Category: Linux

Links: Use Redo Rescue: Backup and Recovery and GPartEd Live to backup a working system and restore it to a new (possibly larger) drive

NOTE: Redo Rescue: Backup and Recovery was formerly known as Redo Backup. This article has been updated to show the new name.

If you are replacing an older hard drive with a newer one, possibly with more capacity, you may wonder if there is a way to do it without having to reinstall everything. The answer is often “yes”. There are many ways to do it — some are free and some cost money — but one great solution that happen to be free is to use Redo Rescue: Backup and Recovery, possibly followed by GPartEd Live. In fact, even if you aren’t planning on replacing a drive, it’s probably a good idea to back up your drives using Redo Rescue periodically, just in case a drive unexpectedly fails. If that happens you can restore from your last backup and you are back in business.

The nice thing about both Redo Rescue and GPartEd Live is that they have nice graphical users interfaces. Redo Rescue is very easy and intuitive, while GPartEd live is a only bit less so. For example, to move a partition within a drive you may need to use a click and drag operation, but that’s not explained on the screen. So, your favorite search engine may be your friend.

Here are some articles that explain how to use Redo Rescue:

Redo Backup and Recovery Tool to Backup and Restore Linux Systems (TecMint)
How To Use Redo Backup And Recovery In Windows 10 (Into Windows)
Redo Rescue Backup and Recovery Live System Gets NFS Share Support, SSH Server (9to5Linux)

Also you can search on YouTube for videos about Redo Rescue: Backup and Recovery.

If you are moving your system to a larger hard drive, a simple restore will only utilize as much of the drive as was used on the original drive size. What you can do is use GPartEd Live, another free tool, to grow your primary partition to occupy the remaining unused space. Before you can do that, you may need to move the existing swap partition to the end of the allocated space. What you need to do depends to some degree on the operating system in use on the drive you are moving, so you may need to do some searching to get instructions that apply to your particular situation.

Here are a couple of links about GPartEd that may help Linux users:

Expanding a Linux disk with gparted (and getting swap out of the way) (mwpreston.net)
How to move a partition to the end in gparted? (Super User)

And one for Windows users:

Resizing and Adding Partitions using GParted Live (bleepingcomputer.com)

Also there are many videos on YouTube about GPartEd.

Link: Transfer Files Securely Using SCP in Linux

The most common way to get terminal access to a remote Linux machine is to use Secure Shell (SSH). To work, the Linux server needs to be running a SSH server (OpenSSH) and at the other end you need a SSH client, something like PuTTy in Windows or the ssh command line tool on Linux or other Unix-like operating systems such as FreeBSD.

The attraction of SSH is that the connection between the two machines is encrypted. This means that you can access the server from anywhere in the world safe in the knowledge that the connection is secure. However the real power of SSH is that the secure connection it provides can be used for more than just terminal access. Among its uses is the ability to copy files to and from a remote server.

Full article here:
Transfer Files Securely Using SCP in Linux (Make Tech Easier)
Related:
12 scp command examples to transfer files on Linux (BinaryTides)

A collection of lesser known Linux commands

From TecMint comes this series of articles…

Linux command line attracts most of the Linux Enthusiastic. A normal Linux user generally posses a vocabulary of roughly 50-60 commands to carry out their day-to-day task. Linux commands and their switches remains the most valuable treasure for a Linux-user, Shell-script programmer and Administrator. There are some Linux Commands which are lesser Known, yet very useful and handy irrespective of the fact whether you are a Novice or an Advanced User.

Now, we personally prefer to do as much as possible in a GUI, but for those of you that prefer the command line, this series is for you:

11 Lesser Known Useful Linux Commands – Part I
10 Lesser Known Linux Commands – Part 2
10 Lesser Known Commands for Linux – Part 3

Link: 5 commands to check memory usage on Linux

Memory Usage

On linux, there are commands for almost everything, because the gui might not be always available. When working on servers only shell access is available and everything has to be done from these commands. So today we shall be checking the commands that can be used to check memory usage on a linux system. Memory include RAM and swap.

It is often important to check memory usage and memory used per process on servers so that resources do not fall short and users are able to access the server. For example a website. If you are running a webserver, then the server must have enough memory to serve the visitors to the site. If not, the site would become very slow or even go down when there is a traffic spike, simply because memory would fall short. Its just like what happens on your desktop PC.

Full article here (tip: if you see a block of run-on text at the top of the page, just skip it and continue on to the next paragraph):
5 commands to check memory usage on Linux (Linux.com)

Link: How To Set Up Tunlr DNS Under Linux To Access Netflix, Hulu, CBS, ABC, Pandora and More Outside The US

Tunlr is a free DNS service that lets you use U.S.-based on-demand Internet streaming providers, such as Netflix, Hulu, CBS, MTV, ABC, Pandora and more, if you’re living outside the U.S. At the time I’m writing this article, Tunlr reports that the following streaming services are working:

  • US video streaming services: Netflix, Hulu, CBS, ABC, MTV, theWB, CW TV, Crackle, NBC, Fox, A&E TV, TV.com, Vevo, History, Logo TV, Crunchyroll, DramaFever, Discovery, Spike and VH1;
  • US audio streaming services: Pandora, Last.fm, IheartRadio, Rdio, MOG, Songza;
  • Non-US streaming services: BBC iPlayer (excluding live streams), iTV Player, NHL Gamecenter Live and TF1 Replay / WAT.tv (excluding “direct” stream).
In my test, Tunlr has worked as advertised, but there’s one issue: using Tunlr DNS permanently is not a good idea: for privacy/security reasons, speed and so on. Even the Tunlr FAQ page says you shouldn’t use the Tunlr DNS for every day web surfing. On Windows, there are some tools you can use to quickly switch the Tunlr DNS on/off, but there’s no such tool for Linux, so here’s how to properly use Tunlr under Linux.

Full article here:
How To Set Up Tunlr DNS Under Linux To Access Netflix, Hulu, CBS, ABC, Pandora and More Outside The US (Web Upd8)

Link: How to Setup your own Proxy Server for Free [Updated]

Do a Google search like “proxy servers” and you’ll find dozens of PHP proxy scripts on the Internet that will help you create your own proxy servers in minutes for free. The only limitation with PHP based proxies is that they require a web server (to host and run the proxy scripts) and you also need a domain name that will act as an address for your proxy site.

If you don’t have a web domain or haven’t rented any server space, you can still create a personal proxy server for free and that too without requiring any technical knowledge.

YouTube Video Link: How to Create a Proxy Server

Full article here:
How to Setup your own Proxy Server for Free [Updated] (Digital Inspiration)

Link: PlayonLinux for Ubuntu/Linux Mint/other Ubuntu derivatives via PPA

PlayOnLinux is a piece of software which allows you to easily install and use numerous apps and games designed to run with Microsoft Windows. Few apps and games are compatible with GNU/Linux at the moment and it certainly is a factor preventing the migration to this system. PlayOnLinux brings a cost-free, accessible and efficient solution to this problem.

playonlinux

Full article here:
PlayonLinux for Ubuntu/Linux Mint/other Ubuntu derivatives via PPA (Noobs Lab)

Link: How to put in pause any process in Linux

Linux is much better at multitasking processor-intensive tasks than Windows. I remember how virus scanning used to make by old Windows PC almost unusable. Linux is much better, but sometimes bad things happens ! Perhaps a plugin of your browser is using all the CPU, or some bad software is freezing your system, or Apache it’s eating up all your resources on your server.

If you have seen some situation like these, don’t worry anymore, you don’t need to kill all the offending processes, restart your graphical session, or even worse restart the computer, you can simply put the specific process in “PAUSE” and analyse the situation, in some cases you could find the cause of a poor performing process, or just restart it in a second moment, maybe after you have saved all your works, when you can give to that process all the CPU.

Full article here:
How to put in pause any process in Linux (Linuxaria)

Link: How to install webmin on ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) Server

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.

Full article here:
How to install webmin on ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) Server (Ubuntu Geek)