today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 05, 2023

• Special Variables in Bash Shell Scripting

  Recently, I covered how you can use the number of arguments in bash that involved the use of the $# variable which is one of the special variables of bash.

• Automated status tests need to have little or no 'noise'

  Unless you're in a bad situation, your systems are almost always working; your backups are happening properly, your machines are up, your disks aren't dangerously full, and so on. Actual failures are a small percentage of the time. This means that even with a very low false positive rate on a percentage basis, almost all of the time your tests are raising some sort of alert, they're giving you noise, a false alert. This gives you the security alert problem; it will be very easy to get habituated to ignoring or downplaying the warning messages. The very rare occasion when they're warning you about a real problem will be drowned out by the noise of non-problems.

  As a system administrator, it can feel morally wrong to not send out a warning if we detect something potentially broken. But here again, the perfect is the enemy of the good. It's better to reliably generate warnings that people will notice and heed when something is definitely broken, even if this doesn't send warnings in some situations when you can't be sure.

• Announcing Screenshots: How I generate meta images for my site

  I was curious about how I could generate screenshots for my personal website. I knew this would involve headless browsers, a technology wherein a browser renders a page programmatically without a user-facing representation available. I had not yet used headless browsers, so I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to build my knowledge.

• How to Set Up a Private VPN With TurnKey GNU/Linux

  Virtual Private Networks (VPN) offers anonymity, security, and privacy online. There are typically two types of VPN connections. The most popular is a VPN service, provided by a third-party company, and typically requires a paid subscription. The second type is a private VPN, installed and configured manually by an individual or workplace.

  Setting up your own private VPN can seem like a daunting task. However, there is an easy way to set up your own VPN server using a pre-configured solution from Turnkey Linux. So how can you install a private VPN at home or at your workplace?

• 8 Useful Commands to Monitor Swap Space Usage in Linux

  Linux memory management is an essential aspect of every System Administrator to improve the performance of a Linux system.

• How to Add Swap Space on Ubuntu Linux

  The post How to Add Swap Space on Ubuntu Linux first appeared on Tecmint: Linux Howtos, Tutorials & Guides .

  One of the simplest ways of watching against out-of-memory problems in applications is to increase some swap size in your server.

• How to Build NGINX from Sources in RHEL, CentOS, Rocky and AlmaLinux

  Nginx is the fastest growing Webserver today on public internet-facing servers due to its free open-source modular model, high performance, stability, simple configurations files, asynchronous architecture (event-driven), and low resources needed to run.

• How to View WebP Image and Convert WebP to PNG or JPEG in Linux

  Developed by Google with the main objective of making loading times faster across the internet, WebP (pronounced “weppy”) is a modern image format and a replacement for JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats. Compared