nixCraft: Linux Tips, Hacks, Tutorials, And Ideas In Blog Format

Download of the day: Half-Life 2 For Steam on Linux

nixCraft — Fri, 10 May 2013 10:05:18 +0000

The first-person shooter Half-Life 2 released for Steam on Linux. I truly enjoyed Counter Strike, and I am going to install Half-Life 2 this weekend.

Download of The Day: Debian Linux 7 ( Wheezy )

nixCraft — Sun, 05 May 2013 07:23:20 +0000

Debian GNU/Linux version 7.0 Wheezy has been released ( jump to download ) after many months of constant development and available for download in various media format. Debian 7.0 is a free operating system includes various new features such as multiarch support, several specific tools to deploy private clouds, an improved installer, and a complete set of multimedia codecs and front-ends which remove the need for third-party repositories.

Apache / Nginx: Visualize Web Server Access Log In Real Time

nixCraft — Wed, 01 May 2013 11:30:49 +0000

Logstalgia (also known as ApachePong) is a very powerful and handy app. It is a website access log visualization tool. It is an extremely useful tool to give you look at your web server traffic. I often use this kind of software to justify and convince my clients and/or boss that we need more servers to handle traffic. It streams Apache / Lighttpd / Nginx web-server access logs as a pong-like battle between the web server and a never ending torrent of requests.

Amazon AWS Route 53 GEO DNS Configurations

nixCraft — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 07:42:31 +0000

You can send visitors to different servers based on country of their IP address using Amazon Route 53 cloud based dns server. For example, if you have a server in Amsterdam, a server in America, and a server in Singapore, then you can easily route traffic for visitors in Europe to the Amsterdam server, people in Asia go to the Singapore server and those in the rest of the world be served by the American server. This will results into the various kinds of benefits such as:

Better performance as you are sending web site visitors to their nearest web server.
Reduced load on origin.
Geomarketing/online advertising.
Restricting content to those geolocated in specific countries (I am not a big fan of DRM).
In some cases you can get potentially lower costs and more.

In this post, I will explain how to configure and test GeoDNS using AWS Route 53 service.

Top 8 Tools To Search Memory Under Linux / Unix [ Forensics Analysis ]

nixCraft — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 22:04:03 +0000

You can dump Linux or Unix server memory. This is useful for forensics analysis, and testing your own system. This is often desirable to see:

What code and what data actually resides in memory.
You can search for specific pids memory.
Search memory for string and other data such as passwords.
Works as add-on tool for gdb and others.
Search/replace/dump memory from running processes and core files.
All kinds of deep hacking activities that simply saves your time and solve problems.

Download of the day: Kali Linux ( BackTrack Linux )

nixCraft — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:24:51 +0000

Kali Linux is the successor of the BackTrack Penetration Testing Linux distribution has been released. From the official project page:

Kali is a complete re-build of BackTrack Linux, adhering completely to Debian development standards. All-new infrastructure has been put in place, all tools were reviewed and packaged, and we use Git for our VCS.

Solaris / Linux: nicstat Command Show Network Interface Card Statistics

nixCraft — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 22:37:44 +0000

The nicstat command is top like utility for network interface card (NIC). It displays information and statistics about all your network card such as packets, kilobytes per second, average packet sizes and more. It works under Solaris and Linux operating systems.

In this post, I will explain how to install and use the nicstat command to find out stats about your NICs under Debian / Ubuntu / RHEL / CentOS Linux operating systems.

Book Review: The Book Of Gimp

nixCraft — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 05:44:09 +0000

I usually use GIMP (the "GNU Image Manipulation Program") for editing photos, changing colors, resizing photos, applying significant effects and more. It is a free software alternative to Adobe Photoshop. It is also quite popular with graphics artists and webmasters who wants to edit digital images. GIMP is not just a Linux specific program. It works on all leading operating systems, i.e., Mac OS X, MS-Windows and Unix variants. However, like many other powerful open source software, GIMP can be difficult to master. There are many options and plugins. So if, you are looking to learn or master the GIMP program, give The Book of GIMP a try.

Read more: "Book Review: The Book Of Gimp"

Amazon Cloudfront Dynamic Content Delivery With A WordPress Blog

nixCraft — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 20:13:59 +0000

A typical Wordpress blog contains a mix of static stuff such as images, javascript, style sheets and dynamic content such as posts, pages and comments posted by users. You can speed up your blog by serving static content via content delivery network such as Akamai, Edgecast and so on. The big boys of CDN business also offered the solution to accelerate dynamic content to improve the performance and reliability of the blog. However, solutions offered by big and traditional CDNs are expensive. Amazon cloudfront recently started to serving dynamic content at lowered price. In this blog post, I will explain:

How to serve your entire blog using cloudfront.
DNS settings.
Wordpress settings.
Documenting limitations of cloudfront.
Documenting performance improvements.

Download Of The Day: Fedora Linux 18 (Spherical Cow) DVD

nixCraft — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 16:37:45 +0000

Fedora Linux version 18 has been released and available for download. Fedora Linux is a community based Linux distribution. Fedora Linux is considered as the third most popular Linux distribution, behind Ubuntu and Mint for desktop usage. The new version comes with several new features such as - an installer that is rewritten and redesigned from the ground up, GNOME v3.6, KDE v4.9, Xfce v4.10, better network security with firewalld, Linux kernel v3.6, Python v3.3, Ruby on Rails v3.0, and much more.