Linux tip

Miscellaneous tips for mortal Linux users and system administrators.

Renaming multiple files

If you need to rename a larger number of files following a certain pattern then you will long for an automated solution. The 'rename' command helps you here that is (at least on my Debian installation) part of the Perl installation. All you need to know is the basics of regular expressions to define how the renaming should happen.

Pipes and redirection

Many system administrators seem to have problems with the concepts of pipes and redirection in a shell. A coworker recently asked me how to deal with log files. How to find the information he was looking for. This article tries to shed some light on it.

Creating video DVDs from DVB-S streams with Debian

After I went from analog cable TV reception to a shiny satellite dish on our roof I was facing new challenges. Like how the hell do I watch TV on my workstation now and how do I record programmes to DVD now? Luckily the watching part was a cakewalk thanks to kaffeine. The great KDE media player was surprisingly capable in helping me find my hundreds of (mostly useless) TV and radio channels pouring from the sky. And it has a timer function, a simple EPG (that really needs some love) and a recording feature for DVB-S transport streams. So much for that.

How to create a favicon for your web site

If you like to create a tiny favicon for your web site (the little icon displayed left of the URL in your browser) there is not much you need to know:

  • apt-get install netpbm

  • Create a bitmap of 16x16 pixels (Gimp is recommended)
  • Save the bitmap as .ppm format (select "raw mode")
  • Convert the file using ppmtowinicon favicon.ppm > favicon.ico

Using tcpdump and Wireshark to sniff and analyse your network traffic

Sometimes a network service is just not behaving the way it should. And the log files do not help you either. Then it is time to use the power of tcpdump and Wireshark to get a deeper look on what is actually happening on the wire.

If you have an X11 running on the host in question you may just start Wireshark and start recording the traffic. However often you need to record traffic that is running on a machine you can just login through SSH. Don't panic - you can still analyze the traffic.

Mounting flash sticks or memory cards on Debian

Usually modern desktop Linux distributions make it easy to automatically mount external storage media like USB flash sticks. But if all else fails this article may help you.

Bacula Cheat Sheet

Bacula is a nifty backup software that is network-capable and stores data in the database for faster retrieval in case you need a certain file back. As a big fan of cheat sheets I created this cheat sheet.

DocBook Cheat Sheet

This reference is incomplete. Just use it to find out how to enter certain contents into your document. See http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/ for the real fun. For an introduction on how to write DocBook/XML documents please see my DocBook introduction.

Overview of the DocBook format

1. What is DocBook?

DocBook is an XML based standard, which is used in many of today's documentation tasks. Practically speaking, when you want to create a DocBook document source, you write XML files which describe the document's layout, paragraph devision and more attributes. XML file structure might look familiar to you if you have seen HTML code before. XML tends to be an improvment over the more "ancient" HTML specification and can be used to produce complete web pages and other markup documents.

Christoph's iptables firewall script

You probably have a computer connected to the internet. How else would you be reading this. As the internet is no friendly place any more you should make sure your computer is protected appropriately. For a while I used the Firewall Builder (fwbuilder) but then decided that managing my firewall rules with iptables in a shell script is much easier (and above all does not require to have a computer with a graphical user interface in my vicinity). This article contains a simple shell script to help you maintain firewall rules using the 'iptables' program on Linux. It's a simple way to set up a firewall without any additional tools.

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