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How to find out the filesystem type of devices and partitions on Linux

Written on October 23rd, 2010 at 02:17 am by shredder12

So, I was working on a system remotely over ssh and I had to find out what filesystem was a particular partition formatted into. The thing looks trivial, but if you have been using some GUI app for this, then it won't come easy if you are working on a console. The trick in such situations is to look into the commands that deal with stuff similar to what you want, i.e disks & partitions in my case. So, I went for df, & parted.

How to Password protect files and folders/directories on Linux using zip

Written on October 11th, 2010 at 00:07 am by shredder12

I have previously discussed a simple trick to prevent other users from accessing your personal data. To summarise, all we did there was change the file permissions and ownership to root, so that whenever someone tries to access the folder through your account (assuming non-root), the system will throw a permission-denied error. Here is another similar trick to compress the content and password protect it.

How to Lock Folders/Directories in Linux

Written on July 21st, 2010 at 07:34 am by shredder12

Whenever I go to home on vacations, I usually share a lot of Music/Videos with my friends. On many occasions, my laptop is being used by someone else and since its a personal notebook, there is a lot of stuff I don't want people to mess around with. Under such cases, restricting other users by locking stuff comes in handy.

Since, most of my hometown friends are neither really techie nor even Linux users, a simple change in file permissions does the trick.

The difference between Primary and Secondary groups in Linux

Written on July 6th, 2010 at 02:02 am by chia

The security of a file on Linux is managed very well using the concept of ownership and permissions. There can be three kind of permissions - read, write and execute and similary the ownership is divided into three kinds too - a user, group and others. Groups are a great way to share your work or work in collaboration with others by defining a group, whose members have the write to contribute/modify/see the work.

How to force inactive users to logout automatically after time out on Linux?

Written on June 17th, 2010 at 21:24 pm by chia

When you work on different servers from your system, the sessions are scattered over various terminals across different workspaces. Its a common mistake people usually make by leaving one or more of those server sessions open. Such sessions can lead to bad things if they get in hands of someone else. So, instead of blaming the user its always a good practice for sys-admins to automatically logout a user who is inactive for quite sometime.

Increase available disk space by decreasing the reserved blocks in extended filesytems ext2/3/4 using tune2fs

Written on October 21st, 2010 at 20:48 pm by shredder12

Have you ever noticed that after formatting a partition or external storage device - hard disk etc. into ext2/3/4 decreases the total available disk space by some amount? That's because the file-system reserves some part of the space to privileged processes. This is done to make sure that in case of file-system fill up, when user processes may not be allowed to write to disk, privilege system processes(or root user) may still be able to function properly(write on disk) e.g. syslogd etc.

How to install Nvidia Driver on CentOS

Written on September 17th, 2010 at 19:08 pm by shredder12

So, I installed CentOS yesterday and I never expected but installing it was a pretty good experience. Since, its mostly used as a server, it asks you in the beginning what kind of work this machine would be doing - Servers(dns/http etc.), virtualization or others. Basically, marking the appropriate packages to install before hand. This went great, but when I finally logged into it system for the first time, the default graphics performance was terrible.

How to add user to a Group on Linux

Written on July 6th, 2010 at 17:50 pm by chia

Managing users is an important activity in Linux. For a Sysadmin, you want different access permissions for developers, maintainers and moderators. Groups are an easy way to categorize users. Rights/permissions given to a group will be applicable to all its members. In this howto, I will tell you how to add users to a group.

I would suggest you to read about the two types of groups - Primary and Secondary, before proceeding.

How to Change Ownership of a file on Linux

Written on July 5th, 2010 at 03:36 am by chia

File ownership is a way to manage files of different users and share files between users of same groups. Every file in linux is managed by a specific user and a group. The chmod command helps to define file permissions separately for user, group and others.

Convert any software packages to formats recognized by your distro using Alien

Written on June 8th, 2010 at 16:44 pm by shredder12

Alien is a program that is used to inter convert software packages from different distributions e.g  a deb to rpm, deb to solaris pkg packages etc. Although most of the popular softwares will be available as a package in your linux distribution too but if that's not the case then you can use alien to convert a package available in some other file format to the one used by your distro.

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