This is a collection of FreeBSD tips that comes with the fortune programe included in the system. Many of these will work on any Unix system. Any user that is a member of the wheel group can use “su -” to simulate a root login. You can add a user to the wheel group by editing /etc/group. By pressing “Scroll Lock” you can use the arrow keys to scroll backwardthrough the console output. Press “Scroll Lock” again to turn it off. Read more

There is a lot of false information around about the way Google stores information about you and how they use it. You can however have full control of your Google Account by visiting google.com/myactivity If you want to benefit from technology you need to learn how to manage it. This link was found on Lauren Weinstein’s Blog If you are interested in Internet Privacy and Security visit Lauren Weinstein’s Blog you will get lots of useful information. Read more

Microsoft Outlook especially older versions is junk, but you probably knew that already. For some reason Outlook often sends out a message with incorrect syntax e.g. “[email protected]”. Mail servers like postfix will reject these messages but Outlook will not warn its user that there is a problem. Instead it will keep the message in the outbox and continously retry sending. If you are a postfix admin you can strip the apostrophes with a command filter. Read more

Windows sometimes has a mind of its own when it comes to DNS. To clear the windows DNS cache when you have issues do the following. Open cmd or powershell as administrator. Run ipconfig /flushdns

I previously posted a tip about making your own soap. If you do make your own soap you will often have a problem with suitable forms for the soap. If you want to make round “bars” of soap instead of square or retangular, life often becomes difficult. You will find lots of ideas by searching for soap forms but the best I found was to use a pringles can. The only problem is that you can only use it once, but it is not a real problem if you like pringles. Read more

When a user doesn’t have a /.vimrc file in vim 8.0 (and possibly later) vim loads the default configuration file after the systemwide vimrc file created by the system administrator. This overides any settings the system administrator made. This is of course totally unexpected and frustrating especially when you upgrade from earlier versions. Some may even call it insane and it is definitely not expected behaviour. Anyway below is a way to prevent that from happening. Read more

sed is one of the commands that have been around forever on Unix systems. sed is a stream editor that you can use to perform basic text transformations on an input stream (a file or input from a pipeline). Want to use sed to edit a file in place? Well, to replace every ’e’ with an ‘o’, in a file named ‘foo’, you can do: sed -i.bak s/e/o/g foo And you’ll get a backup of the original in a file named ‘foo.bak’, but if you want no backup: Read more

Most people know the netstat command to show you everything about the state of the network on your machine. You can also use sockstat to list all the open sockets on your system. Below are the sockstat options. sockstat -4 Show AF_INET (IPv4) sockets. sockstat -6 Show AF_INET6 (IPv6) sockets. sockstat -c Show connected sockets. sockstat -j jid Show only sockets belonging to the specified jail ID. Read more

If you want df, ls or du and other commands to display disk sizes in kilobytes instead of 512 byte blocks, set BLOCKSIZE in your environment to ‘K’. You can also use ‘M’ for Megabytes or ‘G’ for Gigabytes. If you want them to automatically select the best size then use df -h for example.

Windows Software Update Services provides a way for Windows sysadmins to control the distribution of updates to windows computers. It also helps to save a lot of bandwidth if you don’t have a superfast internet connection. Unfortunately many think that it is easy to setup and maintain. On newer version of Windows Server it is easy to setup but it needs a lot of care and feeding. I you want to run WSUS you will have to run the “Server Cleanup Wizard” at least once a month, or run Invoke-WSUSCleanup in a scheduled task. If you don’t lots of frustration awaits after a few months. Read more