As a Linux server administrator, having a reliable email notification system in place is crucial. Whether you’re dealing with unattended upgrades, monitoring RAID arrays, or any other server-related alerts, getting quick notifications can make a world of difference. Here’s a quick guide to setting up sSMTP, a lightweight and straightforward alternative to postfix or other full-fledged mail transfer agents (MTAs).

Why sSMTP instead of postfix?
sSMTP is lightweight, easy to configure, and perfect for scenarios where you just need outgoing email functionality. It’s particularly well-suited for sending notifications from Linux servers without the overhead of a fully-fledged MTA like postfix.

Greg Kroah-Hartman can't explain the inflection point, but it's not slowing down or going away. //

No one is quite sure what's behind it. Asked what changed, Kroah-Hartman was blunt: "We don't know. Nobody seems to know why. Either a lot more tools got a lot better, or people started going, 'Hey, let's start looking at this.' It seems like lots of different groups, different companies." What is clear is the scale. "For the kernel, we can handle it," he said.

"We're a much larger team, very distributed, and our increase is real – and it's not slowing down. These are tiny things, they're not major things, but we need help on this for all the open source projects." Smaller projects, he implied, have far less capacity to absorb a sudden flood of plausible AI-generated bug reports and security findings – at least now they're real bugs and not garbage ones. //

The trick for Kroah-Hartman and his peers will be to keep AI as a force multiplier, without drowning the open source maintainers.

Ts'o, Hohndel and the man himself spill beans on how checks in the mail and GPL made it all possible

Many computer systems around the world have been possessed by penguins; some have even been possessed by dead rats. In light of this, it is desireable to exorcize these evil spirits, and replace them with a nice, friendly daemon.
(More to the point, there are a number of dedicated server hosting companies which only offer Linux (or, in some cases, Linux and Windows); being able to remotely replace Linux with FreeBSD makes the (typically very low cost) offerings from these companies available to those who want to run FreeBSD.

I've put together some code for building a FreeBSD disk image which will boot into memory, configure the network, set a root password, and enable SSH. This can be used to "depenguinate" a Linux box, without requiring any access beyond a network connection.

The remainder of this page relates to the original (December 2003) version of my depenguinator. For a more recent version (which works with FreeBSD 7.0) see my blog post about my depenguinator version 2.0.

Users running a Linux system hardly pay attention to the underlying filesystem. In fact, during the installation of Linux, there’s a tendency to often go with the default filesystem listed without exploring other available options. For windows, things are a lot easier since NTFS is the dominant filesystem. With Linux, there are numerous filesystems at your disposal. These include the Ext4, XFS, ZFS, and BTRFS.

The most widely used filesystems are Ext4 and XFS, with the latter being the default filesystem in RHEL-based distros and Ext4 being the standard filesystem in Debian and Ubuntu distributions. When choosing a filesystem some of the factors that need to be considered include scalability, stability, and data integrity.

In this guide, we will focus on Ext4 and XFS filesystems and seek to understand the differences between these two.

If you see a message like this in your logs:

ext4 filesystem being mounted at /boot supports timestamps until 2038 (0x7fffffff)```

it's an indication that your filesystem is not Y2k38-safe.

You can also check this manually using:

$ tune2fs -l /dev/sda1 | grep "Inode size:"
Inode size:           128

where an inode size of 128 is insufficient beyond 2038 and an inode size of 256 is what you want.

The safest way to change this is to copy the contents of your partition to another ext4 partition:
...

An easier method (but caution):

e2fsck -f /dev/sda1 tune2fs -I 256 /dev/sda1

VoidLink includes an unusually broad and advanced array of capabilities.

Welcome to the Mirror Services infrastruction site by BOINC Team Belgium. On here, you will find software mirrors of various Linux® and UNIX®-like operating systems distributions. The mirrors sync once an hour (or once per 2 hours for ISO mirros) using rsync with a Tier 0 or Tier 1 mirror

I'd strongly suggest not to use find -L for the task (see below for explanation). Here are some other ways to do this:

If you want to use a "pure find" method, and assuming the GNU implementation of find, it should rather look like this:

find . -xtype l

(xtype is a test performed on a dereferenced link)

Just insert a disk and the TV starts playing three-year-old’s favorite shows. //

The one thing Olesen said he'd do differently, were he to redesign the entire project, would be to eliminate the Chromecast due to excessive latency and connect a computer directly to the TV. That, and he wishes he would have programmed a different melody onto each disk that would play from the drive itself when a disk was inserted, which he told us "should be totally doable" if he ever gets around to it.

If you, too, long for the era when a satisfying ca-chunk preceded file transfers and want to find something useful to do with that old floppy disk drive rotting away in that box of old computer stuff, Olesen's entire codebase and other relevant project files are available on GitHub. ®
https://github.com/mchro/FloppyDiskCast

Download an entire website with wget, along with assets.

# One liner
wget --recursive --page-requisites --adjust-extension --span-hosts --convert-links --restrict-file-names=windows --domains yoursite.com --no-parent yoursite.com

# Explained
wget \
     --recursive \ # Download the whole site.
     --page-requisites \ # Get all assets/elements (CSS/JS/images).
     --adjust-extension \ # Save files with .html on the end.
     --span-hosts \ # Include necessary assets from offsite as well.
     --convert-links \ # Update links to still work in the static version.
     --restrict-file-names=windows \ # Modify filenames to work in Windows as well.
     --domains yoursite.com \ # Do not follow links outside this domain.
     --no-parent \ # Don't follow links outside the directory you pass in.
         yoursite.com/whatever/path # The URL to download

The data=writeback mount option deserves to be tried, in order to prevent journaling of the file system. This should be done only during the deletion time, there is a risk however if the server is being shutdown or rebooted during the delete operation.

According to this page,

Some applications show very significant speed improvement when it is used. For example, speed improvements can be seen (...) when applications create and delete large volumes of small files.

The option is set either in fstab or during the mount operation, replacing data=ordered with data=writeback. The file system containing the files to be deleted has to be remounted. //

He could also increase the time from the commit option: "This default value (or any low value) will hurt performance, but it's good for data-safety. Setting it to 0 will have the same effect as leaving it at the default (5 seconds). Setting it to very large values will improve performance". –
Cristian Ciupitu Commented Sep 26, 2010 at 19:14

Lastly, FYI, not mentioned in that link is that fact that data=writeback can be a huge security hole, since data pointed to by a given entry may not have the data that was written there by the app, meaning that a crash could result in the old, possibly-sensitive/private data being exposed. Not a concern here, since we're only turning it on temporarily, but I wanted to alert everyone to that caveat in case either you or others who run across that suggestion weren't aware. –
BMDan Commented Sep 27, 2010 at 1:23

cat is surely the best way to do this. Why use python when there is a program already written in C for this purpose? However, you might want to consider using xargs in case the command line length exceeds ARG_MAX and you need more than one cat. Using GNU tools, this is equivalent to what you already have:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name 'input_file*' -print0 |
  sort -z |
  xargs -0 cat -- >>out

what is the fastest method to CREATE a thousands of files? Also, does it really matter if there is data in them, if they are just being deleted?

Using rsync is surprising fast and simple.

mkdir empty_dir
rsync -rd --delete empty_dir/    yourdirectory/

But ZFS also comes with an uncomfortable truth that doesn't get talked about enough: the filesystem is only as good as the operating system wrapping it. And if you're running ZFS on a generic Linux distribution, you're often signing up for more risk, maintenance, and subtle breakage than you expect. ZFS works on Linux, and many use it daily, but it's not a seamless, built-in part of the kernel. Instead, it's an add-on with caveats, and setting it up can feel frustratingly difficult. //

The problem with ZFS is Oracle
Licensing is a major issue

the Linux kernel's GPLv2 license is legally incompatible with ZFS's CDDL license, meaning that it can't be combined with the Linux kernel. Oracle's licensing is the major bottleneck.

Crucial early evolutionary step found, imaged, and ... amazingly ... works

Computer History Museum software curator Al Kossow has successfully retrieved the contents of the over-half-a-century old tape found at the University of Utah last month.

UNIX V4, the first ever version of the UNIX operating system in which the kernel was written in the then-new C programming language, has been successfully recovered from a 1970s nine-track tape drive. You can download it from the Internet Archive, and run it in SimH. On Mastodon, "Flexion" posted a screenshot of it running under SGI IRIX.

https://archive.org/details/utah_unix_v4_raw //

The very first version of Unix, later known as the "Zeroth edition", was hand-coded in assembly language by Thompson in 1969. He wrote it for a spare PDP-7 at Bell Labs, a Digital Equipment Corporation minicomputer from 1965. The PDP-7 was an 18-bit machine: it handled memory in 18-bit words. This was so long ago that things like the eight-bit byte had not yet been standardized. PDP-7 UNIX was reconstructed from printouts between 2016 and 2019.

It did well enough that a few years later, Thompson got his hands on a PDP-11. Thompson rewrote his OS for this 16-bit machine – still in assembly language – to create UNIX First Edition. At first, the machine had a single RS11 hard disk, for a grand total of half a megabyte of storage, although the rebuilt source code is from a later machine with a second hard disk.

All the mainstream distros (Ubuntu and Mint, openSUSE and Gecko Linux, Fedora, Debian) come with largely the same choice of desktops, and they're all the same. //

I am also not saying that any of these environments are bad. I have my own preferences, but I completely respect that other people have their own. That's fine too.

That is not the purpose of this piece.

What it is asking is: why are they all the same?

So many different implementations of the "traditional" (since 1995) taskbar-and-launch-menu are not different desktops.

Yes, there are differences, but they are trivial and cosmetic. //

The hidden price of duplicated effort
A very important aspect of this is accessibility. Not only for blind users, but they make a good example. GNOME 2 was reasonably good for people without eyesight, but it's gone, and none of its inheritors come close to matching it.

An excellent and very simple test of accessibility is to use a desktop PC and just unplug the mouse. Windows remains highly usable with only a keyboard. As standard, without enabling any special accessibility aids, windows can be opened, moved, resized, switched and closed, entirely with the keyboard. //

The accessibility features and keyboard controls of macOS are not available at all until enabled, whereas in Windows, they are part of the standard UI, there for everyone to use. //

There are other designs out there. There are more desktops than Windows and macOS, and all offer their own unique benefits. Reimplementing the same old desktop model over and over again doesn't help anyone: it just wastes a huge amount of talent and effort. ® //

Tuesday 17th May 2022 08:55 GMT
DrXymSilver badge
The curse of overchoice
Overchoice is actually a term for when a consumer is given so many options, often varying in ways which are meaningless or confusing that they end up making no choice at all.

Linux has always had that issue and it is illustrated in the article in all the desktops that exist or existed. I expect most prospective Linux users just want to install the thing and use it for something. They really don't care what desktop is powering their experience providing it is easy to use, discoverable, familiar, doesn't throw any nasty surprises at them and lets them get on and do stuff.

There are an almost ridiculous number of Windows-style desktops on Linux – and mostly this applies to the BSDs, too. Most of them are implemented in C, and most use various versions of the Gtk toolkit for their widgets: menus, dialog boxes, buttons and so on.

In approximate age order, the ones still being maintained today are Xfce; MATE, which is a fork of GNOME 2; LXDE; Linux Mint's Cinnamon; and Budgie, implemented in the GNOME-centric Vala language. //

Now we're up to 23. We could dig deeper, but we hope that we've made the point by now. There are several different languages here (but a lot fewer than 23 of them), and several different graphical toolkits (but again, well under 20). This is a vast amount of effort spent reinventing, and then maintaining, the basic concept of a round thing on the end of an axle.

But the underlying concept here is really quite a simple one. The window managers can't match the functionality of the Windows 95 Explorer, and not one of the desktops captures the simple elegance of the original. Windows 95 let you put the taskbar on any screen edge, but you only got one, and you couldn't change its length, or re-arrange or resize its contents, let alone change their orientation. Multiple rows was your only option. //

Remember the Basics of the Unix Philosophy:

Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

That 1995 design was simple. The components of the desktop – the task bar, the file manager, the text editor, and so on – don't need to exchange lots of rich, complex messages. //

Nearly two dozen different Windows-like UIs represents a titanic waste of programmer effort, skill, and time. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people, working hard for decades… but all on different projects, meaning that none of them achieve greatness. For an example, look at KDE Plasma's 36 launcher menus.

It is 27 years since the first release of KDE, and I suspect that Microsoft has been laughing all the way to the bank ever since. The FOSS world can do better, and it's time it started to try. ®

admin-tools is available as an AppImage which means "one app = one file", which you can download and run on your Linux system while you don't need a package manager and nothing gets changed in your system. Awesome!

AppImages are single-file applications that run on most Linux distributions. Download an application, make it executable, and run! No need to install. No system libraries or system preferences are altered. Most AppImages run on recent versions of Arch Linux, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and other common desktop distributions.