Thomas Leavitt's Personal Blog

A blog about nothing and everything.

Linux Tools

November 24, 2024 — Thomas Van Ness Leavitt

Some of the tools I use to manage / operate this site and server (and others). Will be updated as I think of things to add.

The server this run on is a minimal DigitalOcean "droplet" running i Ubuntu Linux . $4/mo.

Secure Shell (ssh) is great (vast improvement, security-wise, on telnet, which is what I started my career with), Mosh improves it considerably.

The web server running on this system is Apache (nothing exotic), was the easiest to get PHP running on (used with another project hosted on this server, www.gospelofthomas.net.

My shell environment is "bash". Default. I have and do use other shells, such as "ksh" (what I started with on Sun Solaris) and "zsh" (what I use on my desktop, an iMac running MacOS).

Tags: tools, linux, bash, apache, mosh, digitalocean, ubuntu

Linux Command Line Fun

November 24, 2024 — Thomas Van Ness Leavitt

So, way, way back in the day, we're talking the early 1990s, I wound up as a Unix sysadmin ( HP-UX, to be precise, colliquially known as "hocky pux"). One of the standard "tools" that was included with every Unix distribution is the "fortune" command, which spits out a random selection from a large database of quotes of varying origins. Standard practice, since the days of yore, has been to have this run when you login (and sometimes log out) of your command line shell. Something like "motd" (message of the day), but personalized.

One of my little side programming projects has been to take fortune, and mash it up with a variety of other related tools (cowsay and lolcat).

  • aafire
  • boxes
  • cmatrix
  • cowsay / cowthink
  • figlet
  • fortune
  • lolcat
  • rev
  • sl
  • toilet

Tags: linux, bash, login, logout, ascii, ascii-animation, aafire, boxes, cmatrix, cowsay, cowthink, figlet, fortune, lolcat, rrev, sl, toilet