Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading: Scary Tales from the Server Room

Carlie Fairchild — Sat, 30 Mar 2019 12:00:00 +0000

It's always better to learn from someone else's mistakes than from your own. This weekend we feature Kyle Rankin and Bill Childers as they tell stories from their years as systems administrators. It's a win-win: you get to learn from their experiences, and they get to make snide comments to each other.

It's Always DNS's Fault!

by Kyle Rankin and Bill Childers

I was suffering, badly. We had just finished an all-night switch migration on our production Storage Area Network while I was hacking up a lung fighting walking pneumonia. Even though I did my part of the all-nighter from home, I was exhausted. So when my pager went off at 9am that morning, allowing me a mere four hours of sleep, I was treading dangerously close to zombie territory...

Zoning Out

by Kyle Rankin and Bill Childers

Sometimes events and equipment conspire against you and your team to cause a problem. Occasionally, however, it's lack of understanding or foresight that can turn around and bite you. Unfortunately, this is a tale of where we failed to spot all the possible things that might go wrong.

Panic on the Streets of London

by Kyle Rankin and Bill Childers

I was now at the next phase of troubleshooting: prayer. Somewhere around this time, I had my big breakthrough...

Unboxing Day

by Kyle Rankin and Bill Childers

As much as I love working with Linux and configuring software, one major part of being a sysadmin that always has appealed to me is working with actual hardware. There's something about working with tangible, physical servers that gives my job an extra dimension and grounds it from what might otherwise be a completely abstract job even further disconnected from reality. On top of all that, when you get a large shipment of servers, and you view the servers at your company as your servers, there is a similar anticipation and excitement when you open a server box as when you open Christmas presents at home. This story so happens to start during the Christmas season...

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Weekend Reading: Do-It-Yourself Projects

Carlie Fairchild — Sat, 23 Mar 2019 10:00:00 +0000

by Carlie Fairchild

Join us this weekend as we bring the DIY movement back. Not only is it a chance to start working on those ideas you've been putting off for months, but it's also a great way to learn while playing.

Why You Should Do It Yourself

by Kyle Rankin

Bring back the DIY movement and start with your own Linux servers.

It wasn't very long ago that we lived in a society where it was a given that average people would do things themselves. There was a built-in assumption that you would perform basic repairs on household items, do general maintenance and repairs on your car, mow your lawn, cook your food and patch your clothes. The items around you reflected this assumption with visible and easy-to-access screws, spare buttons sewn on the bottom of shirts and user-replaceable parts. Through the years though, culture has changed toward one more focused on convenience.

Building a Voice-Controlled Front End to IoT Devices

by Michael J. Hammel

Apple, Google and Amazon are taking voice control to the next level. But can voice control be a DIY project? Turns out, it can. And, it isn't as hard as you might think.

This article covers the Jarvis project, a Java application for capturing audio, translating to text, extracting and executing commands and vocally responding to the user. It also explores the programming issues related to integrating these components for programmed results. That means there is no machine learning or neural networks involved. The end goal is to have a selection of key words cause a specific method to be called to perform an action.

Two Portable DIY Retro Gaming Consoles

by Kyle Rankin

A look at Adafruit's PiGRRL Zero vs. Hardkernel's ODROID-GO.

If you enjoy retro gaming, there are so many options, it can be tough to know what to get. The choices range from officially sanctioned systems from Nintendo all the way to homemade RetroPie projects like I've covered in Linux Journal in the past. Of course, those systems are designed to be permanently attached to a TV. But, what if you want to play retro games on the road?

Build a Custom Minimal Linux Distribution from Source

by Petros Koutoupis

Follow along with this step-by-step guide to build your own distribution from source and learn how it installs, loads and runs.

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Weekend Reading: Tor and Tails

Carlie Fairchild — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 14:04:18 +0000

by Carlie Fairchild

Tails is a live media Linux distro designed to boot into a highly secure desktop environment. Tor is a browser that prevents somebody watching your internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location.

Learn why anonymity matters and how you can protect yourself with this Linux Journal Weekend Reading.

T or Hidden Services

Why should clients get all the privacy? Give your servers some privacy too!

Tails above the Rest: the Installation

How to get and validate the Tails distribution and install it. We will follow up with what Tails can and can't do to protect your privacy, and how to use Tails in a way that minimizes your risk. Then we will finish with some more advanced features of Tails, including the use of a persistent volume (with this feature, depending on your needs, you could conceivably use Tails as your main Linux distribution).

Tails above the Rest, Part II

Now that you have Tails installed, let's start using it. Read on to find out how to get started.

Tails above the Rest, Part III

In the first two parts on this series, we gave an overview of Tails, including how to get the distribution securely, and once you have it, how to use some of the basic tools. Here, we cover some of the more advanced features of Tails, such as some of its log-in options, its suite of encryption tools and the persistent disk.

Tor Security for Android and Desktop Linux

The Tor Project presents an effective countermeasure against hostile and disingenuous carriers and ISPs that, on a properly rooted and capable Android device or Linux system, can force all network traffic through Tor encrypted entry points (guard nodes) with custom rules for iptables. This action renders all device network activity opaque to the upstream carrier—barring exceptional intervention, all efforts to track a user are afterwards futile.

A Bundle of Tor

The best way to set up Tor on your personal machine.

Dolphins in the NSA Dragnet

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Weekend Reading: Science

Carlie Fairchild — Sat, 09 Mar 2019 13:38:17 +0000

by Carlie Fairchild

Mathematics and science tools often depend on cluster and high performance computing, both undeniably Linux strengths. Couple that with the maturity of the science tools available for Linux and you get a lot of computational bang for your buck. Join us this weekend as we review physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and other science programs for Linux.

Open Science Means Open Source--Or, at Least, It Should

Why open source was actually invented in 1665.

Getting Started with Scilab

Introducing one of the larger scientific lab packages for Linux.

A Look at KDE's KAlgebra

This article looks at one of the programs specifically available in the KDE desktop environment, KAlgebra.

Atomic Modeling with GAMGI

General Atomistic Modelling Graphic Interface, or GAMGI, provides a very complete set of tools that allows you to design and visualize fairly complex molecules.

Drawing Feynman Diagrams for Fun and Profit with JaxoDraw

In physics, there's a powerful technique for visualizing particle interactions at the quantum level. This technique uses something called Feynman diagrams, invented by physicist Richard Feynman. These diagrams help visualize what happens when one or more particles have some kind of interaction.

Visualizing Molecules with EasyChem

Introducing EasyChem, a program that generates publication-quality images of molecular structures.

Astronomy Software by Any Other Name

Similar to other larger astronomy programs, you can use SkyChart from the desktop to the observatory.

Modeling the Entire Universe

For this article, I want to look at the largest thing possible, the whole universe. At least, that's the claim made by Celestia, the software package I'm introducing here.

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Weekend Reading: FOSS Projects

Carlie Fairchild — Sat, 02 Mar 2019 13:15:15 +0000

by Carlie Fairchild

Linux Journal's FOSS Project Spotlights provide an opportunity for free and open-source project team members to show Linux Journal readers what makes their project compelling. Join us this weekend as we explore some of the latest FOSS projects in the works.

FOSS Project Spotlight: Mender.io, an Open-Source Over-the-Air Software Update Manager for IoT Devices

by Ralph Nguyen

Mender is an open-source (Apache 2.0) project to address over-the-air (OTA) software update management for Linux-based IoT devices.

FOSS Project Spotlight: Nitrux, a Linux Distribution with a Focus on AppImages and Atomic Upgrades

by Nitrux Latinoamericana S.C.

Nitrux is a Linux distribution with a focus on portable, application formats like AppImages. Nitrux uses KDE Plasma 5 and KDE Applications, and it also uses our in-house software suite Nomad Desktop.

FOSS Project Spotlight: Tutanota, the First Encrypted Email Service with an App on F-Droid

by Matthias Pfau

Seven years ago, Tutanota was being built, an encrypted email service with a strong focus on security, privacy and open source. Long before the Snowden revelations, the Tutanota team felt there was a need for easy-to-use encryption that would allow everyone to communicate online without being snooped upon.

FOSS Project Spotlight: LinuxBoot

by David Hendricks

Linux as firmware.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. That may sound cliché, but it's still as true for the firmware that boots your operating system as it was in 2001 when Linux Journal first published Eric Biederman's "About LinuxBIOS". LinuxBoot is the latest incarnation of an idea that has persisted for around two decades now: use Linux as your bootstrap.

FOSS Project Spotlight: CloudMapper, an AWS Visualization Tool

by Scott Piper

Duo Security has released CloudMapper, an open-source tool for visualizing Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environments.

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Weekend Reading: All Things Bash

Carlie Fairchild — Sat, 12 Jan 2019 13:45:21 +0000

by Carlie Fairchild

Bash is a shell and command language. It is distributed widely as the default login shell for most Linux distributions. We've rounded up some of the most popular Bash-related articles for your weekend reading.

Writing More Compact Bash Code

By Mitch Frazier

In most programming languages, non-scripting ones at least, you want to avoid uninitialized variables. In bash, using uninitialized variables can often simplify your code.

Normalizing Filenames and Data with Bash

By Dave Taylor

URLify: convert letter sequences into safe URLs with hex equivalents.

Roman Numerals and Bash

By Dave Taylor

Fun with retro-coding a Roman numeral converter—Dave heads back to his college years and solves homework anew!

Also read Dave's followup article, More Roman Numerals and Bash.

Create Dynamic Wallpaper with a Bash Script

By Patrick Wheelan

Harness the power of bash and learn how to scrape websites for exciting new images every morning.

Developing Console Applications with Bash

By Andy Carlson

Bring the power of the Linux command line into your application development process.

Parsing an RSS News Feed with a Bash Script

By Jim Hall

I can automate an hourly job to retrieve a copy of an RSS feed, parse it, and save the news items to a local file that the website can incorporate. That reduces complexity on the website, with only a little extra work by parsing the RSS news feed with a Bash script.

Hacking a Safe with Bash

By Adam Kosmin

Being a minimalist, I have little interest in dealing with GUI applications that slow down my work flow or application-specific solutions (such as browser password vaults) that are applicable only toward a subset of my sensitive data. Working with text files affords greater flexibility over how my data is structured and provides the ability to leverage standard tools I can expect to find most anywhere.

Graph Any Data with Cacti!

By Shawn Powers

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Weekend Reading: Multimedia

Carlie Fairchild — Sat, 29 Dec 2018 12:45:00 +0000

by Carlie Fairchild

Put the fun back in computing. With this weekend's reading, we encourage you to build yourself an internet radio station, create your own Audible or even live-stream your pets on YouTube. Sky's the limit with Linux. Enjoy!

Building Your Own Audible

by Shawn Powers

I have audiobooks from a variety of sources, which I've purchased in a variety of ways. I have some graphic audio books in MP3 format, a bunch of Audible books in their DRM'd format and ripped CDs varying from m4b (Apple format for books) to MP3 and even some OGG. That diversity makes choosing a listening platform difficult. Here I take a quick look at some options for streaming audio books.

Linux Gets Loud

by Joshua Curry

Linux is ready for prime time when it comes to music production. New offerings from Linux audio developers are pushing creative and technical boundaries. And, with the maturity of the Linux desktop and growth of standards-based hardware setups, making music with Linux has never been easier.

Using gphoto2 to Automate Taking Pictures

by Shawn Powers

With my obsession—er, I mean hobby—regarding BirdCam, I've explored a great number of camera options. Whether that means trying to get Raspberry Pi cameras to focus for a macro shot of a feeder or adjusting depth of field to blur out the neighbor's shed, I've fiddled with just about every webcam setting there is. Unfortunately, when it comes to lens options, nothing beats a DSLR for quality. Thankfully, there's an app for that.

Creating an Internet Radio Station with Icecast and Liquidsoap

by Bill Dengler

Ever wanted to stream prerecorded music or a live event, such as a lecture or concert for an internet audience? With Icecast and Liquidsoap, you can set up a full-featured, flexible internet radio station using free software and open standards.

Live Stream Your Pets with Linux and YouTube!

by Shawn Powers

Anyone who reads Linux Journal knows about my fascination with birdwatching. I've created my own weatherproof video cameras with a Raspberry Pi. I've posted instructions on how to create your own automatically updating camera image page with JavaScript. Heck, I even learned CSS so I could make a mobile-friendly version of BirdCam that filled the screen in landscape mode.

Nativ Vita

by James Gray

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Weekend Reading: Cloud

Carlie Fairchild — Sat, 22 Dec 2018 12:30:00 +0000

by Carlie Fairchild

The cloud has become synonymous with all things data storage. It additionally equates to the many web-centric services accessing that same back-end data storage, but the term also has evolved to mean so much more.

This weekend join us as we explore the cloud.

CloudWatch Is of the Devil, but I Must Use It

by Corey Quinn

Let's talk about Amazon CloudWatch.

Everything You Need to Know about the Cloud and Cloud Computing, Part I

by Petros Koutoupis

An in-depth breakdown of the technologies involved in making up the cloud and a survey of cloud-service providers.

Everything You Need to Know about the Cloud and Cloud Computing, Part II: Using the Cloud

by Petros Koutoupis

How to get started with AWS, install Apache, create an EFS volume and much more.

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Cloud Billing

by Corey Quinn

Cloud billing is inherently complex; it's not just you.

Nextcloud 13: How to Get Started and Why You Should

by Marco Fioretti

In its simplest form, the Nextcloud server is "just" a personal, free software alternative to services like Dropbox or iCloud. You can set it up so your files are always accessible via the internet, from wherever you are, and share them with your friends. However, Nextcloud can do so much more.

Simple Cloud Hardening

by Kyle Rankin

Apply a few basic hardening principles to secure your cloud environment.

Vendor Lock-in: Now in the Cloud!

by Kyle Rankin

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Weekend Reading: Sysadmin 101

Kyle Rankin — Sat, 08 Dec 2018 18:27:16 +0000

by Kyle Rankin

This series covers sysadmin basics. The first article explains how to approach alerting and on-call rotations as a sysadmin. In the second article, I discuss how to automate yourself out of a job, and in the third, I explain why and how you should use tickets. The fourth article covers some of the fundamentals of patch management under Linux, and the fifth and final article describes the overall sysadmin career path and the attributes that might make you a "senior sysadmin" instead of a "sysadmin" or "junior sysadmin", along with some tips on how to level up.

Sysadmin 101: Alerting

In this first article, I cover on-call alerting. Like with any job title, the responsibilities given to sysadmins, DevOps and Site Reliability Engineers may differ, and in some cases, they may not involve any kind of 24x7 on-call duties, if you're lucky. For everyone else, though, there are many ways to organize on-call alerting, and there also are many ways to shoot yourself in the foot.

Sysadmin 101: Automation

Here we cover systems administrator fundamentals. These days, DevOps has made even the job title "systems administrator" seem a bit archaic, much like the "systems analyst" title it replaced. These DevOps positions are rather different from sysadmin jobs in the past. They have a much larger emphasis on software development far beyond basic shell scripting, and as a result, they often are filled by people with software development backgrounds without much prior sysadmin experience. In the past, a sysadmin would enter the role at a junior level and be mentored by a senior sysadmin on the team, but in many cases currently, companies go quite a while with cloud outsourcing before their first DevOps hire. As a result, the DevOps engineer might be thrust into the role at a junior level with no mentor around apart from search engines and Stack Overflow posts.

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Weekend Reading: Qubes

Carlie Fairchild — Sat, 17 Nov 2018 12:29:12 +0000

by Carlie Fairchild

Qubes OS is a security-focused operating system that, as tech editor Kyle Rankin puts it, "is fundamentally different from any other Linux desktop I've used". Join us this weekend in reading Kyle's multi-part series on all things Qubes.

Secure Desktops with Qubes: Introduction

In this first article, I provide an overview of what Qubes is, some of the approaches it takes that are completely different from what you might be used to on a Linux desktop and some of its particularly interesting security features. In future articles, I'll give more how-to guides on installing and configuring it and how to use some of its more-advanced features.

Secure Desktops with Qubes: Installation

This is the second in a multipart series on the Qubes operating system. In my first article, I gave an overall introduction to Qubes and how it differs from most other desktop Linux distributions, namely in the way it focuses on compartmentalizing applications within different VMs to limit what attackers have access to in the event they compromise a VM. This allows you to use one VM for regular Web browsing, another for banking and a different one for storing your GPG keys and password manager. In this article, I follow up with a basic guide on how to download and install Qubes, along with a general overview of the desktop and the various default VM types.

Secure Desktops with Qubes: Compartmentalization

This is the third article in my series about Qubes. In the first two articles, I gave an overview about what Qubes is and described how to install it. One of the defining security features of Qubes is how it lets you compartmentalize your different desktop activities into separate VMs. The idea behind security by compartmentalization is that if one of your VMs is compromised, the damage is limited to just that VM.

Secure Desktops with Qubes: Extra Protection

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