HOW-TOs

Low Power Wireless: 6LoWPAN, IEEE802.15.4 and the Raspberry Pi

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the new kids on the block. It promises connection of sensors and actuators to the internet, for data to flow both ways, and once on the internet, to become part of new and exciting business systems, reaching up into the realms of big data and artificial intelligence.

Wrapping Up the Mars Lander

In my last few articles ("Let's Go to Mars with Martian Lander" and "Mars Lander, Take II: Crashing onto the Surface"), I've been building a variant on the classic video game Lunar Lander, with a few simplificatio

Simple Server Hardening, Part II

In my last article, I talked about the classic, complicated approach to server hardening you typically will find in many hardening documents and countered it with some specific, simple hardening steps that are much more effective and take a only few minutes.

On-the-Fly Web Server

Most of you have a web server installed on your network somewhere. In fact, most of you probably have several. In a pinch, however, getting to the web directory can be difficult.

Flat File Encryption with OpenSSL and GPG

The Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) application, which has long been known as a primary tool for file encryption, commonly focused on email. It has management tools for exchanging credentials with peers and creating secure communication channels over untrusted networks.

Preseeding Full Disk Encryption

Usually I try to write articles that are not aimed at a particular distribution. Although I may give examples assuming a Debian-based distribution, whenever possible, I try to make my instructions applicable to everyone. This is not going to be one of those articles.

GRUB Boot from ISO

Last year I worked on a project to add an OEM-style rescue partition to a computer. Where most OEM installs have a custom program that just rewrites an install image over the top of the partition, in this case, everything was based on open-source software.

Working with Command Arguments

In this article, I want to cover a more fundamental aspect of shell scripting: working with command arguments. I suspect that most shell scripts go through an evolution with their command flags, a

AWS EC2 VPC CLI

There's just something about the fresh start you get with a new job. Both my previous job and my new one began with the opportunity to build a new infrastructure from scratch. In both cases, as is common with startup infrastructure in its early stages, everything was to be built using Amazon Web Services (AWS), specifically using its Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) infrastructure.

Words from Letter Cubes

I got a great letter from a reader with a puzzle to solve, so let's dig in, shall we? Here's what he wrote: Love your column in Linux Journal. I've read it for years and learned a lot about shell scripting, but not quite enough to solve a puzzle on my own.

Secure File Transfer

File transfer between Linux systems (and perhaps all POSIX systems in general) is in some ways a neglected subject. The arcane protocols in common use are far from secure, and the SSH replacements offer too much power and complexity.

Transferring Conserver Logs to Elasticsearch

If your organization manages Linux, AIX, HP-UX or Solaris servers in-house, chances are your system administrators at least occasionally need low-level access to those devices. Typically, administrators use some kind of serial console—for example, traditional serial port, Serial-over-LAN or Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI).

What's New in 3D Printing, Part IV: OctoPrint

This is the last article in a four-part series on the current state of 3D printing. In the first part, I gave an overall introduction to differences in 3D printing since I wrote my original articles on 3D printing three years ago. The second piece focused on advances in 3D printing hardware, and the third column covered 3D printing software.

Server Hardening

Server hardening. The very words conjure up images of tempering soft steel into an unbreakable blade, or taking soft clay and firing it in a kiln, producing a hardened vessel that will last many years. Indeed, server hardening is very much like that.

MySQL—Some Handy Know-How

I recently was talking to someone over IRC who was helping me with a PHP app that was giving me trouble. The extremely helpful individual asked me to let him know the value of a certain field in a record on my MySQL server. I embarrassingly admitted that I'd have to install something like PHPMyAdmin or Adminer in order to find that information.

Working with Functions: Towers of Hanoi

For this article, I thought it would be beneficial to go back to some basics of shell scripting and look at how functions work. Most script writers probably eschew using functions because it's a bit antithetical to how scripts tend to evolve, as a sequence of commands on the command line that are captured in a file.

Build a Large-Screen Command Center with the RPi 2

When the folks who make the Raspberry Pi made good on their plan to release a multi-core version of the tiny computer with 1GB of RAM earlier this year, I saw it as the perfect opportunity to put the single-board Linux box to work—real work—in our company's network operations center.
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