Tech Stuff - Survival Guides

We forget stuff - frequently. These survival guides are meant as quick and dirty overviews of various open-source software that we use on both Linux and FreeBSD and depending on the software - occasionally on Windows. While some may call this kind of thing a cheat-sheet we prefer the term survival guide since it plays to our sense of drama and in more than a couple of instances it was no exaggeration.

If this stuff is useful - print the page and save our bandwidth. If it is not useful - well that's just too bad. Though if we do miss something obvious you could drop us an email.

The general style of each guide is to describe the basic functions - locations, logging, configuration files, basic commands and the occasional weird stuff and then link more detailed sources where appropriate.

Cron	Scheduling a task seems to be a simple enough process - but quickly gets real confusing 'cos of all the features and options. For FreeBSD and Linux (Fedora Core).
Cryptography	Overviews and tutorial material on Cryptography, Authentication, Authorization, Hashes, Digest, MAC, digital signatures and other eye-popping stuff.
FreeBSD Update	Information about upgrading FreeBSD, keeping it up to date using the superb freebsd-update, updating ports and if you are into ruby whether to use ports or RubyGems to keep up to date. We also include some notes on using rsync to keep backups.
MySQL	The ever popular MYSQL. Good Database software but operationally confusing. IOHO.
Postfix	Postfix SMTP Agent. We use in combination with Dovecot as the Mail agent. Includes configuring virtual_mailbox_domains, virtual_alias_domains, TLS, spamassasin, amavis, greylisting, spf, piping mail to scripts and some UCE controls.
sed	Sed is incredibly useful and brutally complex. Some notes on its uses and links to other material on our page introducing regular expressions.
SSL	All you never wanted to know about SSL/TLS and X.509 certificates - including generating self-signed certificates with OpenSSL.

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Problems, comments, suggestions, corrections (including broken links) or something to add? Please take the time from a busy life to 'mail us' (at top of screen), the webmaster (below) or info-support at zytrax. You will have a warm inner glow for the rest of the day.