Vincent Danen

Vincent Danen introduces his favorite tool for automating text in Mac OS X. Typinator allows you to save time typing and will also correct oft-misspelled words.

If you are in an environment that disallows the use of SSH and forces the use of an HTTP proxy, it is possible to use that HTTP proxy as a transport for SSH. Vincent Danen explains how to use the Corkscrew program to do it.

Editing multiple files at once is made easier in the vim text editor with the use of tabs. Vincent Danen goes over the basic tab commands and shows you how to combine them with key bindings to make the most of a powerful editing tool.

Vincent Danen tells you how you can work smarter in vim by adding and changing keybindings to more familiar commands.

If you are using Nagios to monitor remote servers, you have more than one method to execute checks, including the use of the check_by_ssh plugin. Vincent Danen tells you how to set up this plugin and the best way to secure it.

With the release of OpenSSH 4.9p1, you no longer have to rely on third-party hacks or complicated chroot setups to confine users to their home directories or give them access to SFTP services. Vincent Danen tells you how to take advantage of this new addition to OpenSSH.

If you prefer to use vi or vim for command-line editing, you can configure shells to use vi key bindings instead of emacs-style key bindings. Here’s how.

GnuPG, the open replacement for PGP, is an excellent tool to manage cryptographic signatures to files or e-mails for validity and integrity, as well as a tool to encrypt and decrypt sensitive files. Previously, we looked into creating an initial GPG public/private keypair and looked at embedding a signature into an ASCII document. GPG can …

Linux is a robust and stable operating system kernel, but there are instances where it can panic, be it due to bad hardware or bad software. It does not happen often, but it can happen. If you’re running a server or some other always-on system that you may not have easy access to, a kernel …

The ls command is a well-known and often used command-line program that is used to list directory contents by name; in fact, it could be argued that it is the most used Linux command-line program. $ ls MD5SUMS  annvix-netinstall-i586-2.0-RELEASE.iso  bin  mc-vdanen In addition to its most basic use, the ls command has a number of …

I’ve covered the system monitoring tool Nagios in a previous tip, focusing on using it to monitor remote systems and explaining some of its basic configurations. But, in addition to monitoring remote services and local statistics, it can monitor local statistics on remote servers with a little bit of work and planning. To start with, …

Learn these timesaving keyboard shortcuts for working in the bash and zsh shells.