administration

ubuntu-grub-menu

How to boot Ubuntu 18.04 into emergency and rescue mode

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Objective

Learning about systemd emergency and rescue targets and how to boot the system into them

Requirements

  • No special requirements

Difficulty

EASY

Conventions

  • # – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either
    directly as a root user or by use of sudo command
  • $ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user

Introduction

Systemd has nowadays become the de facto standard init system for all the major Linux distributions.

Superseding SysV and upstart, it also replaced the classical way of defining system runlevels, using system targets, a special type of unit.

In this tutorial we will see how to boot an Ubuntu 18.04 system into the emergency and rescue systemd targets, and what kind of environment they provide to the users.

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How to deny all incoming ports except FTP port 20 and 21 on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver Linux

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Objective

The objective is to enable UFW firewall, deny all incoming ports however only allow FTP port 20 and 21 on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver Linux

Operating System and Software Versions

  • Operating System: – Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver

Requirements

Privileged access to your Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver will be required.

Difficulty

EASY

Conventions

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cockpit_logo

How to install cockpit on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver

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Objective

Learn how to install and take advantage of cockpit on an Ubuntu 18.04 machine

Requirements

  • Root permissions

Difficulty

EASY

Conventions

  • # – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either
    directly as a root user or by use of sudo command
  • $ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user

cockpit_logo

Introduction

Cockpit is a web-based system administration service, which let us manage machines in a nice and easy way. Its aim is to simplify daily administration tasks, including resources, network and users monitoring and management.

Originally available for the Rhel distributions family, it was possible to install it on Ubuntu 16.04 by using an external ppa. With Ubuntu 18.04 it has been included in the official repositories, therefore its installation has become even simpler and safer.

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Command-line programs for everyday use in Linux

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Introduction

I must admit, I’m a command line geek. Whenever I have the chance, regardless of desktop environment or distribution, I open a terminal and start fiddling something. This does not mean everyone must be like me, of course. If you’re the person who is mouse and GUI-oriented, no problems. However, there are situations when all you have at your disposal for a while is the command line. One of those situations might be an upgrade of your kernel/graphics drivers that leave you high and dry until the bug is reported and the developers look at the issue. You have to send a very important e-mail or you have to check the evolution of prices of your favorite laptop. All the essential desktop tasks (with some exceptions, though) that you do on a GUI-enabled machine can be done on a CLI-only machine as well, so if you’re interested…

The tasks

The everyday tasks we will refer to are the ones we usually do in a usual day, be it a work day or a weekend. We need to check our mail, maybe watch something on Youtube (yes, it’s possible), chat with our friends or simply browse away from URL to URL. These are the kinds of things we are talking about in this article. By the way, another huge advantage of the CLI approach is (besides efficiency and low resources) uniformity. You don’t have to worry, if you use many Linux computers, that some of them won’t have your favorite desktop installed: these programs we will tell you about work everywhere, GUI available or not, as long as you have a terminal emulator installed, of course. Note that this article is comprised only of ideas and suggestions, and will not guide you step-by-step on how to use the presented applications.

Web browsing

It’s true, you can’t see images , but they are practical to have, way faster and even more secure, because some of them don’t even support Javascript unless you tweak their compile options. Ladies and gents, I give you links, elinks and lynx. You can install them on almost any distribution with the native package manager, or you can install them from source, and of course compilation will not take a lot, because there are no heavy dependencies. links also offers a command-line flag (-g from graphical) that, if compiled with the right options, will offer you a very simple but fast GUI browser.

On Debian, when I wanted to do ‘links -g’, I got “Graphics not enabled when compiling (use links2 instead for graphics mode)”. After installing it, typing

  $ links2 -g

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