Link: A Primer for Scheduling Cron Jobs in Linux

Cron jobs in Linux are simple scheduled tasks that can be set to run commands at specific times. Unfortunately, the syntax isn’t the easiest to use or remember, but in this month’s column I’ll share some examples and tips to help you better understand and utilize cron jobs.

Full article here:
A Primer for Scheduling Cron Jobs in Linux (ServerWatch)

Note that if you have Webmin installed on a system, it may be easier to use that to schedule cron jobs.

Link: TheLittleBlackBox: An ARM-based, open source XBMC media center

XBMC is a media center application that started its life as a project to turn the first-generation Xbox into an audio and video powerhouse. The project has since been ported to run on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and other platforms, and we’ve even seen it running on low-power devices with ARM processors such as the Pivos XIOS DS Media Play.

Now there’s a new XBMC box on the way, and it’s designed specifically for running XBMC. It doesn’t run Android apps at all, just an embedded operating system to support XBMC.

Full article here:
TheLittleBlackBox: An ARM-based, open source XBMC media center (liliputing)

Is elitism the reason many open source projects self destruct?

The author of this article seems to think so. He appears to be primarily talking about Ubuntu here, but we strongly suspect that the same thing has happened with several other open source projects:

The Achilles Heel of Open Source: Elitism (Linux Advocates)

Mark Shuttleworth: Canonical leads Ubuntu, not ‘your whims’ (The Register)

Link: How to protect Apache with Fail2ban

Around 2 years ago I wrote an article about fail2ban.

Fail2ban is an intrusion prevention framework written in the Python programming language. It is able to run on POSIX systems that have an interface to a packet-control system or firewall installed locally (such as, iptables or TCP Wrapper).

Fail2ban’s main function is to block selected IP addresses that may belong to hosts that are trying to breach the system’s security. It determines the hosts to be blocked by monitoring log files (e.g. /var/log/pwdfail, /var/log/auth.log, etc.) and bans any host IP that makes too many login attempts or performs any other unwanted action within a time frame defined by the administrator.

Today I want to show you some configurations that you can use to improve the security of your Apache.

Read the rest here:
How to protect Apache with Fail2ban (Linuxaria)

If you ever play video using VLC and it is jerky or drops frames, try this

In VLC’s preferences, note the setting for “Use GPU accelerated decoding” — on most systems with modern graphics hardware this should be checked, but is not by default. So, check the box and then click Save. You can always change it back if it makes things worse, or causes videos to not play at all.