As a Linux administrator, it’s important to keep an eye on how your server (or servers) is performing. One way to measure its performance is to track the CPU usage. This will give you insight into the performance of the system as well as show how the hardware resources are being divided up across the various running services. In this guide, we’ll go over a few methods to check and monitor the CPU utilization on a Linux system. Whether you are in charge of a server or just your personal...

The traditional way to schedule tasks on Linux, is to use the cron daemon , specifying time intervals and commands to be executed in crontabs. Systemd , the relatively new init system now adopted by all the major Linux distributions, among the other things, provides the ability to schedule tasks using dedicated units , called timers . In this article we will learn how they are structured and some examples of their usage. In this tutorial you will learn: The basic structure of systemd timers;...

The objective of this article is to provide the reader with an information on how to test microphone on Linux system. In this tutorial you will learn: How to test Microphone How to record audio via microphone How to play recorded audio

Managing a messy music library can be a serious pain. Even if you ripped all of your music yourself, there's still a pretty good chance that your ripping application got at least a few things wrong. Kid3 is a simple graphical meta tag editor for music files that can help you get everything straightened out. In this tutorial you will learn: How to Install Kid3 How to Edit a Song's Tags How to Change Multiple Files at Once How to Get Album Art

In this guide, you will learn how to setup an Nginx reverse proxy with step by step instructions. We will also explain how a reverse proxy server works and what its advantages are. In addition, we also go over various configuration options that Linux administrators commonly employ on their reverse proxy servers. In this tutorial you will learn: How does a reverse proxy work What are the benefits of a reverse proxy How to setup Nginx reverse proxy How to pass headers How to configure load...

The basic concept involved with the use of the osquery application is the "tabular abstraction" of many aspects of the operating system, such as processes, users, etc. The data is stored in tables which can be queried using SQL syntax, directly via the osqueryi shell, or via the osqueryd daemon. In this tutorial we will see how to install the application, how to run basic queries, and how to use FIM (File Integrity Monitoring) as part of your Linux system administration job . In this tutorial...

Apache web servers can generate a lot of logs. These logs contain information such as the HTTP requests that Apache has handled and responded to, and other activities that are specific to Apache. Analyzing the logs is an important part of administering Apache and ensuring that it runs as expected. In this guide, we’ll go over the different logging options present in Apache and how to interpret this log data. You’ll learn how to analyze the logs that Apache produces and how to configure the...

Using a combination of the youtube-dl script and FFMPEG, you can easily rip audio from YouTube videos and instantly convert it to MP3, OGG, or any other audio format that you prefer for your music library. In this tutorial you will learn: How to Install FFMPEG and youtube-dl How to Download and Convert a YouTube Video How to Convert a Video in One Line and Script It

Disney Plus is super popular, and it's not wonder. The service is loaded with Disney, Marvel, and Star Wars streaming content, including original series. There's one problem for Linux users, though. The operating system isn't officially supported. That's alright, though, it's still popular to stream your favorite shows and movies. In this tutorial you will learn: How to Enable DRM Playback on Firefox How to Spoof Google Chrome on Windows 10 How to Watch Disney Plus on Firefox

Apache Bench is a tool used to measure the performance of a web server. Despite having “Apache” in its name, it can actually be used to test any type of web server. In this tutorial, we’ll go over the steps to use Apache Bench and how to interpret its report about a web server’s performance. Apache Bench works by sending varying amounts of HTTP requests to the web server and recording the response times. It can tell you how much congestion the server can handle before it gets overwhelmed and...

VLC is a popular open source media player, and it's earned its reputation as one of the best. Aside from playing your media files and DVDs, it can do other useful things, like streaming video and ripping DVDs for backups. This guide will help you use VLC to make digital backups of your DVDs on Linux. In this tutorial you will learn: How to Install VLC How to Rip a DVD to Your Hard Drive With VLC

In this article we will be installing Arch Linux on ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7 Laptop. This tutorial contains installation instructions, basic configuration as well as some post-install tuning of Arch Linux to get you started. Most of the instructions are Arch Linux installation generic hence with a simple modifications this tutorial can be used for any UEFI system installations. However, some points are specific to ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7 therefore basic Linux Administration skills are...

Either you have reinstalled your computer or simply wish to make a backup copy of your Chrome/Chromium browser passwords this article will help you to do just that. The Google Chrome/Chromium Import/Export feature is missing by default, mostly due to the security reasons. In this tutorial you will learn: How to export passwords How to import passwords

In a previous article we saw some basic examples of how to use rsync on Linux to transfer data efficiently. As we saw, to synchronize data with a remote machine we can use both a remote shell as ssh or the rsync daemon . In this article we will focus on the latter option, and we will see how to install and configure rsyncd on some of the most used Linux distributions. In this tutorial you will learn: How to install and configure the rsync daemon

Rsync is a very useful tool which allows Linux system administrators synchronize data locally or with a remote filesystem via the ssh protocol or by using the rsync daemon . Using rsync is more convenient than simply copying data, because it is able to spot and synchronize only the differences between a source and a destination. The program has options to preserve standard and extended filesystem permissions, compress the data during transfers and more. We will see the most used ones in this...

Most of the modern Linux Desktop systems come with Nvidia driver pre-installed in a form of the Nouveau open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards. Hence depending on your needs and in most of the situations there is no need for an additional Nvidia Linux Driver installation procedure. The only reason could be that you wish to squeeze as much power as possible from the Nvidia VGA card and in that case you may attempt to install the official proprietary Nvidia Linux driver . Some...

MP3 is still easily the most widly used and widely supported digital audio file format. As a result, working with MP3 tends to be simple, especially on Linux. There was a time when it was still a proprietary format, and required additional packages, but now, converting your MP3 files is a breeze. In this tutorial you will learn: How to Install SoundConverter How to Convert To MP3 How to Convert From MP3

When we delete a file from a filesystem, the data is not physically removed: the operating system simply marks the area previously occupied by the file, as free and makes it available to store new information. The only way to make sure data is actually removed from a device is to override it with other data. We may want to perform such operation for privacy reasons (maybe we plan to sell the device and we want to be sure the new owner cannot access our data), or maybe to prepare a device for...

The dropbear suite provides both an ssh server and a client application (dbclient), and represents a light alternative to OpenSSH . Since it has a small footprint and uses system resources very well, it is generally used on embed devices, with limited memory and processing power (e.g routers or embed devices), where optimization is a key factor. It provides a lot features, like, for example, X11 forwarding , and it is fully compatible with the OpenSSH public key authentication. In this...

In this article we will talk about foremost , a very useful open source forensic utility which is able to recover deleted files using the technique called data carving . The utility was originally developed by the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations, and is able to recover several file types (support for specific file types can be added by the user, via the configuration file). The program can also work on partition images produced by dd or similar tools. In this tutorial...