FOSSCasts - Free Linux, Unix, and Open Source Screencasts

#19 Using the Mutt Email Client With Gmail

Mutt is a great text-based email client I've been using recently. Mutt is very simple to use but still highly configurable.

In this episode we will configure Mutt to use Gmail's IMAP interface to retrieve our email from Gmail.

Check out the Mutt Wiki for lots of great info and help.

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#18 Substitution with GNU Sed

GNU sed(stream editor) is a great little utility. In this episode we use substitution to preform find and replace operations on a text file. Sed also allows regular expression matching for advanced substitution.

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#17 Hello Zsh! Part 2

In the second half of our 2 part series on Zsh, we look at globbing and using Zsh's qualifiers. This can be combined with the completion from episode 16 for some super powerful shell bliss.

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#16 Hello Zsh! Part 1

Zsh is a great alternative to Bash and other Unix shells. It has programmable completion, paging, and many other great features.

We'll take a good look at paging and the completion that Zsh offers in this episode and explore more in the next episode.

As mentioned in the episode, the Zsh Wiki is an excellent source for Zsh information and help with your .zshrc.

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#15 Power Searching with Ack

Most Linux/Unix users are familiar with Grep, but for many situations Ack does a better and faster job.

Ack is smart enough to skip version control files and directories, temp files, can exclude or include certain file types, and use powerful regular expression when searching.

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#14 Incremental Backups with rdiff-backup

Keeping incremental backups is easy with rdiff-backup. In this episode, learn how to set up a simple cron job that will keep an incremental backup of a remote directory.

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#13 GNU Screen

This week we take a peek at GNU Screen - a terminal multiplexer. GNU Screen allows you to open multiple terminal sessions and easily switch between them from one terminal window. You can also disconnect from GNU Screen and your terminal sessions will stay in the background waiting for you to reconnected.

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#12 Getting Started with Iptables

Iptables is the de-facto firewall solution for Linux. In this episode, we'll setup basic rules to only allow certain traffic and even deny certain IP addresses from connecting.

NOTE: I did catch one minor error in the screencast after encoding - I mention iptables in conjunction with both Linux and Unix. Iptables has many hooks into the Linux kernel and therefore is not available for Unix. Sorry for any confusion.

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#11 Scripting SCP with Expect

Expect is a great automation tool. It is especially good at scripting SCP, FTP, and other interactive programs.

In this episode we'll create a bash script using expect to automatically SCP a log file from a server. The script could be easily extended as a cron job and modified for other uses.

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#10 Sysstat Part 2: mpstat & sar

In the second part of our introduction to the Sysstat utilities, we'll look at Mpstat and Sar.

Mpstat is a great little utility to view information about our CPU or CPUs/Cores.

Sar is an extremely versatile utilities that, when paired with the sadc daemon, provides extensive system logging and realtime monitoring.