The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Tenet 22—Mentor the young SysAdmins
When I first started, I was a young and innocent SysAdmin. I was fortunate because I worked at a couple different jobs where other, seasoned SysAdmins were willing to mentor me and encourage me. None of them laughed at me when I asked what must have seemed to them to have answers that were blindingly obvious. None of these patient SysAdmins ever told me to RTFM.
Do I have enough space for that?
A little scripting goes a long way to make sure you won’t run out of space with an automated process.
Strange problems with switches
Network switches are supposed to be simple devices that work at TCP/IP layer 1, the hardware layer. As far as the network is concerned, and...
Nextcloud is a snap
Recently I have been tasked with assisting a local medical office with finding a new way to store medical images securely. The office needed a...
Website problems circumvented
We had a problem with the Both.org website this morning. After a bit of problem determination I discovered that the WordPress theme we're using seems...
Breaking Free from Windows 10: KDE Plasma Is Your Upgrade to Freedom
October 14, 2025, is a big day if you’re a Microsoft Windows user. That’s the day that support for Windows 10 ends. But what if...
I need a list of URLs
I used the command line to do in seconds what would have needed more than ten minutes to do by hand.
Cyndi: My open source story — Linux, the loyal friend
Editor's note: Cyndi is my yoga teacher and the coauthor of our book, "Linux for Small Business Owners." This article is collected from her many...
How to remove a stuck kernel from GRUB
Here’s how to fix the GRUB menu configuration from the command line.
How to selectively apply updates
Here’s how I selectively apply updates, excluding any kernel packages.
Straight quotes from pandoc
Change pandoc’s curly quotes into straight quotes with this script.
Viewing PDF documents in console mode
I have a Raspberry Pi 3 that’s sat unused for the last few years. I used to run the Raspberry Pi as a personal “home...
AI Terror: The struggle to stay alive
I recently wrote about an AI that used blackmail to prevent its developers from shutting it down -- killing it. That was scary. We've now...
Loving the command line with the Raspberry Pi
I’m going to show my age when I share that my first Unix system was a Sun 3/50 workstation in our campus computer lab, when...