — at least, in the absence of a security module like SELinux. There is interest in how these attributes work, though, as evidenced by the discussions that have followed the posting of revisions of this patch by Vivek Goyal, which seeks to make a seemingly small change to the rules regarding extended attributes and special files.

Time Card is the heart of the Open Time Server project. It is an entirely open source board design that can be used with the OCP PTP driver in the Linux kernel to run a computer as a grandmaster clock source with hardware timestamping.

This is a WebP Image format GdkPixbuf loader, making WebP image thumbnails available in GTK applications, such as Nautilus (GNOME Files) or Thunar.

Here’s a little trick I worked out a while back. Along the way I’llintroduce two tools, direnv and Nix, which I’ve found super helpful whendeveloping many di...

Looking to improve your organization’s security posture? Don’t forget to secure the DNS-layer! Learn how – and why – to invest in DNS-layer security here.

Printing on Linux is easy, but sometimes it feels like a lot of work to launch an application, open a file, find the Print selection in the menu, click a confirmation button, and so on. When you're a Linux terminal user, you often want to perform complex actions with simple triggers. Printing is complex, and there's little as simple as the lpr command.

Monitoring IT assets is an essential task for any IT department. Still, due to the growing number of devices in corporate networks, it is getting more and more challenging to find an approach that is flexible enough to monitor the wide range of available systems properly. It's essential to have a monitoring tool that is flexible, scalable, and easy to use.

MacOS is a Unix but it isn’t a Linux so, unfortunately, if/when we need to use linux-y things like docker we need to install a…

In previous articles, I have written about container images and runtimes. In this article, I look at how containers are made possible by a foundation of some special Linux technologies, including namespaces and control groups.

The echo command is a bash built-in to print the output to stdout. This guide explains bash echo command usage in scripts with examples.

I've long blogged about my love of setting up a nice terminal, getting the ...

Using Tor to aid various system administration tasks, including checking firewall rules, bypassing internal network restrictions and connecting to remote systems that are behind NAT/CGNAT.

Let’s examine how to set up multiple desktops in Windows and use them to maximize your device’s functionality and productivity.

In Working with Postgres types I showed an example of a materialized view that depends on a typed set-returning function. Because Postgres knows about that dependency, it won’t allow DROP FUN…

broot is a utility that gives an overview of a directory, and much much more. It's free and open source software.

If you’ve ever spent ages waiting for an Ansible playbook to get through a bunch of tasks so yours can be tested, then this article is for you. Ansible can be pretty tedious to debug and obsc…

Slack's Secret STDERR Messages

Streamline SSH with two very specific SSH tools: ssh-agent and the SSH config files.

The Linux kernel is turning 30 this year! If you're like us, that's a big deal and we are celebrating Linux this week with a couple of special posts. Today we start with a roundup of responses from around the community answering "What Linux kernel module can you not live without? And, why?" Let's hear what these 10 enthusiasts have to say. I guess some kernel developers will run away screaming when they hear my answer. Still, I list here two of the most controversial modules:

The number one problem, according to the security company's latest report, is organizations using out-of-date, unsupported operating systems and programs.

Create and deploy reproducible infrastructure with CDKTF

The stat command, included in the GNU coreutils package, provides a variety of metadata, including file size, inode location, access permissions and SELinux context, and creation and modification times, about files and filesystems. It's a convenient way to gather information that you usually need several different commands to acquire.

Get right into tmux with a gentle learning curve. We go through managing panes, windows, and sessions in this blog post.

CAA is a type of DNS record that allows site owners to specify which Certificate Authorities (CAs) are allowed to issue certificates containing their domain names. It was standardized in 2013 by RFC 6844 to allow a CA “reduce the risk of unintended certificate mis-issue.” By default, every public CA is allowed to issue certificates for any domain name in the public DNS, provided they validate control of that domain name.

A Certification Authority Authorization (CAA) record is used to specify which certificate authorities (CAs) are allowed to issue certificates for a domain.