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Monthly Archives: August 2014

Axel and Aria2 CLI Download tools

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Axel and Aria2 are download accelerators that you use from the terminal and can speed up downloads significantly. I’ve not really found either to be better than the other and both are very easy to install and use.

Installation:

Axel with Debian/Ubuntu

apt-get install axel

CentOS/RHEL

yum install axel

Operation:

From the terminal run axel and the URL e.g. axel http://example.com/system.iso
There are a number of syntax switches that you can run depending on your requirements, such as:

–max-speed=x           -s x    Specify maximum speed (bytes per second)
–num-connections=x     -n x    Specify maximum number of connections
–output=f              -o f    Specify local output file
–search[=x]            -S [x]  Search for mirrors and download from x servers
–header=x              -H x    Add header string
–user-agent=x          -U x    Set user agent
–no-proxy              -N      Just don’t use any proxy server
–quiet                 -q      Leave stdout alone
–verbose               -v      More status information
–alternate             -a      Alternate progress indicator
–help                  -h      This information
–version               -V      Version information

 

Firejail sandbox for Linux

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Firejail is a SUID security sandbox program that reduces the risk of security breaches by restricting the running environment of untrusted applications using Linux namespaces. It allows a process and all its descendants to have their own private view of the globally shared kernel resources, such as the network stack, process table, mount table.

Firejail can sandbox any type of processes: servers, graphical applications, and even user login sessions. Written in C with virtually no dependencies, it should work on any Linux computer with a 3.x kernel version. Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, OpenSUSE, and Fedora packages are provided. An Arch Linux package is maintained in AUR.

Installation:
Download the zip file and extract, then cd into it.
Run the following command:

./configure && make && sudo make install

Alternative install is to use the .deb or rpm files and install with dpkg or rpm/yum.

Operation:

To run and use firejail issue the firejail command from the terminal followed by the application, for example start Firefox in a Firejail sandbox with:

firejail firefox

Reference more info and download from:
http://l3net.wordpress.com/2014/04/16/how-to-restrict-a-login-shell-using-linux-namespaces/

Saidar Utility

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saidar is a curses-based tool for viewing the system statistics available through libstatgrab. Statistics include CPU, processes, load, memory, swap, network I/O, disk I/O, and file system information.

This utility has now become part of my toolbox collection now and I install it on almost everything now. It’s extremely handy to take a quick look at everything about the system, as some other tools might only show you CPU or disk and so forth.

Installation:
==> Debian/Ubuntu

apt-get install saidar

==> CentOS/RHEL*

yum install statgrab-tools

* requires epel

Operation:

A simple saidar in the terminal will kick it off, however I prefer the colour switch option with:

saidar -c

Which looks like this:
saidar

How to check for security errata with yum

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CentOS, Fedora and RHEL provide extra information alongside its errata packages that you can use to see whether there are any security-related updates available. To do this, first install yum-plugin-security:

# yum -y install yum-plugin-security

To list outstanding security errata for your system, issue:

# yum updateinfo list security
RHSA-2014:0246 Important/Sec. gnutls-2.8.5-13.el6_5.x86_64
RHSA-2014:0222 Moderate/Sec. libtiff-3.9.4-10.el6_5.x86_64

You can then find out more about each security advisory with:

# yum updateinfo "RHSA-2014:0246"

To update the system with all outstanding security patches, run the following command:

# yum --security update-minimal

More details and references:
CentOS: http://wiki.centos.org/
RHEL: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/
Linux Blog: https://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/203-konstantin-ryabitsev/765302-what-is-the-gnutls-bug-and-how-to-protect-linux-system-from-it

 

extundelete utility

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extundelete is a utility that can recover deleted files from an ext3 or ext4 partition. The ext3 and ext4 file systems are the most common default file systems in Linux distributions like Mint, Mageia, or Ubuntu. extundelete uses information stored in the partition’s journal to attempt to recover a file that has been deleted from the partition. There is no guarantee that any particular file will be able to be undeleted, so always try to have a good backup system in place, or at least put one in place after recovering your files!

More details here: http://extundelete.sourceforge.net/

How can I run “apt-get install” in the background?

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On just about every system I have including my MacBookAir I’m using byobu which is awesome and will usually allow you to run multiple tmux sessions or just windows within the terminal.

However, you can also perform your apt-get command with fancy things around it:

 sudo bash -c 'apt-get -y install guake >/dev/null 2>&1 & disown'

I found the above from Askubuntu post: http://askubuntu.com/questions/421807/how-can-i-run-apt-get-install-in-the-background

 

Brackets OpenSource Code Editor

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Brackets is an open source code editor for web designers and front-end developers. However, sysadmins should also take a look and try it out on scripts or configuration files. One of cool features is the live preview in a browser, i.e. change the code and see a live preview in your browser without refreshing. Note: this feature is currently only supported with Chrome as of August 2014. It’s also cross platform, having tried it on both Linux and Mac OSX.

Download and install instructions available here:
http://brackets.io/

 

 

Coreutils Viewer

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Coreutils is a very cool tool that can be described as a Tiny Dirty Linux Only C command that looks for coreutils basic commands (cp, mv, dd, tar, gzip/gunzip, cat, …) currently running on your system and displays the percentage of copied data.

correutils

 

 

 

Full details with examples and code on GitHub here:
https://github.com/Xfennec/cv

Simple Invoices – OpenSource and Free

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Simple Invoices is a free, open source, web based invoicing system that can be installed on a local server, hosted/cloud environment or even your laptop. Also add to an existing LAMP server which is what I did.

Some of the features:

  • Absolutely free, no monthly subscription
  • Browser based application you can use from anywhere
  • It’s open source, developed by the community and it’s yours
  • Easily track your finances, send invoices as PDF’s and hundreds of other great features

More details and download:
http://www.simpleinvoices.org