Yellowdog Updater Modified or Yum for short is a package management tool for RPM packages. It is popular in the REHL family of Linux distributions, including CentOS and Fedora. Thus, you can think of yum as a bootstrap for RPM package manager. Like popular package managers, Yum works via repositories that contain collections of tools […]

Whether you are a seasoned system administrator or a new Linux user, service management is one of the fundamental operations you will have to carry out. Hence, having a firm grasp of how services work and how to manage them is a great advantage. This tutorial walks you through the basics of service management in […]

I can bet that we are all familiar with sudo. It is a utility available in most Linux distributions and being adopted by those that haven’t implement it yet. Therefore, if you are a regular Linux user, sudo is a must-use tool. Sudo is a Unix utility that allows trusted users to run commands with […]

Message-Digest algorithm, commonly known as md5 hash, is a type of cryptographic hash function mainly used to verify the integrity of files. Md5 is a 128-bit message digest produced after running the MD5 function against a file. Md5 has its flaws and is therefore not a very good choice for certain encryption methods, but it […]

In various instances, you will need to edit the host file in the system. That can be to either use it as a firewall, i.e., control some network traffic, add a domain name, or test out its functionality. The host file is a local file or local DNS system that contains a static table lookup […]

Names or labels are useful as they allow us to identify one thing or one person from another. Even a person’s name, which might not be globally unique, contains a set of characters that allow a person to become distinguished from another person. Similarly, computers support labels or names that help give them a unique […]

You may have come across the saying, “Everything is a file in Linux.” Although this is not entirely true, it does hold a set of truths to it. In Linux and Unix-like systems, everything is like a file. That means the resources in the Unix system get assigned a file descriptor, including storage devices, network […]

We all love SSH! It is a powerful tool that we use to interact with remote machines and perform heavy tasks at the comfort of our local terminal. Due to the comfort and control that SSH gives us, we try to implement methods such as Password-less logins using SSH keys and two-factor authentications. However, despite […]

Htop is one of the greatest task managers for Linux systems. Okay, I am a little biased as I have actively contributed to its code. However, I think we can agree that htop is a great tool for monitoring and understanding what is going on in our Linux system. If you are not familiar with […]

When working with graphical desktop environments, we rarely worry about background processes. If we have a process running in the foreground, we can quickly spawn another terminal window and continue with our work. However, if you are in a raw terminal shell such as SSH, you will often feel concerned about processes that occupy and […]