In my previous seven articles in this series about systemd, and especially in the most recent article, time and date have come up in multiple contexts. systemd uses calendar time, specifying one or more moments in time to trigger events (such as a backup program), as well as timestamped entries in the journal. It can also use timespans, which define the amount of time between two events but are not directly tied to specific calendar times.

About 15 years ago, I mused about the idea of having a "desert island machine". This is where I'd put someone in a room with a box that has a couple of hard drives and a working network connection. HD #1 is blank. HD #2 has a few scraps of a (Linux) OS on it: bootloader, kernel, C library and compiler, that sort of thing. There's a network connection of some sort, and that's about it.

Now you see things like people managing to do the original Super Mario Bros game from the 80s in under five minutes, and I do mean people. There are actual humans frobbing plastic controllers doing this! Just dig around on your favorite giant video-streaming site if you need evidence of this happening.

So here's the pitch: Linux speedruns. By that, I don't mean "speedrunning a game on a Linux box" (like emulation, or something). Nope.

Dmidecode reports information about your system's hardware as described in your system BIOS according to the SMBIOS/DMI standard. This information typically includes system manufacturer, model name, serial number, BIOS version, asset tag as well as a lot of other details of varying level of interest and reliability depending on the manufacturer. This will often include usage status for the CPU sockets, expansion slots (e.g. AGP, PCI, ISA) and memory module slots, and the list of I/O ports (e.g. serial, parallel, USB).

In this tutorial, we are going to discuss about some good alternatives to Top command line task manager program.

Typically, you would connect to your server with an SSH client like PuTTY and after logging in you are dropped into a shell like Bash where you can enter commands and interact with the operating system. For most purposes, this simple setup suffices. However, in certain scenarios, you may need, or at least benefit, from expanding the capabilities of such a session with a terminal multiplexer like tmux. Just like the operating system running on your phone or computer can execute and display, side by side, multiple applications on its graphical user interface, so can tmux do with text-based programs and shell sessions.

Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. Webmin removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files like /etc/passwd, and lets you manage a system from the console or remotely. See the standard modules page for a list of all the functions built into Webmin.

The classical Unix utility that provides a rolling display of top cpu using processes.

Sysdig captures system calls and events from the Linux kernel. You can save, filter, and analyze the data with our CLI or our desktop app. Think of sysdig as strace + tcpdump + htop + iftop + lsof + wireshark for your entire system.

ngrep applies the grep logic to the network layer, allowing to match regular expressions against data payloads of packets; it recognizes IPv4/6, TCP, UDP, ICMPv4/6, IGMP and Raw across Ethernet, PPP, SLIP, FDDI, Token Ring and null interfaces.