
Best Articles of 2024 about Linux system tools
Linux has many excellent tools that allow SysAdmins to manage our systems. We’ve published many articles this year about those tools, and here are 9 that we especially like.
- How to use udev — April 18 (Seth)
- The real differences between less, more, and most — April 7, (Seth)
- Securely erasing your data on Linux — November 6, (Don)
- Essential steps for creating a USB boot drive for Linux — November3, (Don)
- Fastfetch: system information tool — October21, (Don)
- Another reason I like Linux –November 18 (David)
- An introduction to the Network Time Protocol – November, 16 (David)
- sync — The command you never heard of – November 15, (David)
- A quick look at DNF5 – November 10, (David)
If you haven’t already read these, Here’s another chance to do so.
More Stories
Short report on the Perl / Raku Conference
This past weekend I attended the Perl / Raku conference in Greenville, SC, USA. It was a great weekend as...
Thinking about Algol 68
I took my first computer science course in my second year at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. The course was a full year, starting in September 1974, and we programmed in Waterloo FORTRAN IV, which if memory serves was called Watfor or maybe Watfiv at the time. We also had a brief session with IBM 360 / 370 Assembler language. Both languages were available to us in the form of batch timeshare services where we wrote our programs on IBM 029 key punches and submitted the card decks to be run, generating printouts which were almost entirely compilation or execution failures interspersed with the occasional output of a program that generated the hoped-for results.
The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Tenet 22—Mentor the young SysAdmins
When I first started, I was a young and innocent SysAdmin. I was fortunate because I worked at a couple different jobs where other, seasoned SysAdmins were willing to mentor me and encourage me. None of them laughed at me when I asked what must have seemed to them to have answers that were blindingly obvious. None of these patient SysAdmins ever told me to RTFM.
Do I have enough space for that?
A little scripting goes a long way to make sure you won’t run out of space with an automated process.
Strange problems with switches
Network switches are supposed to be simple devices that work at TCP/IP layer 1, the hardware layer. As far as...