As you know, Red Hat recently announced that CentOS Linux 8, as a rebuild of RHEL 8, will end in 2021. CentOS Stream continues after that date, serving as the upstream (development) branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The news met with a strong reaction from the open-source community and CentOS users. Today, Red Hat released a new option where RHEL developer subscriptions can now be used in production environments. The developers and team can have up to 16 systems. In other words, it is a no-cost RHEL that small groups and developers can use to build packages and in production environments.
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We use the df command to show how much disk space is free on mounted file systems in Linux, macOS, and Unix-like systems. We also have the du command to estimate file space usage. We now have another fancy and fantastic looking tool called duf to display statistics on free disk space in Unix, Linux, macOS, *BSD, Android, and Windows written in Golang.
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On Linux, we encrypt our partitions and entire disk using Linux Unified Key Setup-on-disk-format (LUKS) for security and privacy reasons. We unlock LUKS protected disk by providing a passphrase at boot time. You need to be in front of your computer or use a remote console to open the encrypted disk under Linux at boot time. However, if your system is in the basement, remote datacenter/office, or upstairs office, you won’t able to unlock and boot your Linux box. We can use the Dropbear SSH server for LUKS encrypted Debian or Ubuntu or any other Linux distro via SSH to solve this problem. Let us see how to unlock LUKS using Dropbear SSH keys in Linux at boot time.
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The last ten years in the computer and IT security world are crippled with so many vulnerabilities. We saw massive cloud computing adoption and end-users using mobile devices with high speed 4G LTE networks. A threat actor may have exploited such weakness in modern computers and networks. Let us look into top vulnerabilities and the attack surface in this decade (2010-2020) that affected Linux/Unix, macOS, IT, cloud-computing, and computers in general.
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A text editor is an essential tool for both developers and sysadmin, especially when dealing with text based sessions. We use a text editor to create, edit, and update text. A text editor is used for many things. Some use them to write documents. Some people write code and others use it to edit Linux and Unix configuration files locally or remote servers running in the cloud. Let us see the top 6 text editors for Linux, macOS, and Unix command-line users/developers.
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We use encryption to protect mobile devices. For instance, I always use LUKS disk encryption to protect all files stored on my SSD. Dm-crypt (Cryptsetup and LUKS) open-source disk encryption is transparent disk encryption and a great way to keep your data secure. However, changing passphrase is a bit of a challenge for new Linux users and developers. This step-by-step guide explains how to find LUKS slots assigned to you and change your passphrase on a Debian/Ubuntu, CentOS/RHEL, OpenSUSE/SUSE other Linux distros.
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The bashtop is an impressive Linux resource monitor that shows usage and stats for processor, memory, disks, and network. However, it suffers from bash itself, and cross-platform support is a nightmare. Now we have the Python port of bashtop. We can use a resource monitor that shows usage and stats for CPU, RAM, SSD (hard disk), network, and processes information in a lovely format.
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As you know, Red Hat and IBM shocked the Linux community by killing CentOS 8 stable. There will be no CentOS Linux. Red Hat announced that there would be only CentOS Stream, which will act as a rolling version, and it will be used as next RHEL. Now we have a possible alternative called Rocky Linux.
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Current GNU/Bash maintainer Chet Ramey announced the latest major release, Bash 5.1, on December 7th, 2020. Bash is the default shell on many Linux distros and popular among developers, especially those working with Linux containers. It is the fifth major release of bash. It came with a new enhanced random number generation and added a new variable called SRANDOM. Let us see how to install and use newly released GNU/BASH 5.1 on Linux.
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