Carolyn Rowland is seeking an intermediate UNIX sysadmin for her team at NIST. Highly recommended! Carolyn rocks! http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/nist.txt

Escape and Control keys historically belong on the left side, right next to the “A” key in the home row: (Thanks to Wikipedia for the keyboard layout graphic.) Nowadays they have drifted away from the home row, which adds wear and tear to your fingers and steals valuable time. To get back to this key…

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  Here is a convenient way to set the From address in emails generated automatically (for example report jobs run from cron):       echo be good | mutt -s 'message from Santa'  -e 'my_hdr From: Santa.Claus@NorthPole.org'   mutt's my favorite command-line emailer.   It is featureful and highly customizable.   www.mutt.org   

There is a remarkably lucid (and brief!) explanation of object-oriented programming at http://www.aonaware.com/OOP1.htm This is something I've tried to clear up twice before and given up.  Boy, am I glad I found the above explanation! Aleksey

Let's say you want to write a regex that will match any string that does NOT contain the string "hello world".  Use: ^((?!hello world).)*$ This is explained in http://stackoverflow.com/questions/406230/regular-expression-to-match-string-not-containing-a-word

Having screen provide session logging for each separate ssh session – this is very useful in case you ever need to “go back in time” and see what it was you did on the server Put this in your .screenrc file: # save the session logs logtstamp on logfile $HOME/.screenlogs/screenlog.%t.%Y-%M-%d.%c # the session log will…

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At a job interview last year, I was asked “What is your philosophy of system administration?” It’s a good question and one I hadn’t been asked before. Here’s Digital Elf on his philosophy of system administration: https://digitalelf.net/2011/09/philosophy-of-system-administration/ What’s yours?

We nearly tripled our USB thumb drive write speed by changing the partitioning and aligning the filesystem with the parititioning, following “Increase USB Flash Drive Write Speed” http://linux-howto-guide.blogspot.com/2009/10/increase-usb-flash-drive-write-speed.html

LISA was awesome this year. I’m publishing my notes on Toby Oetiker’s presentation on his two new projects, remOcular and Extopus. 1. RemOcular is a technology stack for enabling a generic but cool web interface to UNIX command line tools. There is a JavaScript framework called qooxdoo with which you can run complete applications in…

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From OWASP Development Guide Applications MUST NOT implement questions and answers as they are contrary to most privacy regimes and ineffective http://code.google.com/p/owasp-development-guide/wiki/WebAppSecDesignGuide_D2 Personal note: web apps that allow you to bypass password authentication via security question/answer drive me batty. I have half a mind to start contacting the webmasters to show them the above. Aleksey