Topic

linux

A collection of 12 issues

chmod and the capital X

This is one very, very, very interesting piece of ancient wisdom. Suppose you need to change permissions for some directories. Maybe the permissions are too strict, e.g. something like 700 for directories and 600 for files, and you need to give access to some other group and not just

Kill Me Softly: killing a process The Right Way

I was tired of repeating the same old pattern. Send a kill signal. Check with pgrep. Did the process exit? Send a kill -9. Now all my knowledge has been permanently dumped here: Kill Me Softly on GitHub If you want to kill a process by letting it to exit

Unfreezing your desktop: when Compiz goes wrong

A desktop freeze is something that's not so rare nowadays - that's not good, but we shouldn't get desperate about that. I like Compiz with Unity Desktop on my Ubuntu Trusty very much; I feel it's a step forward compared to traditional desktops. The only major nuisance I had on

Don't give a shell to system users - use su

I seem very ancientwisdom-oriented these days. Sometimes you've got a system user on your linux server that's used to run a specific service; it's a good practice to employ those users to achieve privilege separation, since it limits the impact of many security breaches. It's security 101, really. If you've

SSH hostnames configuration and shortcuts

This is another old trick, but I like to tell the world about such amenities. I often find people writing command lines such as: ssh arcane-system-user@someextremelylong.andimpossibiletotype.anderrorprone.hostname.com or, worse ssh idliketorememberwhichuser@10.20.30.40 or maybe it was ssh someuserimashamedof@1.2.3.4 yes,

I wish sudo would ask for my password less often

This is a very old trick, but I find many people doesn't know about it yet. If you're using sudo (and you definitely should), one minor complaint is that you need to re-enter your password quite often. One common pseudo-solution is to completely disable the password for executing sudo with

Ubuntu: faster release upgrade

It might be high time to update to the latest Ubuntu 14.04. I think that the upgrade process that is provided by Canonical is slightly underoptimal: if you're using a local mirror which can provide a very fast download of all packages, they'll usually be disabled during the upgrade

apt-get update: fixing 'package index files are corrupted'

Sometimes when performing your daily apt-get update, you'll experience messages like E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened. or The package index files are corrupted Such messages usually don't go away for quite a long time, and may prevent legitimate updates from installing. This

ssh client: stopping key verification complaints inside your own private network

If you develop enough software, most probably you'll have a test/development network at your service. In such networks, which are usually handled through a virtualization infrastructure, machines come and go very quickly. But ssh clients are usually unhappy about that: alan@melquiades:/etc/ssh$ ssh root@192.168.0.

Thunderbird temporary directory

Whenever you use Thunderbird on Linux you may encounter one annoying behaviour. If you open a message which is got an attachment - you just need to open the message, not to save the attachment! - Thunderbird will place such attachment in our temporary directory, usually /tmp. You find the