Having the “/home” directory tree on it’s own partition has several advantages, the biggest perhaps being that you can reinstall the OS (or even a different distro of Linux) without losing all your data. You can do this by keeping the /home partition unchanged and reinstalling the OS which goes in the “/” (root) directory, [...]

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Recently I had need to generate random passwords. I did not want to make a script for it and I certainly did not want any applications to do the tasks. Here is the command line argument for such a task: </dev/urandom tr -dc A-Za-z0-9_ | head -c8 Note that the ‘tr’ strips out everything except [...]

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The restore will need to be perfomred as root tar xvpzf filename.tgz -C / the mkdir options are mandatory, and you will notice that they are the directories that are excluded from the backup. this is fine, but the folders do need to be replaced BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING AFTER THE RESTORE mkdir proc mkdir [...]

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I had a few issues with my Ubuntu system after installing KDE4. I don’t think KDE4 caused the issue, but a combination of the software I use and the things I do was causing me login issues and X session headaches. I would have programs close immediately after opening, which I could only solve with [...]

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Some time ago I installed an SBS 2003 server to act as Domain Controller/Exchange server/File and Print Server etc. The main aim was to centralise all the different locations of my data and printing needs into one manageable system. Although I am more than capable of mapping a drive manually and navigating to shared folders, [...]

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