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By now, most of you have probably already heard of the biggest disaster in the history of IT – Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities which affect all modern CPUs, from those in desktops and servers, to ones found in smartphones. Unfortunately, there’s much confusion about the level of threat we’re dealing with here, because some of the impacted vendors need reasons to explain the still-missing security patches. But even those who did release a patch, avoid mentioning that it only partially addresses the threat. And, there’s no good explanation of these vulnerabilities on the right level (not for developers), something that just about anyone working in IT could understand to make their own conclusion. So, I decided to give it a shot and deliver just that.

Storing large binary files in Git repositories seems to be a bottleneck for many Git users. Because of the decentralized nature of Git, which means every developer has the full change history on his or her computer, changes in large binary files cause Git repositories to grow by the size of the file in question every time the file is changed and the change is committed. The growth directly affects the amount of data end users need to retrieve when they need to clone the repository. Storing a snapshot of a virtual machine image, changing its state and storing the new state to a Git repository would grow the repository size approximately with the size of the respective snapshots. If this is day-to-day operation in your team, it might be that you are already feeling the pain from overly swollen Git repositories.

systemd is a suite of system management daemons, libraries, and utilities designed as a central management and configuration platform for the GNU/Linux computer operating system. It provides a system and service manager that runs as PID 1 and starts the rest of the system as alternative to the traditional sysVinit.

When it comes to gaming on a PC, Windows is pretty much the only operating system of choice suitable for the job. Sure, there are a few titles that can run on Linux at the moment, but the list is fairly thin. However, things may not stay this way for long, as Linux is making tremendous efforts to step into the game, with the upcoming SteamOS being the pièce de résistance. With no official released date available yet, Linux’s swing at Microsoft’s domination over the gaming industry may have to wait a bit longer. That doesn’t make its efforts any less remarkable, though, as Linux came a long way when it comes to gaming.

For a very long time I wanted an FPS that manages to blend seamlessly the FPS and RTS genre, and this is how I got into Natural Selection 2. This is a multiplayer oriented game where you can take the role of either humans or aliens as you try to survive and lead your race to victory.

As a Linux user, you always want to keep your files and folders up to date, and this is especially true in those situations where you can create a backup. This is why you have to use a tool that automatically syncs the content of two folders in order to keep them up to date. FreeFileSync is a utility that fits the bill quite nicely, since it automates the aforementioned process and makes it easy for you to compare as well as synchronize the content of any two different or similar files that are located on your computer or network.

Documenting processes and systems or just keeping a diary of the daily happenings are things that many computer users are doing very often. RedNotebook is a professional application that allows you to create a log or journal of all those tasks as well as document issues with your network. The app can be seen as a professional journal for IT experts, although it can also be used by home users as well.

lsof is the sysadmin/security über-tool. I use it most for getting network connection related information from a system, but that’s just the beginning for this powerful and too-little-known application. The tool is aptly called lsof because it “lists openfiles“. And remember, in UNIX just about everything (including a network socket) is a file.

Interestingly, lsof is also the Linux/Unix command with the most switches. It has so many it has to use both minuses and pluses.

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 released and CentOS version 7 newly unveiled, now is a good time to cover systemd, the replacement for legacy System V (SysV) startup scripts and runlevels. Red Hat-based distributions are migrating to systemd because it provides more efficient ways of managing services and quicker startup times. With systemd there are fewer files to edit, and all the services are compartmentalized and stand separate from each other. This means that should you screw up one config file, it won’t automatically take out other services.

I’ve recently bought an offer for Sanctum 2 on Steam, and while at the start I was a bit skeptic, I must say that I like this mix between a Tower Defense and an FPS.

Some time ago I posted an article about shelr.tv a website and a service that was made to allow you to share your terminal records directly from the website. Now the website of shelr.tv seems dead and so I’ve took a look around to see if there are similar websites and I’ve found commands.com. For what I can see from their homepage it’s a service similar to the other, so let’s test it.

If you manage a server with many different users or just your family computer you will probably have many different accounts to manage, and one important aspect of any account it’s its password. In this small article I’ll show you how to use the basic passwd command but also how to do some small bash script or use a web application, if you have a more complex environment, such as a central ldap server that keep all your accounts information.

Zorin OS has a lot of takers in the new Linux converts from Windows. Recently, Zorin OS released it’s 9th version based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with 5 years of support. For users who are familiar with Zorin, the release notes states of some incremental improvements over it’s predecessors, namely:

Luckily this problem don’t happen so frequently, at least using stable kernel and distributions, but sometime your beloved Linux could go in “Kernel Panic”.

A hard link is actually nothing more than a regular directory entry, which in turn can be seen as a pointer to the actual file’s data on the disk. The cool thing about hard-links is that a file can be stored once on the disk, and be linked to multiple times, from different locations/entries, without requiring to allocate extra disk space for each file instance.

What’s your upload and download speed at home (or in your office) ? Are you really sure that you get what do you pay for to your ISP ?

To test the speed of our internet connection There are several internet services such as SpeedTest a web service that is available both from Web browsers and mobile application.

Now you can easily check it also with speedtest_cli a command line interface for testing internet bandwidth using speedtest.net. In this way you can do the test also on servers that don’t have a Browser or a graphical interface.

Garry’s Mod, developed by Facepunch is without a doubt one of the most enjoyable and hilarious games that I have ever played. Out of the box, the game is perhaps one of the ultimate sandbox games available anywhere. You spawn in the middle of an open area that you choose and you can spawn in just about any item or NPC that you can think of. This game is also probably one of the best physics simulators available. The entire game revolves around physics. In this game you are able to do whatever you heart desires and although I say that with a lot of different games, I truly mean it with Garry’s Mod. Whatever you want. If you want to build an airplane out of a bathtub and some planks of wood, then be my guest. You can simply spawn in the materials that you want and then use tools to “weld” them together. Using weight tools you can make these items very light, which will allow them to become airborne. This game definitely deserves lots of praise.

In previous posts we’ve seen how to Enable automatic security update in Debian/Ubuntu and in Red hat enterprise or Centos 6, recently I’ve started to work with the new Red Hat Enterprise 7 and I’ve noticed that there are some interesting changes in the way this system can be set to auto update.

An example ?

In Red Hat/Centos 6 you could not set which kind of update you’d like to do, so you could just decide to update for any kind of update (feature,bug or security) or nothing at all, this has changed and now we can fine grain which kind of updates we want to do on our servers.

If, like me, you work on terminals connected via ssh to remote computer/server you are probably used to tmux and screen and so it’s not a problem if you have to close your session, as you’ll be able to easily re-connect when you need it, but sometimes you could forget about using one of these utility.