Luke Reynolds

Recovering deleted files from a FAT filesystem on Linux

Data recovery of deleted files from the FAT filesystem

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Although FAT32 or FAT16 are very old file systems, which is reflected in their poor performance in comparison to other file system alternatives, they are still widely used by many electronic devices. Usually, these devices include USB sticks, digital cameras, camcorders and other peripheral storage devices.

There’s a good chance that you own and store personal data on a device with the FAT filesystem. If you accidentally delete important data from the device, we’ve got good news for you: it can be recovered on Linux.

In this guide, we’ll go over the step by step instructions to recover deleted data from the FAT filesystem on Linux. Read on as we use the testdisk command to perform file recovery.

In this tutorial you will learn:

  • How to create a low level backup of FAT filesystem
  • How to install testdisk tool on major Linux distros
  • How to use testdisk to recover deleted files from FAT

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USB stick encryption using Linux

USB stick encryption using Linux

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If you were to ever lose your USB stick, all data stored on it will be lost. More importantly, your USB stick may end up in the hands of some other person, which will have access to your private files, and use that information in any way they please. This is one of many fears of USB stick users. One of the simplest solutions to this dilemma is to keep only non-private information on the USB stick. Obviously, this would defeat a primary purpose for the storage device.

Another solution is to encrypt your USB stick so it will be accessible only to those users who possess the correct password which will fit to decrypt the USB stick’s encryption. This article will deal with the second solution and that is encryption of a USB stick device. Although encrypting an USB stick seems to be the best and easiest solution, it must be said that it also comes with number of disadvantages. The first disadvantage is that decryption of the USB key must be done using a Linux system that has the dm-crypt module installed.

In other words, you cannot use your encrypted USB stick on any Windows machine and UNIX-like system with older kernels. Therefore, to encrypt only a part of the USB stick which holds only private information seems to be a good solution. In this article, we will go through the step by step instructions of encrypting part of a USB device on Linux. Read on to see how it’s done.

In this tutorial you will learn:

  • How to install cryptsetup on major Linux distros
  • How to partition a USB stick
  • How to encrypt a USB stick partition
  • How to mount encrypted partition

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Configuring and testing a BIND nameserver on Linux

Linux DNS server BIND configuration

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The BIND DNS software is one of the most reliable and proven ways to configure name resolution on a Linux system. Having been around since the 1980s, it remains the most popular Domain Name Server (DNS) currently in use. This article serves as a quick configuration manual of a Linux DNS server using BIND.

This article is not an introduction to DNS or an explanation of how the protocol works. Rather we will simply concentrate on a simple configuration of a custom zone and config file for a given domain / host supporting www and mail services. Follow along with the instructions below to get BIND DNS set up and configured on your own server.

WARNING
Before you proceed with the installation and configuration of BIND nameserver, make sure that BIND DNS server is exactly what you want. Default setup and execution of BIND on Debian or Ubuntu may take around 200MB of RAM with no zones added to the config file. Unless you reduce the memory usage of a BIND via various BIND “options” config settings, be prepared to have some spare RAM available just for this service. This fact is even more important if you pay for your own VPS server.

In this tutorial you will learn:

  • How to install BIND on major Linux distros
  • How to create a DNS zone file
  • How to configure address to name mappings
  • How to check BIND zone file and configuration
  • How to start or restart the BIND DNS service
  • How to test a BIND configuration with dig command

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How to crack a wireless WEP key using aircrack-ng

How to crack a wireless WEP key using AIR Crack

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This article shortly describes simple steps on how to crack a wireless WEP key using aircrack-ng software. This can be done by sniffing a wireless network, capturing encrypted packets and running appropriate encryption cracking program in an attempt to decrypt captured data. WEP ( Wired Equivalent Privacy ) is quite easy to crack as it uses only one key to encrypt all traffic.

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Getting to know the hardware of your Linux box

Getting to know the hardware of your Linux box

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When you buy a new PC, laptop, or server and install a Linux distribution, you want to know what hardware is actually installed in the Linux box and more importantly which piece of hardware is supported by the kernel out of the box and which needs special tweaking with modules to get it to work.

This guide features a list of command line examples which should help you to troubleshoot your hardware and find some information about it. This is not an ultimate troubleshooting guide but certainly will serve as a good starting point. Note that some commands may not be available for your platform by default, and some commands may be specific to certain distributions.

In this tutorial you will learn:

  • How to see what hardware is installed via Linux commands

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USB token authentication on Linux

USB token authentication on Linux

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This article describes a method how to use a USB memory device as an authentication token to log in into a Linux system instead of traditional password. This can be accomplished by use of Pluggable Authentication Modules ( PAM ) and some sort of USB storage device such as USB memory stick of Mobile phone with SD card attached.

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How to synchronize time with NTPD time server

How to synchronize time with NTPD time server

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NTP stands for Network Time Protocol and is used for clock synchronization across multiple computers. An NTP server is responsible for keeping a set of computers in sync with each other. There are NTPD servers available over the internet to which you can sync, or you can run your own NTPD server and configure client computers to sync their times to it.

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