Homebrew Getting Started

Homebrew is a package manager for macOS systems to install the missing UNIX tools. It provides an easy and flexible way to install the tools that Apple did not include with macOS. Homebrew formulae are simple Ruby scripts and complement macOS based developer machine. We can place Homebrew wherever we like in the system including user’s home directory, and it only installs in the directory except it creates symlinks to their files into /usr/local for the tools to be readily available. Read More

VIM Runtime Configuration File (.vimrc)

Vim is a cross-platform text editor based on vi text editor program for Unix. Most Unix-like systems have vim preinstalled but if the system does not have vim then use system package manager to install vim. For example, on Ubuntu system use apt install vim. However, sometimes the default configuration is not enough to get most out of the vim, text editor. So one of the ways to customize the vim experience is by creating a .vimrc file in the user’s home directory. Here is my vim runtime configuration file (.vimrc), Read More

Asterisk PBX: A Comprehensive View

Asterisk is an open source private branch exchange (PBX) system initially designed and developed by Mark Spencer from Digium way back in 1999. During the late nineties, Mark saw enormous business opportunity providing professional support to Linux operation system. He observes an urgent need for a call distribution system which is capable of distributing calls equally among his group comprising Linux experts. Unfortunately, the building of such infrastructure requires the expense of millions of dollar to his organization. Read More

Effective Project Management through 'do.com'

These days, every task is performed in an organized manner in almost every industry, be it retailing, advertising or any other. Orderly working and efficient project management has increased the productivity. In the same league, website management is no exception. Better website management bestows efficient website navigation which ultimately increases the site traffic. Read More

Net-SNMP v3: Brief Overview

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an Internet-standard Application Layer protocol used mostly in network management systems to monitor network-attached devices for conditions that warrant administrative attention. The SNMP agent receives requests on UDP port 161, and the manager gets notifications (Traps and InformRequests) on port 162 but when SNMP is used with Transport Layer Security (TLS) or Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) requests are received on port 10161 and traps are sent to port 10162. Read More

Ping: How to turn off ICMP ECHO Response on Linux Server

Kernel parameters provide a mechanism to adjust the functioning of the Linux kernel. The sysctl command can be used to view and set kernel parameters, and ping response can also be denied by just changing the kernel parameter value. Let’s check the current value of kernel parameter, Read More

Character Encoding: Convert from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1

The iconv program converts the encoding of characters in an input file from one coded character set to another. We have tested these commands on RHEL 5, but it should work on other Linux distributions just fine. We have a test UTF-8 encoded file, Read More

Change Login Shell of Linux User

There are a couple of ways to change login shell of Linux user. We can change the login shell while creating a new user account or for an existing user. If creating a new user then use -s or --shell option in useradd command but for an existing user chsh or usermod command. Read More