Monitor systemd journals via email
Modern Linux systems often use systemd as their init system and manager for jobs and many other functions. Services managed by systemd generally send their output (of all forms: warnings, errors, informational messages, and more) to the systemd journal, not to traditional logging systems like syslog.
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10 cheat sheets for Linux sysadmins
When you're a systems administrator, you don't just have one job; you have ALL the jobs, and often each one is on-demand with little to no warning. Unless you do a task every day, you may not always have all the commands and options you need in mind when you need them. And that's why I love cheat sheets.
Cheat sheets help you avoid silly mistakes, they keep you from having to look through pages of documentation, and they keep you moving efficiently through your tasks. I've selected my favorite 10 cheat sheets for any sysadmin, regardless of experience level.
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4 ways I contribute to open source as a Linux systems administrator
I recently participated in The Linux Foundation Open Source Summit North America, held virtually June 29-July 2, 2020. In the course of that event, I had the opportunity to speak with a fellow attendee about my career in Linux systems administration and how it had led me to a career focused on open source. Specifically, he asked, how does a systems administrator who doesn't do a lot of coding participate in open source projects?
That's a great question!
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Bypass your Linux firewall with SSH over HTTP
With the growth of connectivity and remote jobs, accessing remote computing resources becomes more important every day. But the requirements for providing external access to devices and hardware make this task complex and risky. Aiming to reduce this friction, ShellHub is a cloud server that allows universal access to those devices, from any external network.
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How learning Linux introduced me to open source
When I entered the engineering program as a freshman in college, I felt like a frivolous teenager. In my sophomore year, and in a fortunate stroke of serendipity, I joined Zairza, a technical society for like-minded students who collaborated and built projects separate from the academic curriculum. It was right up my alley. Zairza provided me a safe space to learn and grow and discover my interests. There are different facets and roadways to development, and as a newbie, I didn't know where my interests lay.
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How to create a documentation site with Docsify and GitHub Pages
Documentation is an essential part of making any open source project useful to users. But it's not always developers' top priority, as they may be more focused on making their application better than on helping people use it. This is why making it easier to publish documentation is so valuable to developers. In this tutorial, I'll show you one option for doing so: combining the Docsify documentation generator with GitHub Pages.
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Why now is the best time to use GNOME
The GNOME desktop environment has been through many changes since its initial release in March 1999. For most of this time, the open source project has issued updates twice a year, which gives users predictability in when they can expect new features to land on their Linux and other Unix-like desktops. Its latest release, GNOME 3.36, came out in March, and the project is preparing to issue its next iteration in September. To learn about what's new in GNOME, I spoke with Emmanuele Bassi.
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Getting started as an open source builder and more industry trends
As part of my role as a principal communication strategist at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are three of my and their favorite articles from that update.
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5 open source IDE tools for Java
Java frameworks make life easier for programmers by streamlining their work. These frameworks were designed and developed to run any application on any server environment; that includes dynamic behaviors in terms of parsing annotations, scanning descriptors, loading configurations, and launching the actual services on a Java virtual machine (JVM). Controlling this much scope requires more code, making it difficult to minimize memory footprint or speed up startup times for new applications.
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What does it mean for code to "work"?
Extreme Programming co-founder Ron Jeffries famously wrote: "The trick is never to let the code not be working."
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Globalization: A history of openness
In my career conducting international business, I traveled to more than 80 countries worldwide. I was always struck by how strongly regions of the world are connected, and I began studying the forces of globalization as a result.
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GitHub stores open source code in an Arctic Code Vault, Linux Foundation launches public health initiative, and more open source news
In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, Power BI releases a new React component, GitHub completes its Arctic Code Vault project, and more open source news.
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Why the future of AI is open source
Artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is the next phase of artificial intelligence, where computers meet and exceed human intelligence, will almost certainly be open source.
AGI seeks to solve the broad spectrum of problems that intelligent human beings can solve. This is in direct contrast with narrow AI (encompassing most of today's AI), which seeks to exceed human abilities at a specific problem. Put simply, AGI is all the expectations of AI come true.
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Choosing open source as a marketing strategy
It can take a while to understand the concept of open source software—at least for me, it was difficult to understand why anyone would develop a product and then open it up to the entire world. It is a general assumption that products are developed to be sold, not to be given for free, and I saw software as such a product. After a while, however, the value of open source, especially in terms of product development, became clearer to me.
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Automate testing for website errors with this Python tool
As a technical search-engine optimizer, I'm often called in to coordinate website migrations, new site launches, analytics implementations, and other areas that affect sites' online visibility and measurement to limit risk. Many companies generate a substantial portion of monthly recurring revenue from users finding their products and services through search engines. Although search engines have gotten good at handling poorly formatted code, things can still go wrong in development that adversely affects how search engines index and display pages for users.
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Build your own open source alternative to Google Suite with Nextcloud
A few years ago, I installed Nextcloud for a local theatre and museum that was looking for an on-premises cloud solution. As an advocate for open source, I always seek out open source options first, and Nextcloud was the most-common open source cloud solution among my peers. I've also used it for some personal projects, but I hadn't looked at it in a while.
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The feature that makes D my favorite programming language
Back in 2017, I wrote about why the D programming language is a great choice for development. But there is one outstanding feature in D I didn't expand enough on: the Universal Function Call Syntax (UFCS). UFCS is a syntactic sugar in D that enables chaining any regular function on a type (string, number, boolean, etc.) like its member function of that type.
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6 ways to contribute to an open source alternative to Slack
Mattermost is a messaging platform built in Go and React for DevOps teams. You can discuss topics in channels, private groups, or one-to-one with rich Markdown formatting and easily share code snippets with syntax highlighting in more than 50 programming languages. You can self-host or deploy on a private cloud to connect in-house systems with plugins, Slack-compatible integrations, and extensive API support.
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