System Admin Simplified

cURL is a command-line tool that connects to a uniform resource locator (URL) for data transfer. Although this tool is commonly used to quickly check if websites are up and running, it can also be used to time the response of services. This may help administrators gather data for analysis to match against baseline response times for performance tuning. cURL has many options or flags available to adjust its behavior. For the purpose of timing, the following flags shall be utilized. [ -k ] tells cURL to disable peer verification of the SSL/TLS certificate. This is useful for connecting to URLs that have  self-signed certificates . [ -s ] tells cURL to operate in silent mode. This suppresses standard error messages and the progress meter. [ -o /dev/null ] tells cURL to dump its standard output to the null device. All messages are effectively discarded and no output file is produced. [ -w '%{time_total}\n' ] tells cURL to write the declared variables to standard output after all tr...

Node.js is a runtime environment that allows JavaScript to be executed directly on the operating system. This enables the use of JavaScript to develop server-side applications. In some Linux distributions, the Node.js implementation may not be properly maintained and may lag from the releases of its official website. The following procedure shows how to manually acquire and install Node.js in order to have the most recent packages. ========== 1. Download the desired Node.js version. 1.1. Node.js x64 and other 64-bit Long-term Support (LTS) https://nodejs.org/en/download/ user@host: $ wget https://nodejs.org/dist/v [ ersionNum ] /node-v [ ersionNum ] -linux-[CPU64].tar.xz user@host: $ tar -xf node-v [ ersionNum ] -linux-[CPU64].tar.xz user@host: $ cd node-v [ ersionNum ] -linux-[CPU64] 1.2. Node.js x64 and other 64-bit previous LTS https://nodejs.org/download/release/ user@host: $ wget https://nodejs.org/download/release/latest-v [ ersionMaj ].x /node-v[ersionNum]-linux-[C...

The following procedure enables Linux programs to start automatically after booting, without requiring users to log in first. This method is useful when automating custom daemons to act as servers with user-specific privileges. This can also be done on the FreeBSD crontab , with some slight changes to account for the behavior of other shells. ========== 1. Edit the user crontab file. user@host: $ crontab -e 2. Add the @reboot line with the desired command. # BEGIN CODE @reboot /myfolder/mydaemon.sh > /dev/null 2>&1 & # "> /dev/null" discards standard output by redirecting to the null device. # "2>&1" redirects standard error to standard output. # Terminating with "&" executes the command in the background. # END CODE 3. Save and exit crontab, then reboot the machine. ==========