I can still recall the excitement of the first time I tried to access and administer a remote system using SSH. Accessing my shell at a remote machine securely, being able to do local and remote port forwarding in order to access remote services through encrypted tunnels, X forwarding, secure file transfers using scp or [...]

I thought that sending a text file as a text message through the GSM network’s short message service would be a trivial task either it was performed from within the phone’s operating system or from a computer that runs a flavour of Linux. Once again, I have been badly misled. In 2007, this task still [...]

rtorstat is a simple web page generator, written in Python, which shows status information about the rTorrent bittorrent client. This makes it possible to quickly have an overview of your torrent list from a remote location, without having to log into the remote machine that actually runs rTorrent.

A while back I had mentioned dircproxy as a solution for an IRC proxy server. Although dircproxy is good and effective, recently I’ve been reading many positive comments about another similar application, BIP. I hope I find some free time in the next days to give it a shot. Judging by its extensive feature set, [...]

One of the things in which I never reached a decent level of knowledge is IRC. I mean I know the basic stuff in order to connect to servers, join channels, send/receive files etc. What I know nothing of is actually IRC server or channel administration… I am not going to learn or write more [...]

This is an excellent article that describes in detail how P2P applications can bypass the firewall and accept incoming data without opening any ports in the firewall configuration. This trick is used by the majority of VoIP software. In this article, the author not only describes how the popular internet telephony software Skype manages to [...]

In some of my older articles, at least where an SSH tunnel is involved, I keep mentioning a specific way of initializing such an encrypted tunnel, which results in the automatic closure of the tunnel after the job on the remote server is finished. Since this is my method of choice, I decided to provide [...]

One of the Linux command line tools I had initially under-estimated is netcat or just nc. By default, netcat creates a TCP socket either in listening mode (server socket) or a socket that is used in order to connect to a server (client mode). Actually, netcat does not care whether the socket is meant to [...]

I was aware that a non-encrypted VNC session could be recorded and then reproduced, but I had never searched for utilities that could do that job. The recorded sessions can be perfectly used to show others how to accomplish a task and, generally, can serve as excellent training videos. There is a very good HOWTO [...]

Some months ago, I had a talk on IRC with someone who had created a useful plugin for WordPress, which shows performance related information. The plugin is called Performance Probe. Its output is saved in text files. I had written a quick python script, for demonstration purposes only, that uses performance probe’s output and RRDTool [...]