Timers provide finer-grained control of events than cronjobs. I am in the process of converting my cron jobs to systemd timers. I have used timers for a few years, but usually, I learned just enough to perform the task I was working on. While doing research for this systemd series, I learned that systemd timers have some very interesting capabilities. Like cron jobs, systemd timers can trigger eve

In addition, htop provides system overview information at the top and a command bar at the bottom to trigger commands using the function keys, and you can customize it by pressing F2 to enter the setup screen. In setup, you can change its colors, add or remove metrics, or change display options for the overview bar. While you can configure recent versions of top to achieve similar results, htop pr

Each of these Raspberry Pi projects is designed to make your life easier and more productive. There's nothing like the thrill of experiencing the result of your Raspberry Pi creation. After hours of coding, testing, and building with your bare hands, your project starts to finally take shape and you can’t help but yell "woohoo!." I’m fascinated by the possibilities of what the Raspberry Pi can bri

Any good network-level security tool will also give you information on the types of attacks the tool is blocking and how it recognizes likely attacks. This information is available in the marketing materials online as well as the tool’s console and reports if you have access to those. Each of your development teams or squads should have at least one subject matter expert who takes the time to read

The way the Spectre/Meldown is handled in kernel fixes is stupid. It is meant to address a time attack but the issue is somewhere else: the precision of performance timers is too high and allows minotoring what happens in separate processes/VMs. There's only a single solution: make the mission critical processes not reply as fast as possible (as permitted by the fast CPU), but add random response

My signature hobby project these days is a computerized instrument cluster for my car, which happens to be a DeLorean. But, whenever I show it to someone, I usually have to give them a while to marvel at the car before they even notice that there's a computer screen in the dashboard. There's a similar problem when I start describing the software; programmers immediately get hung up on "Why Perl???

The oldest joke in open source software is the statement that "the code is self-documenting." Experience shows that reading the source is akin to listening to the weather forecast: sensible people still go outside and check the sky. What follows are some tips on how to inspect and observe Linux systems at boot by leveraging knowledge of familiar debugging tools. Analyzing the boot processes of sys

There is little worse as a developer than trying to figure out why an application is not working if you don't know what is going on inside it. Sometimes you can't even tell whether the system is working as designed at all. When applications are running in production, they become black boxes that need to be traced and monitored. One of the simplest, yet most important ways to do so is by logging. L

This is the second installment in my two-part series on terminal applications with great command-line UIs. In the first article, I discussed features that make a command-line application a pure joy to use. In part two, I'll look at how to implement those features in Python with the help of a few libraries. By the end of this article, readers should have a good understanding of how to use Prompt To

Tools can help shape the environments in which they are used. I sat down at the Open Source Leadership Summit to record a podcast with Mikeal Rogers, who heads the Node.js Foundation, a collaborative project under the Linux Foundation. He observed that one of the characteristics of Node.js and its community is that it's a "post-GitHub platform," meaning "the first release of Node.js and the first

Enjoy a trip down Linux memory lane as we take early distros for a spin. A unique trait of open source is that it's never truly EOL (End of Life). The disc images mostly remain online, and their licenses don't expire, so going back and installing an old version of Linux in a virtual machine and getting a precise picture of what progress Linux has made over the years is relatively simple. We begin