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Papa's Got a Brand New NAS

It used to be that the true sign you were dealing with a Linux geek was the pile of computers lying around that person's house. How else could you experiment with networked servers without a mass of computers and networking equipment? If you work as a sysadmin for a large company, sometimes one of the job perks is that you get first dibs on decommissioned equipment.
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More L337 Translations

Dave continues with his shell-script L33t translator. In my last article, I talked about the inside jargon of hackers and computer geeks known as "Leet Speak" or just "Leet". Of course, that's a shortened version of the word Elite, and it's best written as L33T or perhaps L337 to be ultimately kewl. But hey, I don't judge.

Creating a Centralized Syslog Server

A centralized syslog server was one of the first true SysAdmin tasks that I was given as a Linux Administrator way back in 1997. My boss at the time wanted to pull in log files from various appliances and have me use regexp to search them for certain key words. At the time Linux was still in its infancy, and I had just been dabbling with it in my free time.
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SSH Tunneling - Poor Techie's VPN

"If we see light at the end of the tunnel, it is the light of the oncoming train" ~ Robert Lowell. Oh yes, another good quote. This post is on SSH tunneling, or as I like to call it 'Poor Man's VPN'. Contrary to the sysadmin's popular belief, SSH tunneling actually can be very valuable use for both techies and home users.

Fun with ethtool

Time to be honest here for a minute. The open source community really has outdone themselves coming up with some very obscure names for packages. Let's take this list of packages for instance: emacs, gimp, gcc, mutt, grub, kyle rankin, parted, tar, mutt, vim. Nine times out of ten, a common person is going to look at that list and become utterly confused over what package does what.

Rebooting the Magic Way

If you have ever had a hard drive fail on a remote server you may remember the feeling you had after trying to issue the following commands:

Take Control of Your PC with UEFI Secure Boot

UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is the open, multi-vendor replacement for the aging BIOS standard, which first appeared in IBM computers in 1976. The UEFI standard is extensive, covering the full boot architecture. This article focuses on a single useful but typically overlooked feature of UEFI: secure boot.

Advanced Firewall Configurations with ipset

iptables is the user-space tool for configuring firewall rules in the Linux kernel. It is actually a part of the larger netfilter framework. Perhaps because iptables is the most visible part of the netfilter framework, the framework is commonly referred to collectively as iptables. iptables has been the Linux firewall solution since the 2.4 kernel.
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Blockchain, Part I: Introduction and Cryptocurrency

It seems nearly impossible these days to open a news feed discussing anything technology- or finance-related and not see a headline or two covering bitcoin and its underlying framework, blockchain. But why? What makes both bitcoin and blockchain so exciting? What do they provide? Why is everyone talking about this? And, what does the future hold?