The Author – Bart Busschots
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Jun
30
TTT Part 5 of n – File Permissions
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech on June 30, 2013 | 1 Comment
In this instalment it’s time to make a start on one of the most important Unix/Linux concepts, file permissions. This can get quite confusing, but it’s impossible to over-state the importance of understanding how to read and set permissions on files and folders. To keep things manageable, I’m splitting understanding and altering permissions into two separate instalments.
Linux and Unix (and hence OS X) all share a common file permissions system, but while they share the same common core, they do each add their own more advanced permissions systems on top of that common core. In this first instalment we’re only going to look at the common core, so everything in this instalment applies equally to Linux, Unix, and OS X. In future instalments we’ll take a brief look at the extra file information and permissions OS X associates with files, but we won’t be looking at the Linux side of things, where more granular permissions are provides through kernel extensions like SELinux.
May
26
TTT Part 4 of n – Navigation
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech on May 26, 2013 | 4 Comments
In the previous segment we discussed the concept of a file system in detail. We described how filesystems contain folders which contain files or folders, and we described the different ways in which Windows and Linux/Unix/OS X combine all the filesystems on our computers into a single name-space, within which every file has a unique ‘path’ (F:\myFolder\myFile.txt -v- /Volumes/myThumbDrive/myFolder/myFile.txt). In this instalment we’ll look at how to navigate around the Unix/Linux/OS X filesystem in a Bash command shell.
May
11
TTT Part 3 of n – File Systems
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech on May 11, 2013 | 3 Comments
This is the third instalment of an on-going series. These blog posts are only part of the series, they are actually the side-show, being effectively just my show notes for discussions with Allison Sheridan on my bi-weekly Chit Chat Across the Pond segment on her show, the NosillaCast Mac Podcast. This instalment will be featured in NosillaCast episode 418 (scheduled for release late on Sunday the 12th of May 2013).
In the first installment we started with the 40,000ft view, looking at what command shells are, and why they’re still relevant in today’s GUI-dominated world. In the second instalment we looked at OS X’s Terminal.app, the anatomy of the Bash command prompt, and the anatomy of a Unix/Linux command. This time we’ll be looking at the anatomy of file systems in general, and the Unix/Linux file system in particular, and how it differs from the Windows/DOS file system many of us grew up using.
Apr
26
TTT Part 2 of n – Commands
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech on April 26, 2013 | 3 Comments
This is the second instalment of an on-going series. In the first instalment I tried to give you a sort of 40,000ft view of command shells – some context, some history, a very general description of what command shells do, and a little bit on why they are still very useful in the modern GUI age. The most important points to remember from last time are that command shells execute commands, that there are lots of different command shells on lots of different OSes, but that we will be focusing on Bash on Linux/Unix in general, and Bash on OS X in particular. The vast majority of topics I plan to discuss in these segments will be applicable on any system that runs Bash, but, the screen shots I use will be from OS X, and some of the cooler stuff will be OS X only. This segment, like all the others will be used as part of my bi-weekly Chit Chat Across The Pond (CCATP) segment with Allison Sheridan on the NosillaCast Mac Podcast.
Last time I focused on the shell, and avoided getting in any way specific about the actual commands that we will be executing within the Bash shell. I thought it was very important to make as clear a distinction between command shells and commands as possible, so I split the two concepts into two separate segments. Having focused on command shells last time, this instalment will focus on the anatomy of a command, but will start with a quick intro to the Terminal app in OS X first.
Apr
13
TTT Part 1 of n – Command Shells
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech on April 13, 2013 | 6 Comments
I have no idea whether or not this idea is going to work out, but on this week’s Chit Chat Across the Pond segment on the NosillaCast Mac Podcast (to be released Sunday evening PST) I’m going to try start what will hopefully be an on-going series of short un-intimidating segments to gently introduce Mac users to the power contained within the OS X Terminal app. I’m on with Allison every second week, and I’ll have other topics to talk about, so the most frequent the instalments in this series could be would be bi-weekly, but I think they’ll turn out to be closer to monthly on average. While the focus will be on OS X, the majority of the content will be equally applicable to any other Unix or Linux operating system.
In the last CCATP we did a very detailed segment on email security, and despite the fact that with the benefit of hind-sight I realise it was too much to do at once and should have been split into two segments, it received the strongest listener response of anything of any of my many contributions to the NosillaCast in the last 5 or more years. I hope I’m right in interpreting that as evidence that there are a lot of NosillaCast listeners who want to get a little more technical, and get their hands dirty with some good old-fashioned nerdery!
Feb
26
Why I Don’t Like RedHat Enterprise Linux
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech on February 26, 2009 | 1 Comment
NOTE: Although this post references experiences I have had in work, the opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone.
If you follow me on Twitter you may have noticed my anti-RHEL (RedHat Enterprise Linux) outbursts today. I could keep twittering to try make my point, but sometimes 140 characters is just not enough, so I figured I’d blog about it instead and then tweet out the link to the blog post when I’m done.
In work we run two kinds of Linux servers, RedHat Enterprise Linux, and CentOS. We pay for RedHat, we don’t pay for CentOS (because it’s free). CentOS is based off the RedHat code base, but has some of the fancy stuff stripped out. Clearly, you would expect RHEL to give you the better experience since it has more features and you pay for support. Unfortunately, in my experience that’s just not how things are shaping up. CentOS has been completely problem and stress free (as well as financially free), while RHEL has not been such a smooth ride. Sure, most of the time it works just fine, but it definitely generates more stress for me than CentOS does, and that’s paid-for stress!
Jun
21
FireFox 3 – Greatly Improved but Not Perfect
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 21, 2008 | 2 Comments
I’ve been recommending FireFox for years now. In fact, I’ve been using it as my primary browser since it was called FireBird. It has been a more secure and a more feature-rich choice for years. (If you’re interested in the security aspects then you might enjoy reading a recent article I wrote for the International Mac Podcast blog comparing Safari and FireFox from a security point of view.) What got me hooked on FireBird was it’s plugin architecture. The idea of being able to customise my browser really appealed to me and as FireBird has grown into FireFox the list of available plugins has grown too. No other browser is as expandable as FireFox. If you can think of it, the chances are someone’s written a plugin for it!
However, FireFox has long suffered from two major shortcomings, memory leaks you could pilot a large ship through, and a non-native look. FireFox has been chewing up insane amounts of RAM for years, and has always looked like a fish out of water, particularly on OS X. These two problems are both fixed in FireFox 3 and if that was all they’d done I’d be recommending it highly, but they’ve done much more.
[tags]internet, browser, FireFox, FireFox 3[/tags]
May
31
Musings on the State of Modern Operating Systems
Filed Under Computers & Tech on May 31, 2008 | Leave a Comment
This week’s Leopard update from Apple sparked a thought in my head that’s been brewing for a while now. Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie seem to have been on to something when they sang Every OS Sucks a few years back (lyrics – video).
[tags]Leopard, OS X, Mac, Apple, Vista, Microsoft, Linux, Three Dead Trolls and a Baggie[/tags]
Mar
25
PasswordVault2Go – A Great Shareware Tool
Filed Under Security, Computers & Tech on March 25, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Passwords are an annoying fact of life in our modern electronic world. If you’re any sort of regular computer user you’re going to start building up quite a collection. You could use the same user name and password for everything, but that’s very insecure. Also, you often don’t have a choice of user name, or you can run into very restrictive password policies, either way it’s unlikely you’ll manage to get the same user name and password everywhere even if you tried! Remembering the details for things you log in to every day is never the problem. It’s the passwords for the things you only use a few times a month or even a year that cause the problems. Saving passwords in browsers can help a bit but it makes things even worse when you try to use another computer and of course your browser isn’t going to be any help when it comes to remembering your domain password at work or your FTP password for that website you only update every few months. On top of all your passwords you also have software registration codes to keep track of and your browser certainly isn’t going to help you with that. Inevitably you end up getting locked out of sites or services and having to re-buy software you’ve bought before because you can’t find your registration key.
[tags]PasswordVault, PasswordVault2Go, Lava Software[/tags]
Feb
26
Two Tips for Getting More out of Thunderbird
Filed Under Computers & Tech on February 26, 2007 | 7 Comments
I’m probably a very rare beast, a Mac user who uses Thunderbird rather than Apple Mail. The reason I use Thunderbird is because I don’t like lock-in. I’ve had my same mailboxes on Windows, Linux and Mac, so I know that as long as I use Thunderbird I can move to any OS I want at any time and keep all my mail, contacts and settings completely effortlessly. I’d just have to copy one folder. It can certainly be argued that Thunderbird is less polished looking than Mac Mail and it has a few less features but on the whole it’s a very capable client that works well.
I’ve been using the basic features for years but of late the sheer volume of mail I have to deal with at work has led me to start experimenting with ways of making my life easier. The first optimization people generally think of is message filters so I’m not going to talk about those because I think they are pretty obvious and people are used to using them. Instead I’m going to give two hopefully less obvious tips.
[tags]Mozilla, Thunderbird, Email, To Do, Organise[/tags]