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It's important to regularly test any public-facing server to see which information it's making available. That information is important to attackers. They can use it to put together a picture of your server, what's running on it, and which exploits might work against it.

In a GNU/Linux system, while devices low level support is handled at the kernel level, the management of events related to them is managed in userspace by udev, and more precisely by the udevd daemon. Learning how to write rules to be applied on the occurring of those events can be really useful to modify the behavior of the system and adapt it to our needs.

The following article provides some useful tips on how to find all files within any specific directory or entire file-system containing any specific word or string.

Not everyone loves systemd, and for those that don't, there really aren't many options. That's especially true if you want something like a stable server. Fear not, SysV Init is actually still supported under Debian, and it's not hard to switch.

Firefox 57 is easily the best update to come to Firefox ever. Mozilla even named this release "Quantum" because of how dramatically the browser speed improved. Couple that with the complete redesign of Firefox's UI, and you have a pretty dramatic change.

If you have the good habit to never use the same password for more than one purpose, you have probably already felt the need for a password manager. There are many alternatives to choose from on linux, both proprietary (if you dare) and open source. If you, like me, think that simplicity it's the way to go, you may be interested in knowing however to use the pass utility.

Normally, on a unix-like operating system, the ownership of files and directories is based on the default uid (user-id) and gid (group-id) of the user who created them. The same thing happens when a process is launched: it runs with the effective user-id and group-id of the user who started it, and with the corresponding privileges. This behavior can be modified by using special permissions.

In a previous article we have seen how to parse command line arguments using getopts in the context of bash scripts (you can find the article here). Now we will see how to accomplish the same task, in a more powerful way, when writing a python script.

There are plenty of ways to play audio files with Python. It really depends on your application, but the easiest way, by far, is to use the bindings for VLC to control VLC with Python, and play your files. With VLC, you don't need to worry about codecs and file support. It also doesn't require too many complicated methods, and/or objects. So, for simple audio playback, VLC is best.

When writing scripts that are meant to run for a considerable time, it's very important to increase their robustness by making them able to react to system signals, executing specific actions when some of them are received. We can accomplish this task by using the bash trap builtin.

JSON is the universal format for passing data between programs and/or languages, especially on the web. Python has excellent built-in support for converting data from a Python program into JSON for another program to use.

It's be convenient to be able to retrieve the latest weather forecast right from your terminal without opening up a web browser, wouldn't it? What about scripting it or setting a cron job? Well, you can.

Sling TV is a popular alternative for cord cutters looking to be free of their cable bill while keeping their favorite TV channels. The service doesn't support Linux, though, at all. Furthermore, by default it is available within United States only.

Sometimes we have to install programs from source: maybe they are not available through standard channels, or maybe we want a specific version of a software. GNU stow is a very nice symlinks factory program which helps us a lot by keeping files organized in a very clean and easy to maintain way.

Are file transfers slow on your network? Are you constantly passing data between your computers? Well, maybe jumbo frames are for you. Jumbo frames are larger than standard network packet payloads. Normally the payload size or MTU(Maximum Transfer Unit) is set to 1500 bytes. Jumbo frames can support to 9000 bytes per packet. Jumbo frames decrease the overhead associated with transferring files by limiting the number of packets that your networking equipment needs to process.

Lots of people like graphical utilities for managing their computers, but plenty don't too. If you prefer command line utilities, managing WiFi can be a real pain. Well, it doesn't have to be. wpa_supplicant can be used as a command line utility. You can actually set it up easily with a simple configuration file.

If you're connected to a VPN, you need a killswitch. No, it's not as metal as it sounds. It's just a mechanism that stops your Internet connection when you're disconnected from the VPN. It protects you from inadvertently leaking sensitive information onto the Internet when the VPN connection drops.

World of Warcraft has been around for almost thirteen years, and it's still easily the most popular MMORPG. Unfortunately, after all that time Blizzard never released an official Linux client. It's not all bad, tough. Wine has you covered.

This guide aims to provide a quite complete overview of PDO, guiding the reader step by step from the establishment of a connection to the database, to the choice of the most appropriate fetch mode, showing how to create prepared statements and describing the possible error modes.

When you fist log in to a terminal on a Unix system, Linux included, you are usually greeted by that system's message of the day(MOTD). The message of the day, gives you important information about the system or just messages from the system admin. Of course, if you are are the system admin, it's up to you to set that message. If it's your own system, you can get creative with your message and include any information that you choose.