I'm sure many of you have at least heard of Tiny Core Linux—legends of how small it is, how little it takes it to run a system with it and even now how it's been ported to run on Raspberry Pi. It's an esoteric minimalist distribution.

If you're like me (and you're a Linux Journal reader, so you may actually be like me), you probably rotate through your cell phones and/or tablets every couple years. These little devices are so convenient and have been consistently dropping in price, while their power continues to go up, so you may have a few older devices sitting in a drawer.

If you run a publicly accessible Web server for your own use (and let's face it, if you're reading Linux Journal, there's a very good chance you do), how do you go about limiting the risk of someone accessing your site and doing bad things? How about SSH, an even bigger concern?

pax is one of the lesser known utilities in a typical Linux installation. That's too bad, because pax has a very good feature set, and its command-line options are easy to understand and remember. pax is an archiver, like tar(1), but it's also a better version of cp(1) in some ways, not least because you can use pax with SSH to copy sets of files over a network.

Since the emergence of strong cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services, Google and Rackspace, software development and deployment is increasingly taking place in the cloud.

Do you routinely make changes to more than a dozen machines at a time? Read this article to find out about a tool to make that task much easier.

When I write my column, I try to stick to specific hacks or tips you can use to make life with Linux a little easier. Usually, I describe with pretty specific detail how to accomplish a particular task including command-line and configuration file examples. This time, however, I take a step off this tried-and-true path of tech tips and instead talk about more-general, high-level concepts, strategies and, frankly, personal opinions about systems administration.