denyhosts is an excellent utility to prevent brute-force SSH attacks against your server. One shortcoming it has is that it is difficult to get a blacklisted IP address back out of the, well, blacklist. Simply removing its entry from /etc/hosts.deny will not keep denyhosts from doing its job of blocking what it deemed to be… Read More »

Do you ever need to/want to know how hot your processors are running? There’s a way! Sure, there are handy gui tools for things like this, but for our purposes, sometimes a quick, clean little shell code snippet gets the job done quite nicely. Take, for instance when you are running something CPU intensive, like… Read More »

You can send out an "alert" email when someone logs in to your server (or workstation) by taking two steps*. Now if you prefer to send the alert to your smart phone instead of your inbox, you can easily apply what wikipedia has to say regarding text-to-sms gateway addresses after you finish reading this post.

Vim sessions are magical things that preserve every setting, every tab, every fold, everything open file, and just about everything else (except command history – “undo”) You can save your vim session and environment and then open it again later, without missing a beat. This is so helpful if you are editing a file remotely… Read More »