Well I just updated the server today so that everything is up to the latest stable version. I don’t know if that will make the server any more stable but it should help a little towards making it more secure. I am currently in the process of removing old processes I don’t use any more such as IRC bots, email servers, email clients, etc. So that just the daemons I use are running, already I have managed to cut back the servers use of its resources by a considerable amount.
Anyway on to some useful Linux commands I use most often, aside from cd, ls, cp, rm, mkdir and the other usual suspects, I also find the following couple of command based applications useful and you might also.
dselect: This is a very useful application for keeping your server up to date, it is basically a menu driven front end for the apt-get command, which helps speed up the process of deciding what you want and do not want on your machine. I have only recently begun using this frequently because I keep forgetting that it is in fact installed. Where as apt-get can give you issues, I have found that this application is able to fix them and then give you a hell of a lot more, but that’s just the fun of managing your own server and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
top: So you have a rogue process doing something it shouldn’t, are interested in what you currently have running or just want to check up on some system statistics. Top is the application for you; I tend to use it to keep an eye on what the server is actually doing. I sometimes install things and processes which run in the background and then don’t use and subsequently forget about them being there. When you do that enough times then the amount of system resources those forgotten processes use can add up and begin effecting the system as a whole. I used this application to hunt them down and then used dselect to remove them. It’s also handy for keeping an eye on the health of the computer, I tend to leave it running in the background so I can keep a watch on what the server is doing while I test things on it.
mc: The last of the regulars of which I remember, mc is short for midnight commander and is basically a file explorer and editor. The great thing about this application is that it supports the mouse, even over SSH. So when logged in from putty I can just click and use a very DOS like window system to make selections. I don’t use this so much anymore due to managing to break it some how (I’m fixing that now) and I prefer to use the command line anyway, but it does prove to be invaluable when trying to search the entire file system for a file containing a certain phrase.
So there you have it, some very useful applications for use on linux, I don’t use that much other command based applications and to be honest as this is just a html server I don’t have much cause to either unless I am patching things or having to compile a new version of some application.
