Data compression has been extremely useful to us over the years. Whether its a zip file containing images to be sent in a mail or a compressed data backup stored on a server, we use data compression to save valuable hard drive space or to make the downloading of files easier. There are compression formats…

root@dwarf /var/spool/clientmqueue # rm spam-* /bin/rm: Argument list too long. Ever seen this error in Linux when you have too many files in a directory and you are unable to delete them with a simple rm -rf *? I have run into this problem a number of times. After doing a bit of research online…

If you administer a Linux machine it is quite likely that you see a lot of messages fly by on your screen as you run commands. Some of these messages are trivial, while others may be critical. Although Linux and UNIX have a fine logging engine in syslogd and most of the system’s messages are…

Anyone who has worked with a remote Linux server using SSH must have faced the problem of having the SSH session drop dead when you head out to get a cup of coffee. Well, here’s a solution to help you configure your SSH daemon on the Linux server to stop it from disconnecting. What happens…

Scheduling jobs is an essential part of administering Linux servers. We took a look at how to schedule jobs on Linux machine using the cron command earlier. Here’s an alternative to cron – at. The primary difference between the two is that when you schedule a task using cron it execute repeatedly without the need…

There are 4 servers which all use the same mail server in the cluster. web1 – mail server/web server web2 – mail server/webserver db1 – db server db2 – db server When db1 & db2 cpbackup is complete, the email is sent out but never received by the admin and fails with the message Server…

If you store important information on your Linux server and want to make sure it is for your eyes only you need to password protect these files. Let’s see how you can do this with Linux. First, pick a good password. There are a few websites on the Internet that help you generate strong passwords….

If you administer a Linux server or are a developer it is quite likely that you might need to watch a file to check for live updates to it. It could be a log file which you want to keep an eye on to see if any errors or messages appear, or it could just…

The Linux command line can be very powerful once you know how to use it. You can parse data, monitor processes, and do a lot of other useful and cool things using it. There often comes a need to generate a report and mail it out. It could be as simple a requirement as a…

If you run a more or less loaded apache web server, you will sooner or later happend to be in a situation that you need to know what ips are currently connected. Here’s when netstat command comes in very handy. To list all connections just issue: netstat -a Since apache uses TCP we can limit…