#!/bin/bash
 
case "$1" in
  start)
 
    ;;
  stop)
    PID=`ps -ax | grep '[D]AEMON' | awk '{print $1}'`
 
    ;;
  *)
    echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop}"                
    exit 1
    ;;
esac
 
exit 0

where DAEMON is the name of the daemon the script is supposed to manage.

#!/bin/sh
 
LOCAL_IF="eth1"
NET_IF="eth0"
 
iptables -F
iptables -t nat -F
iptables -X
 
iptables -P INPUT DROP
 
# Accept local network
iptables -A INPUT -i $LOCAL_IF -j ACCEPT
# and loopback.
iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
 
# accept established, related
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
 
# masquerade
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o $NET_IF -j MASQUERADE
 
# ip-forwarding
echo "1" >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

On Debian-like Linux systems, including Ubuntu, Udev by default keeps track of the MAC address of network interfaces. If you happen to replace a network card, the operating system increments the interface number instead of reporting just the cards that it finds in the computer at that time. To stop this behavior, the following Udev ruleset can be eliminated:

echo "" > /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

After a reboot, Udev will stop renaming the interfaces (as it should have done from the start).

A different way to stop Linux from changing the interface names is to append:

net.ifnames=0

to the kernel command line (for grub, by editing /etc/default/grub and adding it to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT).

*  *  *  *  * command to execute
|  |  |  |  |
|  |  |  |  +-- day of week (0-7) (Sunday=0 or 7)
|  |  |  +----- month (1-12)
|  |  +-------- day of month (1-31)
|  +----------- hour (0-23)
+-------------- minute (0-59)

The following command will return the IP address of the interface eth0:

/sbin/ifconfig eth0 | grep "inet addr" | awk -F: '{print $2}' | awk '{print $1}'

A common problem on linux is that packets coming in from an interface do not necessarily get a reply from a server out of the same interface that they came in from. In order to fix this, we have to set-up a few routing tables by editing /etc/iproute2/rt_tables and adding, for example, two tables:

100     table_a
101     table_b

then, we can route the packets out of the same interface that they came in from using:

ip route add default via $GATEWAY_A dev $INTERFACE_A src $IP_A table table_a
ip rule add from $IP_A table table_b

where:

• $GATEWAY_A is the gateway IP for an interface.
• $INTERFACE_A is the interface that the packets come in from.
• $IP_A is the IP address assigned to the interface.

To prelink binaries, using the prelink tool:

prelink -amR

To restore:

prelink -au

tune2fs  -O dir_index /dev/sda2

Where /dev/sda2 contains an Ext3 filesystem.

ps -eo pcpu,pid,user,args | sort -k 1 -r | head -10

Made by Blagovest ILIEV and adapted to GIF animation.

After downloading the source, applying the necessary patches, issue:

make menuconfig

and configure the kernel. After that issue:

make-kpkg --initrd kernel_image

to make a .deb package which will be placed one level up from the kernel source directory.

Note that building an initrd image is essential because it contains the necessary drivers to bootstrap the boot system. If you recompile manually, the old way, Debian will not boot.

After modifying the database configuration at /etc/tripwire/twpol.txt, the following script can be used to regenerate the database:

#!/bin/sh -e
twadmin -m P -S site.key twpol.txt
twadmin -m F -S site.key twcfg.txt
tripwire -m i

For example to link any /dev/grsec device to /dev/grsec2, add a file at /etc/udev/rules.d/60-grsec-compatiblity.rules with the following contents:

KERNEL=="grsec*", SYMLINK+="grsec2"

Suppose you have a parent directory upper, and that the directory upper is group-owned by a group called maintain.

You want that all new directories and files under that parent directory upper, regardless by whom they are created (ie: root) to be group-owned by maintain.

This can be accomplished by setting the set-guid flag on the parent directory upper:

chmod g+s upper

localmodconfig can be used to auto-detect the necessary modules for the kernel.

make localmodconfig

For a disk with the following partition layout:

first install syslinux and then issue:

mkdosfs -F32 /dev/sdc1

to format /dev/sdc1 to MS-DOS.

Now copy the MBR file to the drive:

dd if=/usr/share/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sdc

Finally, install syslinux:

syslinux /dev/sdc1

Next step is to make the disk bootable with fdisk (run fdisk /dev/sdc and press a to toggle the bootable flag).

getconf PAGE_SIZE

This can be accomplished with:

dstat -t -c 5 500

where t indicates time-based output and c stands for CPU.

The output is:

----system---- ----total-cpu-usage----
     time     |usr sys idl wai hiq siq
11-02 18:33:24|  3   1  95   0   0   0
11-02 18:33:29| 14   3  83   0   0   0

Other options are also available:

To renumber partitions we first dump the table using sfdisk:

sfdisk -d /dev/sda > sda.table

then, we edit sda.table to edit the partitions:

# partition table of /dev/sda
unit: sectors

/dev/sda1 : start=      2048, size=  4194304, Id=82
/dev/sda2 : start=         0, size=        0, Id= 0
/dev/sda3 : start=   4196352, size= 47747546, Id=83, bootable

In this case, we will delete the line starting with /dev/sda2 and rename /dev/sda3 to /dev/sda2:

# partition table of /dev/sda
unit: sectors

/dev/sda1 : start=      2048, size=  4194304, Id=82
/dev/sda2 : start=   4196352, size= 47747546, Id=83, bootable

Next, we restore the modified table:

sfdisk /dev/sda < sda.table

netstat -an | awk '/^tcp/ {A[$(NF)]++} END {for (I in A) {printf "%5d %s\n", A[I], I}}'

To scroll the virtual terminal up and down use the keys Shift+Page↑ and Shift+Page↓. In case you are using a Mac keyboard without Page↑ or Page↓, then the keys Shift+Fn+↑ and Shift+Fn+↓ should achieve the scrolling.

date can be used to set the system clock, however hwclock has to also be used to set the hardware clock. First we set a date using date:

date -s "1 MAY 2013 10:15:00"

or in two commands using formatting characters; first the date:

date +%Y%m%d -s "20130501"

then the time:

date +%T -s "10:15:00"

After that, the hardware clock has to be set (the hardware clock runs independent of the Linux time and of other hardware, powered by a battery). To set the hardware clock to the system clock (since we have already done that above), issue:

hwclock --systohc

Or, as an independent command, to set the hardware clock to local time:

hwclock --set --date="2013-05-01 10:15:00" --localtime

of for UTC:

hwclock --set --date="2013-05-01 10:15:00" --utc

The load-average is included in the uptime command:

09:48:35 up 8 days,  7:03,  5 users,  load average: 0.24, 0.28, 0.25

The load average numbers are scaled up to the number of CPUs. For example, on a quad-core CPU, the maximal load-average (when all 4 cores are busy) would be 4. The numbers thus represent only a fraction of the total CPU power that is currently being utilised.

dhclient is responsible in most Linux distributions for acquiring the DHCP parameters from upstream DHCP servers. The configuration can be altered to not pull name-servers and instead prepend some static name-servers. The configuration has to changed such that the domains a prepended:

prepend domain-name-servers 1.1.1.1, 2.2.2.2;

where 1.1.1.1 and 2.2.2.2 represent name-servers IP addresses.

Next, the domain-name-servers and domain-search directives should be removed from the request clause, the result looking like:

request subnet-mask, broadcast-address, time-offset, routers,
        domain-name, host-name,               
        dhcp6.name-servers, dhcp6.domain-search,
        netbios-name-servers, netbios-scope, interface-mtu,
        rfc3442-classless-static-routes, ntp-servers;

After a restart dhclient will prepend the specified name-servers and place them in /etc/resolv.conf as well as ignoring the DHCP's settings for the domain-name-servers and domain-search directives.

The temporary memory filesystem (tmpfs) can be used when you want to temporary store files that will be deleted on the next reboot. This is helpful, for example, when you want to store log-files that are not important over reboots and want to reduce the pressure on the hard-drive.

Adding this entry to /etc/fstab will, for example, mount polipo's cache directory in RAM:

tmpfs        /var/cache/polipo       tmpfs nodev,noexec,nodiratime,noatime,nosuid,size=5G,async      0       0

using a slab of 5G.

This function works together with iptables and the IDLETIMER module in order to limit the CPU consumption of a process (commonly a daemon) when the process does not generate incoming traffic.

#!/bin/bash
###########################################################################
##  Copyright (C) Wizardry and Steamworks 2014 - License: GNU GPLv3      ##
##  Please see: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html for legal details,  ##
##  rights of fair usage, the disclaimer and warranty conditions.        ##
###########################################################################
# The function suspends or resumes the named process passed as parameter to 
# the fuction, provided that iptables has been set-up to create an idle 
# timer for the named process passed as the parameter to this function.
#
# For this function to work properly, you should issue:
# iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 8085 -j IDLETIMER \
#	--timeout 60 --label $process_name
# where $process_name is the parameter passed to this function
#
# This script is best called via crontab to periodically check whether a 
# proccess's network traffic is stale and to suspend the process if it is.
function idlecpulimit {
    # path to the cpulimit daemon
    local cpulimit=/usr/bin/cpulimit
    # percent to throttle to accounting for multiple CPUs
    # effective throttle = (CPUs available) x throttle
    local throttle=1
    # get the car and cdr of the daemon
    local car=`echo $1 | cut -c 1`
    local cdr=`echo $1 | cut -c 2-`
    # get the daemon if it is running
    local daemon=`ps ax | grep "[$car]$cdr" | awk '{ print $1 }'`
    if [ -z $daemon ]; then
    	# just bail if it is not running
    	return;
    fi
    # get the PID of the cpulimit daemon for the process
    local cpulimit_PID=`ps ax | grep '[c]pulimit' | grep $daemon | awk '{ print $1 }'`
    case `cat /sys/class/xt_idletimer/timers/$1` in
        0)
            # suspend
            if [ -z $cpulimit_PID ]; then
                $cpulimit -l $throttle -p $daemon -b >/dev/null 2>&1
            fi
            ;;
        *)
            # resume
            if [ ! -z $cpulimit_PID ]; then
                kill -s TERM $cpulimit_PID >/dev/null 2>&1
            fi
            ;;
    esac
}

As an example, suppose you had a daemon named mangosd and, as a daemon, it is active when it has inbound connections on port 8085. In that case, you would first add a firewall rule:

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 8085 -j IDLETIMER --timeout 60 --label mangosd

which will start a countdown timer in /sys/class/xt_idletimer/timers/mangosd when the connection is idle.

After that, you would create a script containing the function above and call it in your script:

function idlecpulimit {
    ...
}
 
idlecpulimit mangosd

The script will then be placed in /etc/cron.d/cron.minutely and will limit or release the CPU limitation when the daemon receives traffic.

Suppose that you have made a configuration error and you need to boot from a LiveCD and chroot to the filesystem in order to repair the damage. In that case, you will find that you will need the proc, dev and sys filesystems. These can be mounted by using the bind option of mount:

mount -o bind /dev /mnt/chroot/dev
mount -o bind /sys /mnt/chroot/sys
mount -o bind /proc /mnt/chroot/proc

Considering that the damaged filesystem is mounted on /mnt/chroot. After the filesystems are mounted, you can chroot to the filesystem and run commands such as update-grub:

chroot /mnt/chroot

tcpdump -i eth0 -s 30 -e | cut -f1 -d','

where eth0 is the interface.

For hung processes, the stack traceback can show where the processes are waiting. The CONFIG_MAGIC_SYSRQ must be enabled in the kernel to enable stack tracebacks. If kernel.sysrq is not set to 1 with sysctl, then run:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq

Next, trigger the stack traceback by issuing:

echo t > /proc/sysrq-trigger

The results can be found on the console or in /var/log/messages.

netstat -tunlp |grep p6

First edit /etc/hosts to comment out any IPv6 addresses:

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
#::1     ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
#fe00::0 ip6-localnet
#ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
#ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
#ff02::2 ip6-allrouters

After that, if you are using grub, edit /etc/default/grub and add:

ipv6.disable=1

to the list following GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT.

In case you use lilo, edit /etc/lilo.conf instead and modify the append line to include ipv6.disable=1.

Issue update-grub or lilo to make those changes.

You can also add a sysctl setting:

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1

to /etc/sysctl.d/local.conf.

Additionally, in case you are running a system with a bundled MTA such as exim, you should probably keep it from binding to IPv6 addresses.

For exim, edit /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf and change the dc_local_interfaces to listen only on IPv4:

dc_local_interfaces='127.0.0.1'

and then add:

# Disable IPv6
disable_ipv6 = true 

in both /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.template and /etc/exim4/conf.d/main/01_exim4-config_listmacrosdefs and run update-exim4.conf followed by a restart of the service.

Otherwise you might receive the error: ALERT: exim paniclog /var/log/exim4/paniclog has non-zero size, mail system possibly broken failed!.

ipcs can be used to display all semaphores:

ipcs -s

to remove a semaphore by id, issue:

ipcrm sem 2123561

To clear all semaphores for a user, for example, for apache (as user www-data on Debian):

ipcs -s | grep www-data | awk '{ print $2 }' | while read i; do ipcrm sem $i; done

Before the watchdog restarts the system, it fires off an email indicating the problem, for example:

Message from watchdog:
The system will be rebooted because of error -3!

The error codes can be found in the man page, here is a list of reasons:

• -1 The system will reboot. Does not indicate an error.
• -2 The system will reboot. Does not indicate an error.
• -3 The load average has reached its maximum specified value.
• -4 Temperature too high.
• -5 /proc/loadavg contains no data or not enough data.
• -6 The given file was not changed in the given interval.
• -7 /proc/meminfo content.
• -8 Child process was killed by a signal.
• -9 Child process did not return in time.
• -10 User specified.

On recent Linux distributions, Codel can be enabled which is better than wondershaper. This can be done by editing the sysctl configuration file (/etc/sysctl.d/local.conf) and adding the line:

net.core.default_qdisc = fq_codel

for general-purpose routers including virtual machine hosts and:

net.core.default_qdisc = fq

for fat servers.

Using POSIX ACLs, it is possible to modify permissions to files (even recursively) such that it is no longer necessary to fiddle with the limited Linux user and group permissions. For example, suppose you wanted to allow a user access to a directory without adding them to a group and then separately modifying all the file permissions to allow that group access.

In that case, you would write:

setfacl -R -m u:bob:rwX Share

where:

• -R means to recursively change the permissions
• -m means modify (and -x means to remove)
• u: stands for user (and g: for group)
• bob is the user that we want to grant access to
• rwX means read (r), write (w) and X (note the capital case) means to only grant execute permissions in case the file already had execute permissions
• Share is the directory (or file) to set the permissions on

The command will thus recursively grant permissions on the file or folder named Share to the user bob allowing bob to read, write and execute the files but only if the file was executable in the first place.

The following command will let you pick the default editor:

update-alternatives --config editor

find /proc/*/fd -xtype f -printf "%l\n" | grep -P '^/(?!dev|proc|sys)' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

In case the machine is hanging and Magic SysRq is enabled in the kernel (enabled by default), then issuing the following combination will reboot the machine more or less gracefully:

Alt+PrtScrn+R+S+E+I+U+B

which will perform, in order:

1. R give control back to the keyboard
2. S sync
3. E sends all processes but init the TERM signal
4. I sends all processes but the init the KILL signal
5. U mounts all filesystems to read-only to prevent fsck at boot
6. B reboots the system

To check whether an attached SSD currently has TRIM enabled, first mount the drive and change directory to the drive:

cd /mnt/ssd

Now create a file:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=tempfile count=100 bs=512k oflag=direct

and check the fib-map:

hdparm --fibmap tempfile

which will output something like:

tempfile:
 filesystem blocksize 4096, begins at LBA 2048; assuming 512 byte sectors.
 byte_offset  begin_LBA    end_LBA    sectors
           0  383099904  383202303     102400

Now, note the number under begin_LBA (383099904 in this example) and run:

hdparm --read-sector 383099904 /dev/sdc

where:

• 383099904 is the number obtained previously
• /dev/sdc is the device for the SSD drive

The last command should output a long string of characters for those sectors.

Now, issue:

rm tempfile
sync

and repeat the previous hdparm command:

hdparm --read-sector 383099904 /dev/sdc

if now the output consists of only zeroes then automatic TRIM is in place otherwise, wait for a while and run the last hdparm again.

On distributions based on systemd, filesystems can be mounted on demand instead of using /etc/fstab in order to let the main system boot while all the requests to the systemd managed filesystems can buffer-up.

Suppose you have a /home partition that you want mounted on demand with systemd. In that case, you can modify the /etc/fstab options to read:

noauto,x-systemd.automount

where noauto prevents Linux from mounting the partition on boot and x-systemd.automount will use systemd to auto-mount the partition on demand.

Additionally, the parameter x-systemd.device-timeout=1min can be added to the mount options which will allow for 1 minute before giving up trying to mount the resource which can be useful for network-mounted devices.

In order to have Linux automatically reboot after a kernel panic, add a setting to sysctl - on Debian systems, you will have to edit the file /etc/sysctl.d/local.conf:

kernel.panic = 30
kernel.panic_on_oops = 30

which will make the machine restart in 30 seconds.

ps -eo pmem,pcpu,rss,vsize,args | sort -k 1 -r | less

The following snippet pipes the second field from the history command and counts the number of time it appears:

history | awk '{ a[$2]++ } END { for(i in a) { print a[i] " " i } }' | sort -urn | head -n 20

which then gets sorted and the top most 20 results are displayed.

You can add: fsck.mode=force and fsck.repair=preen to the grub parameter line on reboot in order to trigger a filesystem recheck. Alternatively, if you feel bold, you can add fsck.repair=yes instead of fsck.repair=preen in order to have Linux automatically fix the errors. This is especially useful to recover from a damaged root filesystem.

Edit /etc/default/grub and add:

scsi_mod.use_blk_mq=1

to the kernel command line parameters.

This helper script can be useful in case you wish to export a bunch of "real" users by scanning the home directory and extracting only users that have a folder inside that directory.

exportusers.sh

###########################################################################
##  Copyright (C) Wizardry and Steamworks 2016 - License: GNU GPLv3      ##
###########################################################################
HOMES="/home"
FILES="/etc/passwd /etc/passwd- /etc/shadow /etc/shadow-"
 
ls -l $HOMES | awk '{ print $3 }' | sort -u | while read u; do
    for file in $FILES; do 
        cat $file | while read p; do
            ENTRY=`echo $p | awk -F':' '{ print $1 }'`
            if [ "$ENTRY" == "$u" ]; then
	        echo $p >> `basename $file`
            fi
        done
    done
done

When the script runs, it will scan all folders under the /home directory, grab the users that the folders belong to and scan the Linux password files (/etc/passwd, /etc/passwd-, /etc/shadow and /etc/shadow-) for entries for that user. It will then generate Linux password files from the matching home directories that can be later inserted into the Linux password files of a different machine.

dd dumps an entire device but has no options that are aware of the number of zeroes on the device. The following command:

dd if=/dev/sda | cp --sparse=always /dev/stdin image.img

will create an image named image.img of the device /dev/sda such that the image file will not contain any zeroes.

To check that the image was created successfully, you can then issue:

md5sum image.img

and

md5sum /dev/sda

and check that the hashes are identical.

Binding to reserved ports (ports under 1024) can be done under Linux by issuing:

setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' /path/to/binary

DMG files are usually compressed; in fact, if you issue in a terminal:

file someimage.dmg

you may get output such as:

someimage.dmg: bzip2 compressed data, block size = 100k

indicating a bzip2 compressed file, or:

someimage.dmg: zlib compressed data

You can then uncompress the DMG image under Linux by issing:

bzip -dc someimage.dmg > someimage.dmg.uncompressed

Now, if you inspect the uncompressed image (in this example someimage.dmg.uncompressed):

file someimage.dmg.uncompressed

you will get some interesting info such as:

someimage.dmg.uncompressed: Apple Driver Map, blocksize 512, blockcount 821112, devtype 0, devid 0, descriptors 0, contains[@0x200]: Apple Partition Map, map block count 3, start block 1, block count 63, name Apple, type Apple_partition_map, contains[@0x400]: Apple Partition Map, map block count 3, start block 64, block count 861104, name disk image, type Apple_HFS, contains[@0x600]: Apple Partition Map, map block count 3, start block 811148, block count 4, type Apple_Free

indicating an uncompressed image.

To convert the DMG into an image that can be mounted, you can use the tooldmg2img:

dmg2img someimage.dmg someimage.dmg.uncompressed

You can now mount the image using the HFS+ filesystem:

mount -t hfsplus -o ro someimage.dmg.uncompressed /mnt/media

To purge all inbox e-mails on Linux from the command line, you can use the mail command with the following sequence of instructions:

d *
q

where:

• mail is the mail reader program,
• d * instructs mail to delete all messages,
• q tells mail to quit

There are cases where a Linux system boots with the root / mounted as read-only. This can occur for various reasons but the standard way of recovering is to issue:

mount -o remount,rw /

which should mount the root filesystem in read-write mode.

However, assuming that you have bad options in /etc/fstab, that will not work and you will get errors in dmesg along the lines of:

Unrecognized mount option ... or missing value

this is due to mount reading /etc/fstab when you do not specify the source and the target. To work around the problem, you can mount the root manually by specifying both:

mount -t ext4 /dev/vda1 / -o remount,rw

which should give you enough leverage to adjust the entries in your /etc/fstab file.

Metadata checksumming provides better data safety protection - you will need e2fsprogs version 1.43 or beyond. On Debian you can check your current e2fsprogs with apt-cache policy e2fsprogs and upgrade to unstable or testing if needed.

On new systems, to enable metadata checksumming at format time, you would issue:

mkfs.ext4 -O metadata_csum /dev/sda1

where:

• /dev/sda1 is the path to the device to be formatted as EXT4

On existing systems, the filesystem must be unmounted first (using a LiveCD, for instance). With the filesystem unmounted and assuming that /dev/sda1 contains the EXT4 filesystem for which metadata checksumming is to be enabled, issue:

e2fsck -Df /dev/sda1

in order to optimise the filesystem; followed by:

resize2fs -b /dev/sda1

to convert the filesystem to 64bit and finally:

tune2fs -O metadata_csum /dev/sda1

to enable metadata checksumming.

If you want, you can see the result by issuing:

dumpe2fs -h /dev/sda1

Now that metadata checksumming is enabled, you may have some performance gain by adding the a module to initrd called crypto-crc32c that will enable hardware acceleration for the CRC routines. On Debian, adding the crypto-crc32c module to initrd is a matter of editing a file and rebuilding the initramfs.

The following command will read in /var/log/mail.log and compile a list of unique IMAP users.

cat /var/log/mail.log | \
  grep imap-login:\ Login | \
  sed -e 's/.*Login: user=<\(.*\)>, method=.*/\1/g' | sort | uniq

To disable the linux console blanking (turning off), the following methods can be mentioned:

• append consoleblank=0 to the linux kernel parameters (ie: edit /etc/default/grub on Debian),
• issue setterm -blank 0 -powerdown 0 on the console to turn off blanking on,
• issue echo -ne "\033[9;0]" >/dev/ttyX; where X is the console number to turn off blanking for,
• issue echo -ne "\033[9;0]" >/etc/issue to turn off blanking (/etc/issue is loaded on console boot).

Note that setterm -blank 0 and echo -ne "\033[9;0]" are equivalent such that you can redirect both their output to a tty device.

Most console-oriented commands that are meant to work on virtual terminals expect a proper terminal to be set up and to be executed on a virtual terminal. The openvt command can be used to execute a program on the Linux virtual terminal. For instance, to force the screen to blank whilst being logged-in via an SSH session (/dev/pts), issue:

TERM=linux openvt -c 1 -f -- setterm -blank force

where:

• TERM=linux sets the terminal type to linux otherwise the terminal type of the terminal used for the SSH session is going to be assumed,
• openvt makes the command run on a virtual terminal,
  • 1 refers to /dev/tty1,
  • -f forces the command to run even if the virtual terminal is occupied (this is by default the case for login terminals),
• – is the separator between openvt parameters and the command to be executed,
• setterm is the command to execute and,
• -blank force instructs the terminal to blank.

Wireless USB, by consequence, has brought to Linux the capability of simulating an USB disconnect and reconnect - this is particularly useful if the device is connected on the inside of the machine such that the device cannot be removed (even logically) because it cannot be replugged.

The first step is to identify the device you want to reset by issuing:

lsusb

and checking the column with the device ID. For instance, you would want to reset the device:

Bus 001 Device 007: ID 05b7:11aa Canon, Inc. 

such that the relevant bit to retain is the vendor ID 05b7 and the product id 11aa.

Next, locate the device on the USB HUB by issuing:

find -L /sys/bus/usb/devices/ -maxdepth 2 -name id* -print -exec cat '{}' \; | xargs -L 4

and then locate the /sys path to the device you would like to reset. In this case, the line matching the vendor and product ID would be:

/sys/bus/usb/devices/1-8/idProduct 11aa /sys/bus/usb/devices/1-8/idVendor 05b7

Finally deauthorize the device by issuing:

echo 0 >/sys/bus/usb/devices/1-8/authorized

and re-authorize the device by issuing:

echo 1 >/sys/bus/usb/devices/1-8/authorized

The above is sufficient to trigger and udev hotplug event - in case you are debugging udev scripts.

The following command will set the CPU governor to powersave for all CPUs installed in the system:

for i in `find /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu[0-9]* -type d | awk -F'/' '{ print $6 }' | sort -g -k1.4,1 -u | cut -c 4-`; do cpufreq-set -c $i -g powersave; done

From man (8) systemd-journald:

mkdir -p /var/log/journal
systemd-tmpfiles --create --prefix /var/log/journal

• 711 if you dont want to add groups as well or

• 751 so that public can't read your home directory

In the event that Linux decides to answer with an IPv6 address when pinging localhost, for example:

PING localhost(localhost (::1)) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from localhost (::1): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.226 ms
64 bytes from localhost (::1): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.291 ms
64 bytes from localhost (::1): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.355 ms
64 bytes from localhost (::1): icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.353 ms

then the issue is an incorrect setup of /etc/hosts - notably, the IPv6 addresses are not setup correctly and Linux answers with the IPv6 equivalent address of localhost.

Open /etc/hosts and modify the IPv6 section to contain the following:

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts

and all services should start working properly again.

On newer Linux systems, the command:

dd if=/dev/xxx of=/dev/yyy bs=8M status=progress

will display progress status whilst copying. Unfortunately, that does not include a convenient progress bar to check for completion.

Alternatively, the corresponding command:

pv -tpreb /dev/xxx | dd of=/dev/yyy bs=8M

will use pv and display a progress bar.

Add to the command line in /etc/default/grub, the kernel parameters:

nopti noibrs noibpb nospectre_v2

and execute:

update-grub

After a reboot, the patches should be disabled and the performance will be back!

setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' /path/to/program

where:

• program is an _executable_ - not a script.

dmidecode can be used to retrieve BIOS information and, amongst which, can also tell what the last power on method has been:

dmidecode -t system | grep 'Wake-Up Type'

will print the last wake-up type.

It may happen that logs fill up with messages indicating that some power management policy cannot be enforced on a given CPU core:

cpufreqd: cpufreqd_loop            : Cannot set policy, Rule unchanged ("none").
cpufreqd: cpufreqd_set_profile     : Couldn't set profile "Performance High" set for cpu4 (100-100-performance)

It may be that the CPU core is simply stuck and may need replugging. The following two commands will take the CPU offline and the next one will start the CPU back up:

echo "0" > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu4/cpufreq/online
echo "1" > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu4/cpufreq/online

In doing so, the power management issue seems to be resolved.

Edit or create the file at /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules with the following contents:

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", ATTRS{idProduct}=="a4a2", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0525", RUN+="/bin/sh -c '/sbin/ip link set dev %k up && /sbin/brctl addif br0 %k'"

where:

• br0 is the interface name of the bridge that the RNDIS devices will be added to.

followed by the command:

udevadm control --reload

to reload all udev rules.

The reason this works is due to a4a2 and 0525 respectively being the identifiers for the RNDIS driver and not for the device itself. For instance, by issuing:

udevadm info -a /sys/class/net/usb0

will show at the top the RNDIS device without any identifiers whereas the parent RNDIS/Ethernet Gadget matches the identifiers.

One usage case for this rule is to connect a bunch of RNDIS devices to an USB hub and have them join the network automatically as they are hotplugged; for instance, Raspberry Pis can be configured as USB gadgets and then connected to an USB hub.

FTP sites can be scraped elegantly by using systemd and tmux on Linux. By starting a tmux detached terminal, wget can run in the background and download a website entirely whilst also allowing the user to check up on the progress by manually attaching and detaching from tmux.

The following script contains a few parameters underneath the Configuration comment and up to Internals in order to set:

• the download path (DOWNLOAD_DIRECTORY),
• the wget download URL (all protocols supported by wget such as FTP or HTTP) (DOWNLOAD_URL),
• a descriptive name for the tmux session (TMUX_SESSION_NAME)

[Unit]
Description=Scrape FTP Site
Requires=network.target local-fs.target remote-fs.target
After=network.target local-fs.target remote-fs.target
 
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
 
[Service]
# Configuration
Environment=DOWNLOAD_DIRECTORY="/path/to/directory"
Environment=DOWNLOAD_URL="ftp://somesite.tld/somedirectory"
Environment=TMUX_SESSION_NAME="somesite.tld-download"
# Internals
Type=oneshot
KillMode=none
User=root
ExecStartPre = -/bin/mkdir -p \""$DOWNLOAD_DIRECTORY"\"
ExecStart=/usr/bin/tmux new-session -d -c "\"$DOWNLOAD_DIRECTORY\"" -s "$TMUX_SESSION_NAME" -n "$TMUX_SESSION_NAME" "/usr/bin/wget -c -r \"$DOWNLOAD_URL\" -P \"$DOWNLOAD_DIRECTORY\""
ExecStop=/usr/bin/tmux send-keys -t "$TMUX_SESSION_NAME" C-c
RemainAfterExit=yes

The file should be placed under /etc/systemd/system, then systemd has to be reloaded by issuing systemctl daemon-reload, the service should then be loaded with systemctl enable SERVICE_FILE_NAME where SERVICE_FILE_NAME is the name of the file copied into /etc/systemd/system and finally started by issuing systemctl start SERVICE_FILE_NAME.

Upon every reboot, the service file will create a detached tmux terminal and start scraping files from the URL.