Why GNU/Linux Rocks

[devilock76]

+1 on a lot of that stuff.

Ken

[Los ßnus]

Hey all, so I am currently renting a dedicated server for something I am doing but that function is only taking up a small amount of the available space/bandwidth, and I was wondering if there were any cool things I can do with it since I have it at my disposal and it's not being fully utilized. Namely my goal here is just to increase my proficiency with using linx from the command line only, so any project that accomplishes that goal would be beneficial even if it isn't particularly usefull for anything at the moment, as I don't need an rsync server or anything but would like to try some sort of project just to learn how to do it.

It's got a 100Mbs connection, a 1.2ghz processor with only 2GB of ram, and is running Debian 6 on it.
It's got 1TB of space, and I am only currently using a little over 200GB of that space, leaving about 790GB left over after accounting for overhead.

It is currently hosted on the French web host OVH, the guys who host wikileaks, so it's relatively secure, and I only access it via SSH.


I have a guy that handles most of the sysadmin stuff on it (security etc), but everything else is run by me and I have SUDO privaledges etc so I can do pretty much anything I want. Right now, aside from the main purpose I bought it for, I have folding@home running on it for team Snuson but that's about it. With a 1.2Ghz processor and 2gb of ram it ain't exactly a supercomputer but it is up 24/7 and has a great connection speed.


So, any ideas on what else I can use it for?? It doesn't have to necessarily be for any specific purpose, I just mainly want to learn more about linux from a server-side prospective. I am working on getting better with linux on my Fedora install at home so I already have that covered. If anyone has any cool ideas about what to use it for it would be appreciated!


So far from googling I have seen that most people will use it for either hosting a web page (I have a web page I am working on but have a seperate shared host for that, not expecting too much traffic), and then I have also heard of people using their dedi's to host an IRC channel or a game server but I don't really need either of those at the moment.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Learn to set up a LAMP server if it interests you. Learn MySQL database, it's pretty easy and fun. Learn PHP and make your own dynamic web site with MySQL database driving it from behind.

hmmm, you could use it as a SSH proxy to get around pesky work firewalls. I am. Also this is good for public wifi. SSH proxy encrypts all traffic through your ssh session (putty for you) and will allow you for more secure browsing at the cafe, airport, parent's house, wherever.

You could try and set up an openvpn server on it so you can be more secure with your browsing and not get throttled for torrenting (legal of course).

Set up a mail server on it and a BIND9 DNS server too so you can host your own email like sgreger@yourdomain.com

Run an internet jukebox with ampache and listen to your tunes anywhere you want.

Set up SAMBA so you can connect to a file share with Windows.

Set up WEBDAV so you can have a web-disk for backing up and the such.

Set up Subversion (SVN) and play around with an awesome open source version control software. Then set up Trac to get a web interface to it.

Mine for bitcoins using the processor (slow as hell)

Learn to code in C. Most linux distros come with GCC installed so you can compile fairly easily.

Install webmin and play with that, it's like CPanel but free. albeit, it is kind of linux "cheat mode" but it is useful. Once you figure out the CLI better, you won't need this.

Set up a forum using phpBB and run your own online community.

Set up a Teamspeak3 server and talk with your friends and family across the globe VOIP for free.

Set up a game server, counter-strike, bf3, whatever and have fun playing on it.

Set up a minecraft server for you and your friends.

Set up a Bittorrent server and piss your host off

Install elinks or lynx and be a 1337 D3WD with CLI based web browsing.

Host a mirror image for your favorite distro.



The list goes on.

[sgreger1]

Hey all, so I am currently renting a dedicated server for something I am doing but that function is only taking up a small amount of the available space/bandwidth, and I was wondering if there were any cool things I can do with it since I have it at my disposal and it's not being fully utilized. Namely my goal here is just to increase my proficiency with using linx from the command line only, so any project that accomplishes that goal would be beneficial even if it isn't particularly usefull for anything at the moment, as I don't need an rsync server or anything but would like to try some sort of project just to learn how to do it.

It's got a 100Mbs connection, a 1.2ghz processor with only 2GB of ram, and is running Debian 6 on it.
It's got 1TB of space, and I am only currently using a little over 200GB of that space, leaving about 790GB left over after accounting for overhead.

It is currently hosted on the French web host OVH, the guys who host wikileaks, so it's relatively secure, and I only access it via SSH.


I have a guy that handles most of the sysadmin stuff on it (security etc), but everything else is run by me and I have SUDO privaledges etc so I can do pretty much anything I want. Right now, aside from the main purpose I bought it for, I have folding@home running on it for team Snuson but that's about it. With a 1.2Ghz processor and 2gb of ram it ain't exactly a supercomputer but it is up 24/7 and has a great connection speed.


So, any ideas on what else I can use it for?? It doesn't have to necessarily be for any specific purpose, I just mainly want to learn more about linux from a server-side prospective. I am working on getting better with linux on my Fedora install at home so I already have that covered. If anyone has any cool ideas about what to use it for it would be appreciated!


So far from googling I have seen that most people will use it for either hosting a web page (I have a web page I am working on but have a seperate shared host for that, not expecting too much traffic), and then I have also heard of people using their dedi's to host an IRC channel or a game server but I don't really need either of those at the moment.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

[mattarios]

Always waned to get around to learning linux and all of its power. Never had the time, I always used Windows which I know can be ridiculously annoying.

I will say 7 is much better than past operating systems they have released but it would be nice to learn Linux seeing how powerful it is.

[devilock76]

Oh and when you don't know the command for the man page use the apropos command which can search man pages by keyword.

Ken

[devilock76]

Sgreger you should probably start with a book on unix sysem administration, preferrably geared to your preferred flavor of linux. You can probably find a free ebook version. If those man page entries are daunting then that might be a better start.

But to answer your question -x is command switch typically an the pattern is regex, regular expression. Regex is just about its own language in itself but learning perl wih regex creates a lot of power.

Ken

[lxskllr]

Los abbreviated the page. It goes on for awhile longer, and explains the switches somewhat. If you don't understand the man pages, you can DuckDuckGo the command, and get useful examples, and more thorough explanations round the web. Some are straight forward, and others not so much. You aren't gonna be able to sit down and memorize this stuff. It's too much to learn.

[sgreger1]

the man command. I know it's not a hardcopy and it is cryptic at times but it is pretty damn useful.

> man command
man grep




edit: check this out too. handy to print out for quick reference.
http://fosswire.com/post/2007/08/uni...d-cheat-sheet/

I guess i'm just an idiot because most of that didn't make sense.

grep [OPTIONS] PATTERN [FILE...]

What do i put where pattern is for example? I wish there was something that gave a simple explanation of what pattern is for example here and how it oculd be applied, or maybe even an example or two

grep [OPTIONS] [-e PATTERN | -f FILE] [FILE...]

This one makes even less sense, what does the -e do? Why does it also add -f FILE? To someone who doesn't know these terms, it makes these instructions unuseable. Again it's like a dictionary with English words, but the definitions are all in spanish and no examples or usage information is provided. There has to be something out there, even if it isn't hardcopy.

[Los ßnus]

$ man woman
No manual entry for woman

[Los ßnus]

Hey guys is there some sort of hard copy manual I can get somewhere that has a list of all the various CLI commands that are common for Fedora or linnux in general? I have seen some but they are like



Aka, it makes no sense. It's like an english dictionary that has all of the definitions written in mandarin, it does me no good. Is there any kind of beginners manual type of book or even something that gives more than a one line (and highly abbreviated) quick definition?

the man command. I know it's not a hardcopy and it is cryptic at times but it is pretty damn useful.

> man command
man grep

GREP(1) User Commands GREP(1)

NAME
grep, egrep, fgrep, rgrep - print lines matching a pattern

SYNOPSIS
grep [OPTIONS] PATTERN [FILE...]
grep [OPTIONS] [-e PATTERN | -f FILE] [FILE...]

DESCRIPTION
grep searches the named input FILEs (or standard input if no files are named, or if a single hyphen-minus (-) is given as
file name) for lines containing a match to the given PATTERN. By default, grep prints the matching lines.

In addition, three variant programs egrep, fgrep and rgrep are available. egrep is the same as grep -E. fgrep is the
same as grep -F. rgrep is the same as grep -r. Direct invocation as either egrep or fgrep is deprecated, but is
provided to allow historical applications that rely on them to run unmodified.

................ and so on and so on

edit: check this out too. handy to print out for quick reference.
http://fosswire.com/post/2007/08/uni...d-cheat-sheet/

[lxskllr]

Try this. They'll be somewhat terse, but if you really need to know more, DuckDuckGo should help...

https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/

[sgreger1]

Hey guys is there some sort of hard copy manual I can get somewhere that has a list of all the various CLI commands that are common for Fedora or linnux in general? I have seen some but they are like

fidks_do_somethign -because /said.so - Definition: Takes a bi link dual quad core fatdick and comingle allocates the sprockets with fdisk GPU750XMBC

Aka, it makes no sense. It's like an english dictionary that has all of the definitions written in mandarin, it does me no good. Is there any kind of beginners manual type of book or even something that gives more than a one line (and highly abbreviated) quick definition?

[Los ßnus]

The data's probably still there, no? How would a dying PSU corrupt a whole drive?

also, rsync should just copy the data from one drive to another not get rid of the data on the first. kind of strange.

If you can fire up a live cd try doing a fsck on the suspect drive. had it save my ass more times than I care to count.

[lxskllr]

So I hit enter, rsync starts up, and my laptop's power supply dies. In the process, it manages to irrecoverably corrupt the partition with all that music on it. So now I'm left with no functioning full laptop, 28 days to try and save what I can off that hard drive, and ship it back before WD charges me $108. I think I'll head off tonight and go get drunk. Hopefully tomorrow I can either stumble across a comparable and fully functional laptop left by the curb, or come up with some brilliant solution to MacGyver my way out of this, but the odds are looking grim. So, it's not always sunshine and kittens when you start getting down to the nuts and bolts of tinkering with your computer.

The data's probably still there, no? How would a dying PSU corrupt a whole drive?

Edit:
I was looking up data recovery on GNU/Linux a couple days ago. Maybe it would be useful for your purposes...

http://digitizor.com/2011/01/25/linu...iles-photorec/

[sgreger1]

Sgreger, I think you're forgetting that you'll need some way to power all this stuff.

For me, the main benefit of Arch is as devilock said, it starts with a real minimalist install. I don't use Gnome, KDE, Pulseaudio, Rhythmbox and so on. i3, mpd+ncmpcpp, and alsa work well enough for me. I can just go through the installer once, and have everything I use and its dependencies, and not have to dig around getting rid of crap I neither want nor need. A heavy install of Arch for me is still a good 7GB less than an install of Fedora or Mint, before I tear out all the crap I have no use for.

Also, everything is where it should be in Arch, at least as far as I'm concerned. It's a rare case where I need to go digging through my file system to find a global config file because some asshole didn't put it in /etc like it should be.

That said, got my replacement hard drive in the mail last night (current one was dying, needed to back it up and send the old one back), set up Arch on it, and set rsync to backing up all my music from the old drive. This represents saving me from reripping some 600+ CDs, a good 150-200 LPs and a handful of cassettes. The CDs aren't such a big deal, but records and cassettes represent several days (probably close to a week at least), of doing the entire rip at 1x speed, editing the tracks, and tagging them all by hand.

So I hit enter, rsync starts up, and my laptop's power supply dies. In the process, it manages to irrecoverably corrupt the partition with all that music on it. So now I'm left with no functioning full laptop, 28 days to try and save what I can off that hard drive, and ship it back before WD charges me $108. I think I'll head off tonight and go get drunk. Hopefully tomorrow I can either stumble across a comparable and fully functional laptop left by the curb, or come up with some brilliant solution to MacGyver my way out of this, but the odds are looking grim. So, it's not always sunshine and kittens when you start getting down to the nuts and bolts of tinkering with your computer.

1) The Raspberry Pi runs off 5v, and it claims 4 AA batteries can run it (but no mention of how long or under what kind of load). My idea for the streetview thing would involve a backpack and you could easily fit a power source in the backpack if you wanted, all of the cameras have their own power source, unles you are using webcams than you could just get a power source in there and an inverter even if you wanted (depending on how heavy you want this to be and how good you are at electrical things, you could rewire everything to run natively from whatever the power source is).

2) Sorry to hear about that man, that sucks. How much is a new power supply, or are you going to have to buy a whole new laptop? Sucks about all the data on the hard drive being wiped though. Do data recovery places charge by the amount of data? Taht is my fear too, I wonder how much it would cost to go to some place and be like "Yah i need to recover 3TB of data off these friend hard drives, how much will that cost?" lol.