Monday, October 31, 2011

Howto enable internet for ip in Centos

#eth0 – internet
#eth1 – network
echo -e “192.168.10.99 00:15:F2:16:6C:C2 dev eth1″ > /srv/mac.list
arp -f /srv/mac.list
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0-j MASQUERADE
iptables -A FORWARD -i eth1 -j ACCEPT
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
#this script enable internet for ip 192.168.10.99 with MAC 00:15:F2:16:6C:C2

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Enable IP forwarding under RHEL/CentOS

The regular way

Edit /etc/sysctl.conf

Edit the “net.ipv4.ip_forward” line and set it to 1

# Kernel sysctl configuration file for Red Hat Linux
#
# For binary values, 0 is disabled, 1 is enabled. See sysctl(8) and
# sysctl.conf(5) for more details.

# Controls IP packet forwarding
net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1

# Controls source route verification
net.ipv4.conf.default.rp_filter = 1

# Do not accept source routing
net.ipv4.conf.default.accept_source_route = 0

# Controls the System Request debugging functionality of the kernel
kernel.sysrq = 0

# Controls whether core dumps will append the PID to the core filename.
# Useful for debugging multi-threaded applications.
kernel.core_uses_pid = 1

When done type the following to validate the new setting :

sysctl -p

The manual way :

echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

This wouldn’t be persistent though, so you should edit sysctl.conf anyway, or add the command in /etc/rc.local

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Thursday, August 18, 2011

Email Fundamentals: How to Send Email via Telnet

This is one of the essential troubleshooting tricks that an Exchange administrator needs to know, sending an email using Telnet from the command line.

Let’s say you’ve just configured a relay connector and want to test it from the server that you wish to allow relay from before you let that server’s owner know that it is all set up for them. Or perhaps you want to quickly test whether a another email server on the internet is accepting mail from your network.

For just about any scenario where you want to quickly test SMTP knowing this method is very useful.

Note: this technique requires the Telnet client to be installed on the computer you’re running the test from. For Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 it will already be installed, but Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 need to install it first.

Installing the Telnet Client for Windows 7

To install the Telnet client on a Windows 7 computer use these steps.

  1. Open the Control Panel
  2. Click on Programs
  3. Click on Turns Windows Features on or off
  4. Scroll down the list until you see Telnet Client, and tick that box
  5. Click OK and close the Control Panel

Installing the Telnet Client for Windows Server 2008

To install the Telnet client on a Windows Server 2008 computer open a command prompt and run the following command.

C:\>servermanagercmd -i telnet-client
.........

Start Installation...
[Installation] Succeeded: [Telnet Client].

Success: Installation succeeded.

Installing the Telnet Client for Windows Server 2008 R2


To install the Telnet client on a Windows Server 2008 R2 computer open a PowerShell window and run the following command.

PS C:\> Import-Module servermanager
PS C:\> Add-WindowsFeature telnet-client

Success Restart Needed Exit Code Feature Result
------- -------------- --------- --------------
True No Success {Telnet Client}

Sending Email from the Command Line via Telnet


Open a command prompt and use Telnet to connect to the remote email server on port 25.

C:\>telnet esp-ho-ex2010a 25

If Telnet is able to connect to the remote server you should see its welcome banner.

220 ESP-HO-EX2010A.exchangeserverpro.net Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service ready at T
ue, 9 Aug 2011 22:00:04 +1000

The first command to send is the HELO command. Some email servers will accept HELO on its own, others will require you to also provide a host or domain name along with it.

helo test.com
250 ESP-HO-EX2010A.exchangeserverpro.net Hello [10.0.1.11]

Next use the MAIL FROM command to tell the remote server who the email is from.

mail from: test@test.com
250 2.1.0 Sender OK

Now use the RCPT TO command to tell the remote server who to deliver the email to.

rcpt to: alan.reid@exchangeserverpro.net
250 2.1.5 Recipient OK

The final step for the bare minimum set of commands is the DATA command.

data
354 Start mail input; end with .

If you just want to send a blank message type a period “.” and press enter. Otherwise you can set a subject line for the message if you like. Use SUBJECT and then type your subject line, and press enter.

subject: this is a test message

Type any text you want to include with the message, press enter, and then finally type a period “.” and press enter to send the email.

sending a test message via telnet
.
250 2.6.0 [InternalId=320] Queued mail for delivery

If the message was queued for delivery then it has been accepted by the server. If this is an Exchange server that you control then you can use message tracking to troubleshoot further if the message doesn’t make it to the inbox that you were expecting.

Type the QUIT command to terminate the connection when you’re done.

SMTP Status Codes


You may notice along the way that after typing commands you see responses from the server starting with “250″.

250 is a good thing, and there are a lot of other SMTP status codes you’ll encounter the more you use this technique. For example an email server may deny your attempt to relay mail between two domains.

550 5.7.1 Unable to relay

Or you may encounter an email server that is explicitly blocking email from your domain.

554 5.1.0 Sender denied

There are a lot of different scenarios you might encounter here, and thankfully the SMTP status codes will help you troubleshoot them.

Now that you understand how to send email using Telnet and the command line I hope you find this technique very useful in the future.

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Set Multiple Sites as a Homepage in Internet Explorer 9

The Procedure for Setting the Homepage

First, open Internet Explorer 9 and then a tab for each site you want to set as a homepage. Browse to those websites.

Once you have all the websites loaded, click on the Tools button from the upper-right side of the Internet Explorer window. Then, click on Internet Options.

Internet Explorer 9

You set the homepage in the General tab. Simply click ’Use current’.

Internet Explorer 9

The websites you have loaded in each tab are now set as a homepage.Click OKand you are done.

Internet Explorer 9

From now on, when you start Internet Explorer 9, the websites which you set as homepages will be loaded in separate tabs.

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Sunday, August 7, 2011

Enabling And Disabling Services During Start Up In GNU/Linux

In any Linux distribution, some services are enabled to start at boot up by default. For example, on my machine, I have pcmcia, cron daemon, postfix mail transport agent ... just to name a few, which start during boot up. Usually, it is prudent to disable all services that are not needed as they are potential security risks and also they unnecessarily waste hardware resources. For example, my machine does not have any pcmcia cards so I can safely disable it. Same is the case with postfix which is also not used.

So how do you disable these services so that they are not started at boot time?

The answer to that depends on the type of Linux distribution you are using. True, many Linux distributions including Ubuntu bundle with them a GUI front end to accomplish the task which makes it easier to enable and disable the system services. But there is no standard GUI utility common across all Linux distributions. And this makes it worth while to learn how to enable and disable the services via the command line.

But one thing is common for all Linux distributions which is that all the start-up scripts are stored in the '/etc/init.d/' directory. So if you want to say, enable apache webserver in different run levels, then you should have a script related to the apache webserver in the /etc/init.d/ directory. It is usually created at the time of installing the software. And in my machine (which runs Ubuntu), it is named apache2. Where as in Red Hat, it is named httpd. Usually, the script will have the same name as the process or daemon.

Here I will explain different ways of enabling and disabling the system services.
1) Red Hat Method

Red Hat and Red Hat based Linux distributions make use of the script called chkconfig to enable and disable the system services running in Linux.

For example, to enable the apache webserver to start in certain run levels, you use the chkconfig script to enable it in the desired run levels as follows:

# chkconfig httpd --add
# chkconfig httpd on --level 2,3,5
This will enable the apache webserver to automatically start in the run levels 2, 3 and 5. You can check this by running the command:
# chkconfig --list httpd
One can also disable the service by using the off flag as shown below:
# chkconfig httpd off
# chkconfig httpd --del
Red Hat also has a useful script called service which can be used to start or stop any service. Taking the previous example, to start apache webserver, you execute the command:
# service httpd start
and to stop the service...
# service httpd stop
The options being start, stop and restart which are self explanatory.
2) Debian Method

Debian Linux has its own script to enable and disable services across runlevels. It is called update-rc.d. Going by the above example, you can enable apache webserver as follows:

# update-rc.d apache2 defaults

... this will enable the apache webserver to start in the default run levels of 2,3,4 and 5. Of course, you can do it explicitly by giving the run levels instead of the "defaults" keyword as follows:

# update-rc.d apache2 start 20 2 3 4 5 . stop 80 0 1 6 .

The above command modifies the sym-links in the respective /etc/rcX.d directories to start or stop the service in the destined runlevels. Here X stands for a value of 0 to 6 depending on the runlevel. One thing to note here is the dot (.) which is used to terminate the set which is important. Also 20 and 80 are the sequence codes which decides in what order of precedence the scripts in the /etc/init.d/ directory should be started or stopped.

And to disable the service in all the run levels, you execute the command:

# update-rc.d -f apache2 remove
Here -f option which stands for force is mandatory.

But if you want to enable the service only in runlevel 5, you do this instead:

# update-rc.d apache2  start 20 5 . stop 80 0 1 2 3 4 6 .
3) Gentoo Method

Gentoo also uses a script to enable or disable services during boot-up. The name of the script is rc-update . Gentoo has three default runlevels. Them being: boot, default and nonetwork. Suppose I want to add the apache webserver to start in the default runlevel, then I run the command:

# rc-update add apache2 default
... and to remove the webserver, it is as simple as :
# rc-update del apache2
To see all the running applications at your runlevel and their status, similar to what is achieved by chkconfig --list, you use the rc-status command.
# rc-status --all
4) The old fashioned way

I remember the first time I started using Linux, there were no such scripts to aid the user in enabling or disabling the services during start-up. You did it the old fashioned way which was creating or deleting symbolic links in the respective /etc/rcX.d/ directories. Here X in rcX.d is a number which stands for the runlevel. There can be two kinds of symbolic links in the /etc/rcX.d/ directories. One starts with the character 'S' followed by a number between 0 and 99 to denote the priority, followed by the name of the service you want to enable. The second kind of symlink has a name which starts with a 'K' followed by a number and then the name of the service you want to disable. So in any runlevel, at any given time, for each service, there should be only one symlink of the 'S' or 'K' variety but not both.

So taking the above example, suppose I want to enable apache webserver in the runlevel 5 but want to disable it in all other runlevels, I do the following:

First to enable the service for run level 5, I move into /etc/rc5.d/ directory and create a symlink to the apache service script residing in the /etc/init.d/ directory as follows:

# cd /etc/rc5.d/
# ln -s /etc/init.d/apache2 S20apache2

This creates a symbolic link in the /etc/rc5.d/ directory which the system interprets as - start (S) the apache service before all the services which have a priority number greater than 20.

If you do a long listing of the directory /etc/rc5.d in your system, you can find a lot of symlinks similar to the one below.

lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 17 Mar 31 13:02 S20apache2 -> ../init.d/apache2

Now if I start a service, I will want to stop the service while rebooting or while moving to single user mode and so on. So in those run levels I have to create the symlinks starting with character 'K'. So going back to the apache2 service example, if I want to automatically stop the service when the system goes into runlevel 0, 1 or 6, I will have to create the symlinks as follows in the /etc/rc0.d, /etc/rc1.d/, /etc/rc6.d/ directories.

# ln -s /etc/init.d/apache2 K80apache2

One interesting aspect here is the priority. Lower the number, the higher is the priority. So since the starting priority of apache2 is 20 - that is apache starts way ahead of other services during startup, we give it a stopping priority of 80. There is no hard and fast rule for this but usually, you follow the formula as follows:

If you have 'N' as the priority number for starting a service, you use the number (100-N) for the stopping priority number and vice versa.

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Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Basic vi Commands

Linux
i or insert to insert text
ii ir insert insert to replace (overwrite)
arrow keys to navigate
esc :q! to exit with out changes
esc :wq to save and exit
my fave
esc shift^ZZ to save and exit.


*BSD
same as above but no arrow keys and sometimes no insert i(only)
esc takes you to command mode and you can navigate
.with keys
x =delete
h,j,k,l = arrows
etc...
just the very basics
Almost forgot that *BSD has an editor ee I like alot when you're done editing
esc and you get a little menu

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Thursday, May 5, 2011

linux command line reference for common operations

 
 
This is a linux command line reference for common operations.
Examples marked with • are valid/safe to paste without modification into a terminal, so
you may want to keep a terminal window open while reading this so you can cut & paste.
All these commands have been tested both on Fedora and Ubuntu.
 

 
Command Description
• apropos whatis Show commands pertinent to string. See also threadsafe
• man -t ascii | ps2pdf - > ascii.pdf make a pdf of a manual page
  which command Show full path name of command
  time command See how long a command takes
• time cat Start stopwatch. Ctrl-d to stop. See also sw
dir navigation
• cd - Go to previous directory
• cd Go to $HOME directory
  (cd dir && command) Go to dir, execute command and return to current dir
• pushd . Put current dir on stack so you can popd back to it
• alias l='ls -l --color=auto' quick dir listing
• ls -lrt List files by date. See also newest and find_mm_yyyy
• ls /usr/bin | pr -T9 -W$COLUMNS Print in 9 columns to width of terminal
  find -name '*.[ch]' | xargs grep -E 'expr' Search 'expr' in this dir and below. See also findrepo
  find -type f -print0 | xargs -r0 grep -F 'example' Search all regular files for 'example' in this dir and below
  find -maxdepth 1 -type f | xargs grep -F 'example' Search all regular files for 'example' in this dir
  find -maxdepth 1 -type d | while read dir; do echo $dir; echo cmd2; done Process each item with multiple commands (in while loop)
• find -type f ! -perm -444 Find files not readable by all (useful for web site)
• find -type d ! -perm -111 Find dirs not accessible by all (useful for web site)
• locate -r 'file[^/]*\.txt' Search cached index for names. This re is like glob *file*.txt
• look reference Quickly search (sorted) dictionary for prefix
• grep --color reference /usr/share/dict/words Highlight occurances of regular expression in dictionary
archives and compression
  gpg -c file Encrypt file
  gpg file.gpg Decrypt file
  tar -c dir/ | bzip2 > dir.tar.bz2 Make compressed archive of dir/
  bzip2 -dc dir.tar.bz2 | tar -x Extract archive (use gzip instead of bzip2 for tar.gz files)
  tar -c dir/ | gzip | gpg -c | ssh user@remote 'dd of=dir.tar.gz.gpg' Make encrypted archive of dir/ on remote machine
  find dir/ -name '*.txt' | tar -c --files-from=- | bzip2 > dir_txt.tar.bz2 Make archive of subset of dir/ and below
  find dir/ -name '*.txt' | xargs cp -a --target-directory=dir_txt/ --parents Make copy of subset of dir/ and below
  ( tar -c /dir/to/copy ) | ( cd /where/to/ && tar -x -p ) Copy (with permissions) copy/ dir to /where/to/ dir
  ( cd /dir/to/copy && tar -c . ) | ( cd /where/to/ && tar -x -p ) Copy (with permissions) contents of copy/ dir to /where/to/
  ( tar -c /dir/to/copy ) | ssh -C user@remote 'cd /where/to/ && tar -x -p' Copy (with permissions) copy/ dir to remote:/where/to/ dir
  dd bs=1M if=/dev/sda | gzip | ssh user@remote 'dd of=sda.gz' Backup harddisk to remote machine
rsync (Network efficient file copier: Use the --dry-run option for testing)
  rsync -P rsync://rsync.server.com/path/to/file file Only get diffs. Do multiple times for troublesome downloads
  rsync --bwlimit=1000 fromfile tofile Locally copy with rate limit. It's like nice for I/O
  rsync -az -e ssh --delete ~/public_html/ remote.com:'~/public_html' Mirror web site (using compression and encryption)
  rsync -auz -e ssh remote:/dir/ . && rsync -auz -e ssh . remote:/dir/ Synchronize current directory with remote one
ssh (Secure SHell)
  ssh $USER@$HOST command Run command on $HOST as $USER (default command=shell)
• ssh -f -Y $USER@$HOSTNAME xeyes Run GUI command on $HOSTNAME as $USER
  scp -p -r $USER@$HOST: file dir/ Copy with permissions to $USER's home directory on $HOST
  scp -c arcfour $USER@$LANHOST: bigfile Use faster crypto for local LAN. This might saturate GigE
  ssh -g -L 8080:localhost:80 root@$HOST Forward connections to $HOSTNAME:8080 out to $HOST:80
  ssh -R 1434:imap:143 root@$HOST Forward connections from $HOST:1434 in to imap:143
  ssh-copy-id $USER@$HOST Install public key for $USER@$HOST for password-less log in
wget (multi purpose download tool)
• (cd dir/ && wget -nd -pHEKk http://www.pixelbeat.org/cmdline.html) Store local browsable version of a page to the current dir
  wget -c http://www.example.com/large.file Continue downloading a partially downloaded file
  wget -r -nd -np -l1 -A '*.jpg' http://www.example.com/dir/ Download a set of files to the current directory
  wget ftp://remote/file[1-9].iso/ FTP supports globbing directly
• wget -q -O- http://www.pixelbeat.org/timeline.html | grep 'a href' | head Process output directly
  echo 'wget url' | at 01:00 Download url at 1AM to current dir
  wget --limit-rate=20k url Do a low priority download (limit to 20KB/s in this case)
  wget -nv --spider --force-html -i bookmarks.html Check links in a file
  wget --mirror http://www.example.com/ Efficiently update a local copy of a site (handy from cron)
networking (Note ifconfig, route, mii-tool, nslookup commands are obsolete)
  ethtool eth0 Show status of ethernet interface eth0
  ethtool --change eth0 autoneg off speed 100 duplex full Manually set ethernet interface speed
  iwconfig eth1 Show status of wireless interface eth1
  iwconfig eth1 rate 1Mb/s fixed Manually set wireless interface speed
• iwlist scan List wireless networks in range
• ip link show List network interfaces
  ip link set dev eth0 name wan Rename interface eth0 to wan
  ip link set dev eth0 up Bring interface eth0 up (or down)
• ip addr show List addresses for interfaces
  ip addr add 1.2.3.4/24 brd + dev eth0 Add (or del) ip and mask (255.255.255.0)
• ip route show List routing table
  ip route add default via 1.2.3.254 Set default gateway to 1.2.3.254
• host pixelbeat.org Lookup DNS ip address for name or vice versa
• hostname -i Lookup local ip address (equivalent to host `hostname`)
• whois pixelbeat.org Lookup whois info for hostname or ip address
• netstat -tupl List internet services on a system
• netstat -tup List active connections to/from system
windows networking (Note samba is the package that provides all this windows specific networking support)
• smbtree Find windows machines. See also findsmb
  nmblookup -A 1.2.3.4 Find the windows (netbios) name associated with ip address
  smbclient -L windows_box List shares on windows machine or samba server
  mount -t smbfs -o fmask=666,guest //windows_box/share /mnt/share Mount a windows share
  echo 'message' | smbclient -M windows_box Send popup to windows machine (off by default in XP sp2)
text manipulation (Note sed uses stdin and stdout. Newer versions support inplace editing with the -i option)
  sed 's/string1/string2/g' Replace string1 with string2
  sed 's/\(.*\)1/\12/g' Modify anystring1 to anystring2
  sed '/ *#/d; /^ *$/d' Remove comments and blank lines
  sed ':a; /\\$/N; s/\\\n//; ta' Concatenate lines with trailing \
  sed 's/[ \t]*$//' Remove trailing spaces from lines
  sed 's/\([`"$\]\)/\\\1/g' Escape shell metacharacters active within double quotes
• seq 10 | sed "s/^/      /; s/ *\(.\{7,\}\)/\1/" Right align numbers
  sed -n '1000{p;q}' Print 1000th line
  sed -n '10,20p;20q' Print lines 10 to 20
  sed -n 's/.*<title>\(.*\)<\/title>.*/\1/ip;T;q' Extract title from HTML web page
  sed -i 42d ~/.ssh/known_hosts Delete a particular line
  sort -t. -k1,1n -k2,2n -k3,3n -k4,4n Sort IPV4 ip addresses
• echo 'Test' | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' Case conversion
• tr -dc '[:print:]' < /dev/urandom Filter non printable characters
• tr -s '[:blank:]' '\t' </proc/diskstats | cut -f4 cut fields separated by blanks
• history | wc -l Count lines
set operations (Note you can export LANG=C for speed. Also these assume no duplicate lines within a file)
  sort file1 file2 | uniq Union of unsorted files
  sort file1 file2 | uniq -d Intersection of unsorted files
  sort file1 file1 file2 | uniq -u Difference of unsorted files
  sort file1 file2 | uniq -u Symmetric Difference of unsorted files
  join -t'\0' -a1 -a2 file1 file2 Union of sorted files
  join -t'\0' file1 file2 Intersection of sorted files
  join -t'\0' -v2 file1 file2 Difference of sorted files
  join -t'\0' -v1 -v2 file1 file2 Symmetric Difference of sorted files
math
• echo '(1 + sqrt(5))/2' | bc -l Quick math (Calculate φ). See also bc
• seq -f '4/%g' 1 2 99999 | paste -sd-+ | bc -l Calculate π the unix way
• echo 'pad=20; min=64; (100*10^6)/((pad+min)*8)' | bc More complex (int) e.g. This shows max FastE packet rate
• echo 'pad=20; min=64; print (100E6)/((pad+min)*8)' | python Python handles scientific notation
• echo 'pad=20; plot [64:1518] (100*10**6)/((pad+x)*8)' | gnuplot -persist Plot FastE packet rate vs packet size
• echo 'obase=16; ibase=10; 64206' | bc Base conversion (decimal to hexadecimal)
• echo $((0x2dec)) Base conversion (hex to dec) ((shell arithmetic expansion))
• units -t '100m/9.58s' 'miles/hour' Unit conversion (metric to imperial)
• units -t '500GB' 'GiB' Unit conversion (SI to IEC prefixes)
• units -t '1 googol' Definition lookup
• seq 100 | (tr '\n' +; echo 0) | bc Add a column of numbers. See also add and funcpy
calendar
• cal -3 Display a calendar
• cal 9 1752 Display a calendar for a particular month year
• date -d fri What date is it this friday. See also day
• [ $(date -d "tomorrow" +%d) = "01" ] || exit exit a script unless it's the last day of the month
• date --date='25 Dec' +%A What day does xmas fall on, this year
• date --date='@2147483647' Convert seconds since the epoch (1970-01-01 UTC) to date
• TZ='America/Los_Angeles' date What time is it on west coast of US (use tzselect to find TZ)
• date --date='TZ="America/Los_Angeles" 09:00 next Fri' What's the local time for 9AM next Friday on west coast US
locales
• printf "%'d\n" 1234 Print number with thousands grouping appropriate to locale
• BLOCK_SIZE=\'1 ls -l Use locale thousands grouping in ls. See also l
• echo "I live in `locale territory`" Extract info from locale database
• LANG=en_IE.utf8 locale int_prefix Lookup locale info for specific country. See also ccodes
• locale -kc $(locale | sed -n 's/\(LC_.\{4,\}\)=.*/\1/p') | less List fields available in locale database
recode (Obsoletes iconv, dos2unix, unix2dos)
• recode -l | less Show available conversions (aliases on each line)
  recode windows-1252.. file_to_change.txt Windows "ansi" to local charset (auto does CRLF conversion)
  recode utf-8/CRLF.. file_to_change.txt Windows utf8 to local charset
  recode iso-8859-15..utf8 file_to_change.txt Latin9 (western europe) to utf8
  recode ../b64 < file.txt > file.b64 Base64 encode
  recode /qp.. < file.qp > file.txt Quoted printable decode
  recode ..HTML < file.txt > file.html Text to HTML
• recode -lf windows-1252 | grep euro Lookup table of characters
• echo -n 0x80 | recode latin-9/x1..dump Show what a code represents in latin-9 charmap
• echo -n 0x20AC | recode ucs-2/x2..latin-9/x Show latin-9 encoding
• echo -n 0x20AC | recode ucs-2/x2..utf-8/x Show utf-8 encoding
CDs
  gzip < /dev/cdrom > cdrom.iso.gz Save copy of data cdrom
  mkisofs -V LABEL -r dir | gzip > cdrom.iso.gz Create cdrom image from contents of dir
  mount -o loop cdrom.iso /mnt/dir Mount the cdrom image at /mnt/dir (read only)
  cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom blank=fast Clear a CDRW
  gzip -dc cdrom.iso.gz | cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom - Burn cdrom image (use dev=ATAPI -scanbus to confirm dev)
  cdparanoia -B Rip audio tracks from CD to wav files in current dir
  cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom -audio -pad *.wav Make audio CD from all wavs in current dir (see also cdrdao)
  oggenc --tracknum='track' track.cdda.wav -o 'track.ogg' Make ogg file from wav file
disk space (See also FSlint)
• ls -lSr Show files by size, biggest last
• du -s * | sort -k1,1rn | head Show top disk users in current dir. See also dutop
• du -hs /home/* | sort -k1,1h Sort paths by easy to interpret disk usage
• df -h Show free space on mounted filesystems
• df -i Show free inodes on mounted filesystems
• fdisk -l Show disks partitions sizes and types (run as root)
• rpm -q -a --qf '%10{SIZE}\t%{NAME}\n' | sort -k1,1n List all packages by installed size (Bytes) on rpm distros
• dpkg-query -W -f='${Installed-Size;10}\t${Package}\n' | sort -k1,1n List all packages by installed size (KBytes) on deb distros
• dd bs=1 seek=2TB if=/dev/null of=ext3.test Create a large test file (taking no space). See also truncate
• > file truncate data of file or create an empty file
monitoring/debugging
• tail -f /var/log/messages Monitor messages in a log file
• strace -c ls >/dev/null Summarise/profile system calls made by command
• strace -f -e open ls >/dev/null List system calls made by command
• strace -f -e trace=write -e write=1,2 ls >/dev/null Monitor what's written to stdout and stderr
• ltrace -f -e getenv ls >/dev/null List library calls made by command
• lsof -p $$ List paths that process id has open
• lsof ~ List processes that have specified path open
• tcpdump not port 22 Show network traffic except ssh. See also tcpdump_not_me
• ps -e -o pid,args --forest List processes in a hierarchy
• ps -e -o pcpu,cpu,nice,state,cputime,args --sort pcpu | sed '/^ 0.0 /d' List processes by % cpu usage
• ps -e -orss=,args= | sort -b -k1,1n | pr -TW$COLUMNS List processes by mem (KB) usage. See also ps_mem.py
• ps -C firefox-bin -L -o pid,tid,pcpu,state List all threads for a particular process
• ps -p 1,$$ -o etime= List elapsed wall time for particular process IDs
• last reboot Show system reboot history
• free -m Show amount of (remaining) RAM (-m displays in MB)
• watch -n.1 'cat /proc/interrupts' Watch changeable data continuously
• udevadm monitor Monitor udev events to help configure rules
system information (see also sysinfo) ('#' means root access is required)
• uname -a Show kernel version and system architecture
• head -n1 /etc/issue Show name and version of distribution
• cat /proc/partitions Show all partitions registered on the system
• grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo Show RAM total seen by the system
• grep "model name" /proc/cpuinfo Show CPU(s) info
• lspci -tv Show PCI info
• lsusb -tv Show USB info
• mount | column -t List mounted filesystems on the system (and align output)
• grep -F capacity: /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info Show state of cells in laptop battery
# dmidecode -q | less Display SMBIOS/DMI information
# smartctl -A /dev/sda | grep Power_On_Hours How long has this disk (system) been powered on in total
# hdparm -i /dev/sda Show info about disk sda
# hdparm -tT /dev/sda Do a read speed test on disk sda
# badblocks -s /dev/sda Test for unreadable blocks on disk sda
interactive (see also linux keyboard shortcuts)
• readline Line editor used by bash, python, bc, gnuplot, ...
• screen Virtual terminals with detach capability, ...
• mc Powerful file manager that can browse rpm, tar, ftp, ssh, ...
• gnuplot Interactive/scriptable graphing
• links Web browser
• xdg-open . open a file or url with the registered desktop application
Command Description
• grep . /proc/sys/net/ipv4/* List the contents of flag files
• set | grep $USER Search current environment
• tr '\0' '\n' < /proc/$$/environ Display the startup environment for any process
• echo $PATH | tr : '\n' Display the $PATH one per line
• kill -0 $$ && echo process exists and can accept signals Check for the existence of a process (pid)
• find /etc -readable | xargs less -K -p'*ntp' -j $((${LINES:-25}/2)) Search paths and data with full context. Use n to iterate
Low impact admin
# apt-get install "package" -o Acquire::http::Dl-Limit=42 \
-o Acquire::Queue-mode=access
Rate limit apt-get to 42KB/s
  echo 'wget url' | at 01:00 Download url at 1AM to current dir
# apache2ctl configtest && apache2ctl graceful Restart apache if config is OK
• nice openssl speed sha1 Run a low priority command (openssl benchmark)
• renice 19 -p $$; ionice -c3 -p $$ Make shell (script) low priority. Use for non interactive tasks
Interactive monitoring
• watch -t -n1 uptime Clock with system load
• htop -d 5 Better top (scrollable, tree view, lsof/strace integration, ...)
• iotop What's doing I/O
# watch -d -n30 "nice ps_mem.py | tail -n $((${LINES:-12}-2))" What's using RAM
# iftop What's using the network. See also iptraf
# mtr www.pixelbeat.org ping and traceroute combined
Useful utilities
• pv < /dev/zero > /dev/null Progress Viewer for data copying from files and pipes
• wkhtml2pdf http://.../linux_commands.html linux_commands.pdf Make a pdf of a web page
• timeout 1 sleep 3 run a command with bounded time. See also timeout
Networking
• python -m SimpleHTTPServer Serve current directory tree at http://$HOSTNAME:8000/
• openssl s_client -connect www.google.com:443 </dev/null 2>&0 |
openssl x509 -dates -noout
Display the date range for a site's certs
• curl -I www.pixelbeat.org Display the server headers for a web site
# lsof -i tcp:80 What's using port 80
# httpd -S Display a list of apache virtual hosts
• vim scp://user@remote//path/to/file Edit remote file using local vim. Good for high latency links
• curl -s http://www.pixelbeat.org/pixelbeat.asc | gpg --import Import a gpg key from the web
• tc qdisc add dev lo root handle 1:0 netem delay 20msec Add 20ms latency to loopback device (for testing)
• tc qdisc del dev lo root Remove latency added above
Notification
• echo "DISPLAY=$DISPLAY xmessage cooker" | at "NOW +30min" Popup reminder
• notify-send "subject" "message" Display a gnome popup notification
  echo "mail -s 'go home' P@draigBrady.com < /dev/null" | at 17:30 Email reminder
  uuencode file name | mail -s subject P@draigBrady.com Send a file via email
  ansi2html.sh | mail -a "Content-Type: text/html" P@draigBrady.com Send/Generate HTML email
Better default settings (useful in your .bashrc)
# tail -s.1 -f /var/log/messages Display file additions more responsively
• seq 100 | tail -n $((${LINES:-12}-2)) Display as many lines as possible without scrolling
# tcpdump -s0 Capture full network packets
Useful functions/aliases (useful in your .bashrc)
• md () { mkdir -p "$1" && cd "$1"; } Change to a new directory
• strerror() { python -c "import os; print os.strerror($1)"; } Display the meaning of an errno
• plot() { { echo 'plot "-"' "$@"; cat; } | gnuplot -persist; } Plot stdin. (e.g: • seq 1000 | sed 's/.*/s(&)/' | bc -l | plot)
• hili() { e="$1"; shift; grep --col=always -Eih "$e|$" "$@"; } highlight occurences of expr. (e.g: • env | hili $USER)
• alias hd='od -Ax -tx1z -v' Hexdump. (usage e.g.: • hd /proc/self/cmdline | less)
• alias realpath='readlink -f' Canonicalize path. (usage e.g.: • realpath ~/../$USER)
Multimedia
• DISPLAY=:0.0 import -window root orig.png Take a (remote) screenshot
• convert -filter catrom -resize '600x>' orig.png 600px_wide.png Shrink to width, computer gen images or screenshots
  mplayer -ao pcm -vo null -vc dummy /tmp/Flash* Extract audio from flash video to audiodump.wav
  ffmpeg -i filename.avi Display info about multimedia file
• ffmpeg -f x11grab -s xga -r 25 -i :0 -sameq demo.mpg Capture video of an X display
DVD
  for i in $(seq 9); do ffmpeg -i $i.avi -target pal-dvd $i.mpg; done Convert video to the correct encoding and aspect for DVD
  dvdauthor -odvd -t -v "pal,4:3,720xfull" *.mpg;dvdauthor -odvd -T Build DVD file system. Use 16:9 for widescreen input
  growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd -dvd-video dvd Burn DVD file system to disc
Unicode
• python -c "import unicodedata as u; print u.name(unichr(0x2028))" Lookup a unicode character
• uconv -f utf8 -t utf8 -x nfc Normalize combining characters
• printf '\300\200' | iconv -futf8 -tutf8 >/dev/null Validate UTF-8
• printf 'ŨTF8\n' | LANG=C grep --color=always '[^ -~]\+' Highlight non printable ASCII chars in UTF-8
• fc-match -s "sans:lang=zh" List font match order for language and style
Development
• gcc -march=native -E -v -</dev/null 2>&1|sed -n 's/.*-mar/-mar/p' Show autodetected gcc tuning params. See also gcccpuopt
• for i in $(seq 4); do { [ $i = 1 ] && wget http://url.ie/6lko -qO-||
./a.out; } | tee /dev/tty | gcc -xc - 2>/dev/null; done
Compile and execute C code from stdin
• cpp -dM /dev/null Show all predefined macros
• echo "#include <features.h>" | cpp -dN | grep "#define __USE_" Show all glibc feature macros
  gdb -tui Debug showing source code context in separate windows
Extended Attributes (Note you may need to (re)mount with "acl" or "user_xattr" options)
• getfacl . Show ACLs for file
• setfacl -m u:nobody:r . Allow a specific user to read file
• setfacl -x u:nobody . Delete a specific user's rights to file
  setfacl --default -m group:users:rw- dir/ Set umask for a for a specific dir
  getcap file Show capabilities for a program
  setcap cap_net_raw+ep your_gtk_prog Allow gtk program raw access to network
• stat -c%C . Show SELinux context for file
  chcon ... file Set SELinux context for file (see also restorecon)
• getfattr -m- -d . Show all extended attributes (includes selinux,acls,...)
• setfattr -n "user.foo" -v "bar" . Set arbitrary user attributes
BASH specific
• echo 123 | tee >(tr 1 a) | tr 1 b Split data to 2 commands (using process substitution)
  meld local_file <(ssh host cat remote_file) Compare a local and remote file (using process substitution)
Multicore
• taskset -c 0 nproc Restrict a command to certain processors
• find -type f -print0 | xargs -r0 -P$(nproc) -n10 md5sum Process files in parallel over available processors
  sort -m <(sort data1) <(sort data2) >data.sorted Sort separate data files over 2 processors
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