Technology Tips, and Anything Else
There may be times when you just want to do a quick check to see whether a web site is up, and/or what status message the web server is showing. This won’t actually show you if the page it served up is correct or not, purely the web server status code on whether or not …
Continue reading “Quick command to check the status of a URL (Linux, BSD, OS X)”
As you start using the command line, you’ll come across thousands of different commands, all with their own options and ways of taking options. Every command is different, but help is on hand in the form of man pages. Manual Pages (or man page for short) are the documentation distributed with every command (or, at …
Continue reading “Command Help using Manual Pages (man) (OS X, Linux, BSD)”
Say you have a text file, and you want to know either how many lines are in the file, how many words are in the file, or how many characters are in the file. How can you do that? Counting them manually would take way too long. This is where wc comes in! The wc …
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New users to Linux or BSD, will have no doubt come across Vim (or at least Vi). Vim is “Vi IMproved” – it’s simply an extended Vi. You’ll have probably had times when you need to do something very simple, such as Cut and Paste, and not been able to, just because you don’t know …
If you run an SSH server, and have left it on the default port, you’ll probably notice in time lots of login attempts. These login attempts will be from random IP addresses, and usually try lots of different username/password combinations, and hopefully failing. This article will focus on OpenSSH – I’m not sure if all …
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Screenshots; everyone loves them – whether it’s to show off your new shiny desktop, or just to record something on the screen at that moment in time, we’ve all taken lots! I guess at the moment a lot of screenshots are being taken with the GNOME tool, but what if you don’t use GNOME? What …
Everyone has a long list of tasks to do of a day – and everyone always forgets something; we just can’t remember everything. This is where Getting Things GNOME! (gtg for short) comes in – an application for the GNOME desktop environment, that focuses on being easy to use, but powerful and flexible at the …
Continue reading “Todo/Task Management and Organiser for GNOME”
mtr is an small utility which combines both the functionality of traceroute and ping, for Linux and BSD. There are always occasions where you’ve wanted to traceroute to a host, possibly due to connectivity issues, and you need to diagnose where the problem lies. Most operating systems offer basic traceroute and ping utilities, but what …
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It’s important to know where mail goes for a domain, especially if you’re a system administrator looking after mail servers. There are a whole host of web sites you can use to find MX records now – MX Records are the DNS entry so servers know where to send e-mail, destined to that domain. The …
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By default, Vim uses tabs instead of spaces when you press the tab button. There is an ongoing argument around the internet (which we won’t go into now, but may in the future!) on what you should use, but, either way, you may want/need to change your tabs to spaces. These are often called “soft …
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