dd is one of those indispensable Unix / Linux utilities whether its cloning or wiping a drive or simply creating a bootable flash drive from an image file. The problem is operations like wiping a drive with the output from /dev/zero can take an extremely long time especially on larger…
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Near Realtime File Replication With Lsyncd
Ever wanted real time backups of directories on your server? To replicate static media files for a website to a separate box to reduce load? An easy solution lays with lsyncd it allows you to watch a directory structure on your file system, and replicate any changes on a remote…
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Locking A Linux Users Login
Sometimes you need to lock a user out of a system on a temporary basis, maybe they didn’t pay that last bill you sent? Luckily this can be done really easily with the passwd command.
i.e passwd -l username
This adds a ! character to the start of the users encrypted password making it invalid. When you want to unlock the account the process is easily reversed using the passwd again but this time with the -u prefix.
i.e passwd -u username
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