Category Archives: Linux Admin

SSH Tunnels Are Like a Free Cheap VPN

By Andrew Hopper1 | Published: August 21, 2009
If you’re not already familiar with the concept I bet you’d be very interested to learn that you can simulate VPN access to a network as long as you have access to a linux host on that network. These instructions work on OS X and Linux. Putty also has tunneling capabilities, but those are beyond [...]
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Use nslookup to check DNS propagation and verify MX record configuration

By Andrew Hopper1 | Published: August 21, 2009
NSLookup is a tool that can be immensely helpful when troubleshooting network connectivity issues. Here are some example uses: 1.) You want to see if the DNS change you requested in live on the primary nameserver hopper-macbook:~ andrewhopper$ nslookup > server dns1.noris.net Default server: dns1.noris.net Address: 213.95.0.65#53 > set type=a > puma.com Server: dns1.noris.net Address: 213.95.0.65#53 Name: puma.com Address: 128.167.119.25 2.) You just configured Google apps for your domain [...]
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Screen keyboard shortcuts

By Andrew Hopper | Published: May 24, 2009
Screen is an amazing little utility that allows you to have multiple sessions going within one terminal session. Here’s a link to the man page - http://man.cx/screen Here’s a quick cheatsheet borrowed from http://www.pixelbeat.org/lkdb/screen.html Key Action Notes Ctrl+a c new window Ctrl+a n next window I bind F12 to this Ctrl+a p previous window I bind F11 to this Ctrl+a “ select window from list I have window list in the status line Ctrl+a [...]
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Learn VIM in 5 Minutes

By Andrew Hopper | Published: May 21, 2009
I found a great Stack Overflow question on learning VIM here @ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2573/vim-tutorials VIM 5 Min Tutorial "Here is your 5 minute tutorial. The easiest way to learn vi is to know what the letters stand for:" y(ank) - copy d(elete) - delete c(hange) - change p(aste) - put from buffer after cursor o(pen) - start a new line i(nsert) - insert before current [...]
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