Mostly Unixish is where I collect some good tips and tricks for Linux, MacOS X and (sometimes) other *nixes.
Mostly Unixish
I seem very ancientwisdom-oriented these days. Sometimes you've got a system user on your linux server that's used to run a specific service; it's a good practice to employ those users to achieve privilege separation, since it limits the impact of many security breaches.
Mostly Unixish
This is another old trick, but I like to tell the world about such amenities. I often find people writing command lines such as: ssh arcane-system-user@someextremelylong.andimpossibiletotype.anderrorprone.hostname.com or, worse ssh idliketorememberwhichuser@10.20.30.40 or maybe it was ssh someuserimashamedof@1.2.3.4 yes,
Mostly Unixish
This is a very old trick, but I find many people doesn't know about it yet. If you're using sudo (and you definitely should), one minor complaint is that you need to re-enter your password quite often. One common pseudo-solution is to completely disable the password
Mostly Unixish
It might be high time to update to the latest Ubuntu 14.04. I think that the upgrade process that is provided by Canonical is slightly underoptimal: if you're using a local mirror which can provide a very fast download of all packages, they'll usually be
Mostly Unixish
UPDATED: 26th January 2015, with Tomcat 8 support. Today I'm gonna share something that I figured out some times ago: how do I keep my tomcat installation up to date on my servers? Of course I'm not willing to automatically switch majors, but I'd
Mostly Unixish
Sometimes you would like to use an http URL as the source file for puppet; while it's being discussed since long, no implementation has been created so far. Of course it would be better to periodically download the file from its http source to the puppet master, and
Mostly Unixish
Sometimes you need to write a quick shell script; many a time, you need to put it on a server, and launch it every now and then, or run it in a cron job. That script may end up doing something important and/or altering the state of the server
Mostly Unixish
Sometimes when performing your daily apt-get update, you'll experience messages like E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened. or The package index files are corrupted Such messages usually don't go away for quite a long time, and may prevent legitimate
Mostly Unixish
I find it extremely handy to be able to recall my windows by just using the keyboard. It's pretty easy to do in Linux, just use: wmctrl -x -R <WM_CLASS> you can find the WM_CLASS of any window using this command: xprop | grep WM_
Mostly Unixish
* UPDATE: modern ssh-copy-id often support a -p parameter for the port. So this trick is unnecessary and won't probably work. ssh-copy-id is a cool script which is usually distributed along openssh client nowadays; it performs an automatic install of your local public SSH key to a remote server.
Mostly Unixish
If you develop enough software, most probably you'll have a test/development network at your service. In such networks, which are usually handled through a virtualization infrastructure, machines come and go very quickly. But ssh clients are usually unhappy about that: alan@melquiades:/etc/ssh$ ssh root@192.
Mostly Unixish
Whenever you use Thunderbird on Linux you may encounter one annoying behaviour. If you open a message which is got an attachment - you just need to open the message, not to save the attachment! - Thunderbird will place such attachment in our temporary directory, usually /tmp. You find the