System administration doesn’t have to be all serious. You can have sudo insult your users who mis-enter their password, by adding ‘insults’ to the Defaults line. Enable it and see which users discover it first.
Reference: Ubuntu Unleashed: Enable Sudo insults for some laughs!
Let’s say you have a bunch of hosts on example.com, such as mercury.example.com, venus.example.com, and jupiter.outerplanets.example.com. You spend a bunch of your time on the command line, so you want to be able to access them with just the short host name, i.e., you want to be able to just type ssh mercury and [...]
How do you determine what version of a Perl module you have? If you have one module you want to check, you can call the VERSION parameter of the module. Let’s say you wanted to check the version of Test::Harness you had on your system. Run the following:
$ perl -MTest::Harness -le ‘print [...]
You used to be able to use tzconfig to set the time zone in Ubuntu. With Hardy Heron you can no longer do this, so how do you do it? Simple:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
In Debian / Ubuntu, sometimes you want to keep a package at a specific version, and not upgrade it. For instance, the Perl module DateTime::Timezone in Ubuntu Dapper lists its version as 1:0.37-1, when the version is actually 0.37. This makes it difficult if I build a new package of the perl module [...]
Due to the recent ssh vulnerability, many releases of Ubuntu found themselves with vulnerable ssh keys.
User Keys
Run ssh-vulnkey to see if you’re unlucky. If you are, you’ll have to regenerate your keys.
ssh-keygen -t rsa
That’s it. If you’re using dsa, use dsa in the above instead of rsa. You should let [...]
If you’re like me, you may need to build your own packages in Debian, or perhaps have downloaded different versions of packages to install on your system. Sometimes you’d like to go the other way, though, and install an older version of a package you found in the repository, or even the same version, [...]
While I tend to like running Ubuntu on the desktop, I sometimes find myself needing to run Windows programs for various things. For that, I actually got VMware Workstation for Linux, and set up a Windows XP Professional image, with a partition size of 8 GB. I rarely use the image, so imagine [...]
Compiz Fusion on a Radeon Mobility X1400 graphics card? Hell yeah!
Oh, driver hell. Proprietary drivers are the bane of Linux’s existence, as any Linux user with a current ATI graphics card can tell you. I have a Lenovo Z61m on which I’d like to install Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, but good luck — [...]
If you’re a debian user (this includes all of you Ubuntu folks!), then you may be familiar with the strangeness of status codes for dpkg -l. For example, let’s say you install postfix:
sudo apt-get install postfix
We can look at the package list with dpkg -l. Let’s take a look at postfix:
$ dpkg -l [...]