Posts about command line

Sometimes I use laptops in the home lab, and to save myself on a few watts of power usage I use these terminal commands to turn off the display, then just SSH into it from my PC.

Configure an Ubuntu machine to autologin and go straight into the terminal on boot.

If you want your Linux machine to stay up-to-date on important security updates, but you don't want to SSH into it all the time to run updates and would rather set it and forget it, this is the way.

Using the Secure Copy (SCP) utility in Linux lets you securely copy files to and from remote hosts, and it's very easy to use.

Just a quick cheat sheet of basic and slightly less basic Linux commands, as well as handy keyboard shortcuts, that I maintain for myself since I can't always remember them all.

Ansible is an IT tool that enables Infrastructure as Code, letting you automate provisioning, configuration, management and deployment of services and applications. I like using it at a fraction of it's full power to bootstrap fresh installs of Linux for my homelab.

I've been getting more and more comfortable working on the command line in Linux, and looked into ways to pretty it up and make it more user friendly. Enter Zsh, an alternative to Bash shell, and the Oh-My-Zsh framework used to customize the terminal experience to your heart's content. Here's my basic set up.

Rsync is a very handy tool for doing high-speed file transfers between Linux hosts over a local network or remote hosts on the internet, such as EC2 instances on Amazon Web Services. You can pass options to Rsync to do things like recursive transfer (all files and sub-directories within the source directory are also transferred), ignore existing or newer files at the destination, and more.

When using Linux headless, such as via SSH or with no desktop environment, accessing a newly installed hard drive (not just external USB drives, but additional internal HDDs too) is not obvious, and most people end up having to Google it. I know I did. So let's have a quick and dirty guide on how.