Sandra Henry-Stocker's blog

Fake "Tech Support" Email

Sandra Henry-Stocker — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 08:29:30 -0400

Occasional email from Tech Support can be very useful if it doesn't arrive so frequently that you tend to ignore it altogether. But what happens when email from Tech Support is just another phishing attempt by the bad guys? Make sure your users can easily spot the difference.

Grappling with disk space

Sandra Henry-Stocker — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:30:07 -0400

Disks are getting bigger and bigger, but so are our users' data collections. How do you quickly pin down the source of the problem when a file system suddenly fills up? Let's look at some useful commands.

Favorite Unix Tools & Commands

Sandra Henry-Stocker — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:00:31 -0400

After 25 years of a love affair with Unix, I still appreciate the many little commands and tricks that make me feel clever on the command line.

Port Forwarding with Perl

Sandra Henry-Stocker — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 06:00:00 -0400

SSH tunnels aren't the only way to do port forwarding. If you're clever enough, you can write your own program. If you're not quite that clever, you can use someone else's program -- like a very cool Perl script I found on the web.

Replacing the DVD in My G4

Sandra Henry-Stocker — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 18:40:11 -0400

Replacing a failed DVD drive in a Mac G4 takes only a few tools and a few tricks. Here's how I muddled my way through to a working system.

Port forwarding

Sandra Henry-Stocker — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:43:54 -0400

Port forwarding can get you around some sticky network restrictions and is easy to set up with ssh. Let's look at what it is and how it works with a simple example that you can try on your own systems.

Connection testing with Perl

Sandra Henry-Stocker — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:11:54 -0400

If you've never used the Perl Sockets module for basic connection testing, you might be surprised at how easily you can craft a very useful script. I find my version of a Perl "listen" script to be as useful as a cable tester!

Ubuntu for Non-Geeks, 3rd Edition

Sandra Henry-Stocker — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:02:55 -0400

Getting your friends and family to try Linux just got a lot easier. With the 3rd edition of Ubuntu for Non-Geeks and a desktop with spiffy visual effects, they might become easy converts!

Long listings for the ps command

Sandra Henry-Stocker — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:15:33 -0400

If you've ever been frustrated by ps output that is truncated at the edge of your 80-column terminal window, let's take a look at the options that various Unix systems provide for showing you what you really want to see.

Unix and long usernames

Sandra Henry-Stocker — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:20:45 -0400

Working around problems caused by usernames with more than eight characters is generally easy, but isn't it time we stop having to abide by limitations created 40 years ago?