Kernel musings
Being a curious sort of person, I wonder about a lot of interesting things. For some reason, I've started wondering about the Linux kernel and...
btop — the top of my dreams
The top program is the original system monitoring and management tool for Unix and Linux. It performs its task well and with a minimum of...
What Robbie the Robot can teach us about AI
Way back in 1956, when I was ten years old, my parents took my brother and I to a drive-in movie theater to see the...
Perl and Raku Conference will be held June 27-29, 2025 in Greenville, SC, USA
David Both to be the keynote speaker The Perl and Raku Conference for 2025 is coming up June 27-29, 2025, and it’s set to be...
The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Tenet 17— Use your favorite editor
Author’s note: This article is excerpted in part from chapter 19 of my book, The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, with some changes to update the...
What our system maintenance this past weekend says about Linux
I've been thinking a lot about the system maintenance I performed on Saturday, February 22. Prior to that day, I thought about what needed to...
Keeping time with chrony
“Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?” -- Chicago, 1969 Perhaps that rock group didn’t care what time it was...
How I recovered from another self-inflicted problem
And how I got there in the first place. Those of you who read my articles and books know that I do updates frequently to...
Updates fix KDE Plasma issues
If you've been reading Both.org for a few months, you'll know that I have two favorite desktops. I like Xfce for it's no-nonsense user interface...
Filelight — my new favorite Linux tool
I like to explore all corners of my Linux installations. Sometimes I find interesting and useful new (to me) tools that -- for some reason...
Fixing Ansible playbooks
I've been using Ansible for several years to perform different tasks on my many physical and virtual hosts. It's an excellent tool for defining the...
How I reverted to Name Service Switch (NSS) for name resolution — And why
There are problems with the new systemd-resolved resolver and that gives us some good reasons to keep or revert to the NSSwitch resolver. The Domain...
New book announcement
I'm currently working on a new book that will be available in July 2025, "systemd for Linux SysAdmins: All You Need to Know About The...
Using the dmesg command
As a SysAdmin I frequently need to access the kernel log to obtain information of various types. This can range from searching for why a...
How Linux keeps time
Knowing the exact time is important to computers for many reasons. A GPS, which is a computer, needs to know the exact time so it...
How to get a clean screen — on the command line
After some time using terminal sessions they can get a bit cluttered with previous commands and their output data streams. At other times, I want...