Half a year ago, I bought an Asus Eee PC 1000HE netbook. The first thing I did was wiping Windows XP off the disk and installing Ubuntu Jaunty Netbook Remix. When I bought the netbook, I knew support for the wireless chip (AR928X, according to lspci) was limited, but things …
read moreOther articles
An IMAP Configuration for Mutt
Usually, I download all my email via fetchmail, sort it into folders using procmail and read the mails with mutt. This works reasonably well and I've been using this mail setup without major changes for about 10 years. Since I recently bought a netbook, I also wanted to read mails …
read moreUnderstanding the find(1) Utility
The Unix find(1) utility is a powerful tool, yet few people really understand how it works. It may be a bit confusing at first, but a programmer who knows his boolean algebra should be able to wrap his head around the basic concepts without much trouble.
You've probably seen …
read moreRsync Snapshot Backups Revisited
A while ago, I blogged about my self-made backup solution, a simple shell script using rsync to create snapshot backups. This wasn't my first attempt at establishing backups for my private workstation but the most successful one so far. The backup takes less than 5 minutes for about 10 GB …
read moreRsync Backups For External Disks
SSH Public Key Authentication
A lot of people use SSH to log into remote hosts. SSH is secure and works well, but if you have to access many hosts with long, well-chosen passwords there is a lot of typing to do just for authentication.
In this article I'll walk you through a basic public …
read moreTransparent Directory Encryption
In a previous article, I discussed sshfs, a user mode filesystem based on FUSE for accessing remote files. Another useful filesystem type is encfs which provides transparent encryption of directories. With encfs, files are stored encrypted in a special directory under encfs' control. The encryption algorithm and password are specified …
read moreMounting Directories via SSH
For mounting directories from a remote machine, usually NFS or SMB/CIFS is used which requires a running file server. On many linux servers, however, all you have is a shell account, so file transfer has to be done via scp.
Using the FUSE Linux kernel module, which provides user …
read moreControlling Firefox via Command Line
Mozilla-based browsers like Firefox have inherited a useful feature from the good old Netscape Navigator: Controlling a running browser instance via the command line. Using command line options, you can open URLs or files inside your browser window without having to enter them in the address bar.
Suppose you're working …
read more