Even though new distros installers tend to support filesystem encryption out of the box, most of the time, it might be interesting to actually understand how it works, mainly when it happens that your system fails to boot :).

Most literature found on the Internet tend to cover how to set up LVM over a partition encrypted with LUKS, this tutorial takes another approach and will explain how to create LUKS encrypted partitions over LVM. The reason for this.... I wanted to have unencrypted partitions :D.

read more

In introduced terminator in a previous article as multi-view terminal.

Since then, terminator as quite evolved, with plenty of new features that were highlighted in Terminator 0.9 beta 1 post.

read more

syslogd is the Linux system logging utility that take care of filling up your files in /var/log when it is asked to.

On a standard system, logging is only done on the local drive. But syslog can be configured to receive logging from a remote client, or to send logging to a remote syslog server.

Some of the use cases could be:

• A machine which filesystem goes read-only
• Log replication

this tutorial will explain how to set up both the server, to receive message from a remote client, and the client to emit messages to a syslogd server.

read more

Linux is a perfect platform to act as a router/gateway.

In this tutorial, I will explain how to set up a Linux box to operate as a network router. The box will provide the following services:

• DHCP server to provide the ip addresses to the machines in the LAN
• DNS server to resolve domain names
• Gateway with IP tables to give access to the Internet.
• Firewall with IP tables.

The resulting machine will have quite a small footprint: about 600M, and except if your network is intensively used, a low spec computer can be recycled to do the job.

As the machine is going to operate as a router/firewall

read more

When copying files over the network, the files informations can be modified.

When using cp, one can avoid this issue by using the -a which will do the copy in archive mode, meaning that it will keep the links, preserve mode, ownership and timestamps and the copy is recursive.

the solution to this over the network is rsync alongside with ssh.

read more

The Intel wireless card 4965 AGN does not work properly on ad-hoc networks since hardy and kernel 2.6.24 or around, network-manager can't get it to use the mode ad-hoc and a standard configuration like:

$ sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid myessid mode ad-hoc channel X key s:mykey13charss
$ sudo dhclient wlan0

will fail to get an ip except a long battle at dhclient'ing around.

I managed to get a process to get things working faster.

read more

Terminator 0.9, an application that allow you to have multiple terminal within the same window, is getting close to be released. FeatureFreeze has been started since a couple of weeks.

The bugs opened against terminator milestone 0.9 are being closed.

A big bunch of new features and enhancements come shipped with this new release.

A package is available from Launchpad PPA. You can grab the .deb there. Feedback to terminator bug tracker on launchpad are welcome.

read more

transmission, a lightweight bittorrent client version 1.22 was released on the 14th of June 2008.

A .deb package is available for Ubuntu Hardy i386 and amd64 from the debuntu repository.

read more

transmission 1.21 is out.

Transmission is a fast, easy, and free multi-platform BitTorrent client with a focus on being lightweight yet feature-filled.

read more

Subtitled movie lovers, here it comes, subtitleeditor 0.21.1 is out.

read more

In the 2 previous articles, I explained how to set up a serial console on Ubuntu and Debian.

This tutorial will now show how to connect to those serial console using another machine using a software called minicom.

read more

This tutorial will go over the steps to go through in order to set up a serial console on Debian Linux.

Debian uses sysvinit to handle the booting process, amongst the different task, and as such, there is a few differences between most of the tutorial that you might find on the internet regarding how to set up a serial console.

A Serial Console becomes handy when running a headless server (i.e no keyboard and screen) or if you cannot connect a a server because of a network issue.

read more

This tutorial will go over the steps to go through in order to set up a serial console on Ubuntu Linux.

Unlike most other distros, Ubuntu uses upstart instead of sysvinit and as such, there is a few differences between most of the tutorial that you might find on the internet regarding how to set up a serial console.

A Serial Console becomes handy when running a headless server (i.e no keyboard and screen) or if you cannot connect a a server because of a network issue.

read more

This tutorial will show how you can export and import a set of GPG keys from one computer to another.
This way, you can sign/encrypt the same way one different computer.

read more

SSH is great. There is so many thing you can do with it other than just a remote secure shell like X forwarding, port forwarding, authenticate using a private/public key, compress the transmitted stream....

If you have different account that you use on an every day basis, it becomes quickly cumbersome to type those lengthly command lines.

One could work around this by using aliases, the right way would be to use ~/.ssh/config

This tutorial will show some customization examples that should cover most ssh use cases.

read more