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If you're anything like me, you prefer to do things via command line (CLI) rather than relying on a GUI to do most things in Linux. You also realize that while some of us don't like to use control panels (plesk, cpanel, webmin, etc..), they are necessary when providing a shared hosting environment for your clients. While cPanel has an excellent migration utility (and they'll even migrate it for you for free in most cases), it will sometimes fail for one reason or another. If you do it via command line, you'll be able to cut out some of those failures.

Many people, when they hear the word Linux, immediately dismiss it as a hard to understand, command line environment designed for hackers and computer geeks. Images of scenes from the 1983 movie War Games start to pop into their heads, with the green on black text based computer systems. In reality though, it is not that scary... in fact, you've probably used Linux hundreds of times and not even known it. As the title suggests, this series of articles will be directed towards people new to Linux, or toying with the idea of making the switch.

So, you have Ubuntu 11.04 or 11.10 and have no interest in using the default mail client (Evolution or Thunderbird respectively), but instead you'd rather have integrated access to your Gmail account? It's actually a pretty simple thing to accomplish with a great little notifier called gm-notify.

It's Friday, the week went pretty well. Friday's going well too - until a customer calls letting you know that their XenServer VM crashed and is not up yet. You soon find out that you have to manually run fsck on it because it won't boot. fsck is a utility that checks and repairs filesystems. Basically what you will have to do is attach the storage from that VM on another VM that can see the same storage. Use this guide to get it done.

Box.net (box.com actually now) is a service that enables you to have a place to put files that you want to access from anywhere. Some people (ehem) use it to back up their workstations. Did your box.net mount start failing recently? They've changed a couple things.. use this guide to set it up again.

If you are using Ubuntu's default user interface Unity, then you are probably familiar with Quick Lists. They are those handy menus that pop up when you right-click on an icon on the Launcher on the left of the screen, giving you options like Keep in Launcher or Quit. Some apps give you more options, but wouldn't it be nice if you could change those options, or better yet... make your own custom Launcher?

The famed Raspberry Pi Model B Beta Boards are now up for grabs on eBay. The first 10 are being auctioned off 2 at a time and 100% of the proceeds will benefit Raspberry Pi foundation.

Everyone loves using services like Dropbox or Boxnet. It's almost 2012 - everyone has some kind of Cloud (buzz buzz) storage! Half of us do have hardware laying around that we'd love to convert into our own 'cloud server' but never came across the right software. Instead we pay $9.99 each month to places like dropbox for 50gigs. Luckily, the people at OwnCloud.org have released their own open source software that works as a web app ready to help you store things, create bookmarks, keep a calendar, contacts, etc.. AND share it to anyone you want.. using YOUR hardware!

PowerDNS Authoritative Server is a great choice for handling DNS for your organization. For a successful install (and for this howto in particular) you'll need a Linux server running CentOS. This HOWTO will show you how to get a working pdns nameserver going along with a great web front-end. The most common way to set up PowerDNS (pdns) on multiple servers (ns1, ns2, etc...) is to enable MySQL replication from the master (ns1) and the slave(s) (ns2, ns3). That's going to be part 2 of this HOWTO. Let's just get pdns set up on our master and answering queries for now...

So, I want to take a shell script and be able to put it on any machine - and have it backup the databases on that machine using mysqldump.. and put them each separately into a backup directory.. here's what I came up with.

Can you make it better?

Desura, a digital distribution service for gamers, puts downloadable games, mods and downloadable content into gamers' hands directly from the developers. Think of it like xbox live for your PC. After a 2 month beta period, Desura has released their Linux version of their software. This article explains how to install it.

There are two machines A and B. The idea is to login (via ssh) from A to B without typing the password that machine B would normally ask for. A is called the client and B is called the server. A single command on the client A does this (replace SERVERB by the correct machine name or IP address of server B ):

I use irssi daily in order to communicate with different people in IRC Chat Channels. I use irssi because I don't like dealing with loading up a full Graphical Interface, going through the connection process and then joining channels. I let my personal VPS maintain my IRC connection, through the use of screen, and never have to worry about this. Even if my server restarts for some reason, I merely restart screen and it auto starts irssi with all my settings loaded, connections made and channels joined.

Screen is a great tool, and highly recommended, tool for any Linux user. It provides a Terminal environment that can withstand network disconnects, random computer restarts, power outages at home and more. With screen you can be assured that if PuTTY, or whatever SSH Client you use, closes you will almost never lose your work.

Few days ago I was trying the LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup) volume encryption on RHEL. It worked pretty well, until I [re]boot the system (to mount the encrypted volume automatically from /etc/fstab) and I was presented with the famous Give root password for maintenance (or type Control-D to continue): screen. I figured it out sorta hard way, so it's mainly for the future reference and for those who experience[d] the same problem.

Hiring a junior Linux System Administrator can be a challenging task, especially if you are interviewing for someone who is above your own Linux skill set! How do you know for sure that they are going to be any good at what they say they can do? What are the best interview questions to ask a junior Linux System Admin? In our experience, the best way to gauge an employees skill set is to put them in front of a command line interface and have them execute a number of straightforward tasks. Oftentimes, candidates will say that they have strong skills in Linux, but when confronted with an actual problem, they don't have the "tools" to fix it themselves. So, what we look for is a candidate's ability to use tools, rather than their ability to fix a particular problem.

This is how I generally setup a new debian server or vps. This process normally only takes a few minutes to have a nice, secure, production worthy lamp setup and running quickly. This is one of the main reasons I love debian so much. In this I assume that you have a bare newly rented server without any prior installations and I cover a few of my common practices that make my life as a sysadmin a little bit easier. We will forget for now that some of their policy decisions seem to be motivated by to much coffee and estrogen.

Need to make some changes to your iptables rules running on one of your servers? Don't worry. While iptables can be a bit risky in that it'll let you add rules without checking your logic there are a few steps that can make your life much easier. Also, as just a general tip: Whenever you are working with modifying network access to a machine or just managing a server in general it pays to have local and/or remote console access to the machine.

At work, I always have a browser tab open for each of our two Nagios instances. At home, I used to check them from time to time. When out and about, I used to check my mail every time I got an email because I wanted to make sure it wasn't Nagios complaining about something. Now that I've installed aNag on my Android phone and have special alert sounds set up in it I've become a happier admin!