Many times you will end up tailing multiple files simultaneously. There is a sweet linux utility called multitail that will let you tail multiple files at the same time within the same shell.

And not only will you be able to tail multiple files! You will also be able to run multiple commands and tail their outputs!

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Ever had your linux box getting Out of Memory (OOM)? Cleaning up after the OOM killer kicked in to find out that even though OOM killer did a decent job at trying to kill the bad processes, your system ends up in an unknown state and you might be better of rebooting the host to make sure it comes back up in a state that you know is safe.

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Last time we saw how bash can help us in handling default values out of the box using parameter expansion. This time we will see how basic string operations (nonetheless common and useful) can also be achieved using bash.

There is many ways to do string manipulation with bash, like finding a filename extension using expr, separating the directory part from a filename using dirname and basename…. or even more sophisticated ones based on regex, sed….

Why using a sledgehammer to crack a nut when you could use bash builtin functionalities!

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Bash is a sh-compatible command language interpreter that executes commands read from the standard input or from a file.
There is much more to bash than running a sequence of commands, one of the features bundled with bash is parameter expansion.

Any shell user has most likely used shell variables, be it $1 or $myvar, to save values… but there is more to it. This tutorial will cover a subset of shell parameter expansion that can become really handy and save you a lot of time.

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top is most likely one of the most known Linux command and also one of the most used one, however most people do not take full advantage of its capabilities.

In this tutorial, we will see a few usages of top that will make allow you to get more out of it.

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OpenVPN is a SSL based VPN software that runs on most OS. It is simple to install and run.

In this tutorial, I will go over the steps needed to configure OpenVPN on Debian Squeeze to provide a full VPN tunnel, this is particularly useful when you want to access internet from non-trusted networks such as free hotspots…

There are many ways of setting up OpenVPN, a common one is to use a unique certificate for each users. Another one is to have each user authenticate with a username/password.

In this article, we will be setting OpenVPN to authenticate users using PAM.

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Munin 2.0 has been released and a .deb package has even been backported to Debian Squeeze!.

Version 2.0 comes with a bunch of new features and scalability improvements. This how-to will explain how to install and configure Munin 2.0 using Apache and mod-fcgid on Debian Squeeze.

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Linux start up behaviour is driven by the so-called runlevels. It will use the default value provided in /etc/inittab for some systems (Debian…), or /etc/init/rc-sysinit.conf or some others (Ubuntu…).

This tutorial will show how to change the runlevel used during boot by modifying Grub2 start up prompt.

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As a sysadmin, most of my time is spent working on remote machines and different task. tmux is a terminal multiplexer, meaning it allows you to run multiple terminals in the same windows.

This tutorial will explain the basics features of tmux that should help you be more productive with your every day task.

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When enabling logs with HAProxy on a busy web site, hard disk space can quickly become a scarce resource.

The reason is that, most of the time, HAProxy is set to use local0 facility which tend to write logs to a bunch of files in /var/log such as messages…

Thanks to rsyslog, we will be able to canalize those logs to a more appropriate location and only once, saving a bunch of disk space.

This tutorial will go over the steps required to accomplish this set up.

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