How Image Your Operating System for Free
Whether you have a OEM edition of Windows installed on your computer and you don’t have an install disk, or you have finally gotten your Gentoo system up and running, it’s a good idea to make a complete backup of your operating system. Although you can generally simply copy the files that make up Linux over onto a different hard drive or partition, with Windows you need to make an image. Making an image also has benefits on Linux, not the least of which is it contains the entire operating system backup in a single, compressed file. The most powerful,...
Why OpenOffice Documents on NFS Won't Open and a Simple Fix
I keep most of my files on my server because I’ve around a terabyte of space available. In order to access directories that I regularly need, I use NFS to share out the drives. Unfortunately, for the past several months, opening OpenOffice documents resulted in a considerable delay, before OpenOffice would finally informed me that the file was locked for editing by another user, despite the fact that I was the only one with access to the file. In addition to problems with opening documents with OpenOffice, other complex files such as the files for Anki would crash the program...
How to Pause Linux Command Line Programs
With a CPU or RAM intensive program running in terminal, sometimes you need to be able to pause the program in order work on something else for a bit, like browsing the web. All of this was done in BASH, other shells may or may not work. Of course, programs like mencoder don’t usually come with a function to pause and resume their execution. Fortunately, its easy to pause it through the shell. Just hit ctrl-z to suspend the program. This will bring you back to the terminal prompt, allowing you to run another program if you choose. In order...
Enhancing Security of Your Passwords with Keyfiles
Some programs that use encryption to protect your data allow you to enter a file to be used as a keyfile as well as using a password to decrypt your data. This greatly increases security for the data because it would require an attacker not only to have the password required to decrypt (passwords which can be gained through a variety of attacks such as keyloggers, successfully attacks on another system which shares the same password, and a variety of other means), but also would require the attacker to have a copy of the file that you have set as...
Securing Drives With TrueCrypt
I synchronize everything in my documents folder on Linux to a 16 gigabyte SD card on a daily basis. That way, I can have all my homework, assignments, and other assorted school materials with me while I’m am at school, but still be able to keep up-to-date versions on my regularly backed up server for access from my desktop (of course I could mount the drive over sshfs, but the wireless connection on campus isn’t up to the task). This comes with the inherent risk that I will lose the SD card, which also has the risk that someone will...