Posts tagged SSH

How to Change Linux Account Password Through SSH: A Beginners’ Tutorial

By Eric Z Ma,
People are sometimes given access to Linux/Unix and asked to change their initial passwords. But for beginners, changing a Linux/Unix password is not an easy task, especially when there is only SSH log on allowed to the Linux/Unix server. This post introduces how to change password of user USER on host HOST remotely using SSH. linux-passwd.png Steps are as follows. Note: you will need to replace HOST and USER with the actual username and hostname you are using. » Read more

How to Force Linux to Unmount a Filesystem Reporting “device is busy”

By Eric Z Ma,
Linux may report “device is busy” when we try to umount a filesystem. This behavior is reasonable as it can help us avoid data loss by disallowing unmouting a filesystem when it is being used. But for situations when we are sure there is something wrong happened or we care not data lost such as a NFS mounting failed because that the NFS server is dead and will never be back. » Read more

How to Disable and Enable Laptop Keyboard in Linux

By Eric Z Ma,
Attaching a USB keyboard to a laptop is common when using a laptop because a normal keyboard may provide a more convenient typing experience. The laptop keyboard is not used in these situations. However, the laptop keyboard may still be touched by accident. In this post, we will discuss how to disable and enable the laptop keyboard in Linux. I will also provide scripts ready for you to directly use them for disabling/enabling the laptop keyboard. » Read more

Three Methods of Executing Commands on Many Nodes in Parallel via SSH on Linux

By Eric Z Ma,
It is common to execute commands on many nodes/hosts via SSH for managing a cluster of Linux servers. On Linux, there are many choices for this task. Generally, to run commands on many nodes, there are two modes: serial mode and parallel mode. In serial mode, the command is executed on the node one by one. In parallel mode, the command is executed on many nodes together. » Read more

Notes for Beginners of Software Development on Linux

By Eric Z Ma,
Linux is a great platform for software development targeting servers or backends. In general, working on Linux is very productive. The problem that beginners on Linux face is the the learning curve is steep at the beginning. But believe me, after you get through the initial green steep learning step as in the figure below with some hard work, you will feel like working on a rocket in the yellow part. » Read more

How to Keep Linux SSH Session Alive from Disconnecting – Server and Client Side Fixes

By Eric Z Ma,
SSH is a very common tool for Linux/Unix platforms. One annoying problem when using SSH is that the connection may get disconnected if the SSH connection is idle for some time under common configurations. Users may run an infinite loop like while true; do uptime; sleep 30; done when there is no work to be done in a SSH session. There are better ways as SSH servers and clients already provide such support and we will discuss these methods in this post. » Read more

SSD Enabled For DreamHost Shared Hosting: Simple Performance Measurement

By Eric Z Ma,
As you may know, SysTutorials is hosted by DreamHost and we are quite satisfied with DreamHost. Now, DreamHost turns to be the first big player that enables solid state drives (SSD) for its Linux-based shared hosting plan in the shared hosting market and we are happy to enjoy the improvement. SSD is common for VPS and PaaS virtual machines for higher I/O performance. » Read more

Lazy Linux Admins Going to Server Rooms Less: Forced Reboot, Auto Reboot after Kernel Panic and Email Notification after Reboot

By Eric Z Ma,
Having to go the the server room to reset servers is the most headache thing for admins managing a cluster of Linux servers in a remote site. Either you can ping the server but can not ssh to it, or you even can not ping it. There are various reasons that may cause a Linux server crash or fail to be connected to by SSH. » Read more

MPlayer over SSH to Play Movie from Remote Host

By Eric Z Ma,
MPlayer is a great movie player. SSH is a great tool to connect and transfer data over the network securely. Combining these 2 great tools together will be greater. You may already has a small server storing some movies or videos or music and playing them on your laptop will be convenient. In this post, we will introduce three methods to play movie using MPlayer over SSH. » Read more

Hadoop Installation Tutorial (Hadoop 2.x)

By Eric Z Ma,
Hadoop 2 or YARN is the new version of Hadoop. It adds the yarn resource manager in addition to the HDFS and MapReduce components. Hadoop MapReduce is a programming model and software framework for writing applications, which is an open-source variant of MapReduce designed and implemented by Google initially for processing and generating large data sets. HDFS is Hadoop’s underlying data persistency layer, loosely modeled after the Google file system (GFS). » Read more

Git through SSH Tunnel as Proxy

By Eric Z Ma,
git is a great tool and it is common to have a git server over SSH possibly managed by gitolite. However, there are situations that we can not directly connect to the git server but be able to SSH to another node that can connect to the git server. The git server may allow only internal connections because of security. With the node that we can SSH to, we can still use the git server “directly” by setting up a SSH tunnel as a proxy for the git connection. » Read more

Directly SSH to Hosts’ Internal IPs Through the Gateway

By Eric Z Ma,
We have many hosts with internal/LAN IPs like 10.0.3.* behind a gateway and the hosts with LAN IPs can connect to the Internet through the gateway. We used iptables to forward port from the gateway to internal IPs so that users from hosts with Internet connections can SSH to the gateway’s forwarded port to log on the internal hosts. However, there should be rules added for these hosts and the users need to connect to these non-standard (not 22) ports of the gateway that may be blocked by firewalls of their network. » Read more

Improving ssh/scp Performance by Choosing Suitable Ciphers

By Eric Z Ma,
Update on Oct. 9, 2014: You should be aware of the possible security problems of blowfish and it is suggested not to be used. Instead, you may consider ChaCha20 as suggested by Tony Arcieri. To use this with OpenSSH, you need to specify the Ciphers in your *.ssh/config* files as chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com possibly with another default one since only newer vesion of OpenSSH supports it. » Read more

Making Emacs Startup Faster

By Eric Z Ma,
I use Emacs in terminals and start/close Emacs frequently as needed like in a file checking-editing-closing loop. However, Emacs seems take some time to start up especially some heavy modes are used. How to make Emacs start up faster? (If you just want the solution/script first, find the command in the summary section.) My solution is to make use of the server/client feature of Emacs ∞ This is how it works. » Read more

Vim Howtos and Tips

By Eric Z Ma,
Vim is a fast and handy editor on *nix systems. Like Emacs, Vim has a steep learning curve as you get constantly get new things. However, the effort deserves it as you efficiency is highly improved. Here, I summarize the tips and howtos I learned using Vim. Some previous posts on vim are tagged with vim. My .vimrc and .vim file ∞ My .vimrc and .vim files: https://github.com/zma/vim-config How to use these files ∞ cd /path/to/vim-config/ git submodule update --init If you never configured Vim: cd ln -s /path/to/vim-config/.vimrc ./ ln -s /path/to/vim-config/.vim ./ If you ever configured your Vim, you may need to merge my configurations to yours. » Read more

How to Set Up A Gitolite Git Server – A Ten-Minute Tutorial

By Eric Z Ma,
I ever introduced seting up git server using SSH or gitosis. However, gitolite is the way to go for managing git servers if you want an lightweight authentication layer. gitolite provides many very usefull features which can control each user’s right on each branch. I set up one gitolite git server and am very happy with it. In this post, let’s look at how to set up one gitolite git server. » Read more

Connecting to Remote Servers by VNC on Windows

By Weiwei Jia,
Software you will need 1, Putty 2, Real VNC viewer 3, twm (lightweight desktop). On fedora (centos, redhat): sudo yum install twm (on other distros, you may need other commands, or download source code and install it). Specific steps ∞ 1, Enter your Host name and port in putty. 1_9.jpg 2, Set port forwarding in putty Tunnels. 1_7.jpg 3, Start vncserver in the server side. » Read more

SSH Port Forwarding on Linux

By Eric Z Ma,
Port forwarding (or tunnelling) is a method to forward one network traffic to another. We will introduce how to forward ports using SSH tunnel in this post. A simple example Let’s start with a simple and useful example: we want to forward local port 8080 to server:port. We can easily do this by using ssh like this: ssh -L 8080:server:port username@ssh_server ssh_server is the sshd server that we can use. » Read more

Managing Xen Dom0′s CPU and Memory

By Eric Z Ma,
The performance of Xen’s Dom0 is important for the overall system. The disk and network drivers are running on Dom0. I/O intensive guests’ workloads may consume lots Dom0′s CPU cycles. The Linux kernel calculates various network related parameters based on the amount of memory at boot time. The kernel also allocate memory for storing memory metadata (per page info structures) is also based on the boot time amount of memory. » Read more

How to Change Linux User’s Password in One Command Line

By Eric Z Ma,
I frequently create new user accounts and change or set password for these accounts on a batch of Linux boxes. The create new user can be done by one command line. The problem is to change the password. In Linux, we use passwd to change password, but passwd requires input from stdin to get the new password. With the help of pipe and a little tricky, we can change user’s password in one command line. » Read more