Get a Free OpenBSD Shell Account

There’s a brand new way to get a free shell account. Their name is Devio.us and their job is simple: They provide a secure and stable box running OpenBSD 4.6 and if you behave well, you’ll get a no-strings attached free shell account to use. It includes 100MB of space, 1 MySQL database, plus a mail account. They even do the rsync ritual nightly. It’s basically all you could ask for from a free shell provider, and you’ll never have to worry about them disappearing either.

For those who know what a shell account is, this is great news. If you are unsure of what you could use it for, here’s a little background. Now look up free shell providers—you’ll see a lot of hackeresque looking websites and links you’ll be unsure about clicking. There is nothing illegal or mysterious about Devio.us. Read More

Kayla

March 28, 201057 viewsLeave a comment

OpenBSD strace equivalent

OpenBSD, I’ve loved you for a long time, but over the last few years, me and you have grown apart. Not due to choice, but due to my career path being deeply entangled with everything associated with Linux.

Thankfully, I recently had the opportunity to bring up an OpenBSD box and set it up from scratch with OpenBSD 4.6.

One of the first issues I encountered had to do with my favorite editor – vi/vim. The problem? The backspace and the arrow keys weren’t working properly and while this is a simple .vimrc fix, I wanted to place the fixes in a global vimrc. On Linux (at least RHEL based distro’s), this can be accomplished by dropping your settings into /etc/vimrc. On OpenBSD though, this is not the case – it is read from a different location. Read More

Daniel

March 21, 201063 views2 comments

OS X Terminal Commands, The Basics

If you’re a newbie to using SSH, here’s a quick OS X Terminal command guide. These should help you become less dependent on websites to do domain look ups or change passwords in control panels. Becoming friends with Terminal means an increase in productivity.

Commands for Web Site Management

1. host
If you need to find out the IP of a domain, type
[root@droplet ~]# host cloudsy.com cloudsy.com has address 66.240.232.17 Read More

Kayla

November 3, 200929 viewsLeave a comment

Automating Cisco switch deployment with Perl over Serial

Camels and serial ports

I was recently given the task to write up some scripts to automate the deployment of Cisco switches via a serial port (or whatever else you’d like to call it – console port, rs232 etc.). While at first glance, the process seemed pretty straightforward, I soon ran into a couple of issues – I couldn’t find any quick and dirty way to do this. Following a couple hours of digging, I found just the right solution.

Daniel

June 13, 2009159 views2 comments