Read on for ways to help reduce the chance that your vacation will be interrupted by sysadmin issues.

In my last article, I began exploring song lyrics. Not so you could have an epic Karaoke night, but more in the sense of analyzing song lyrics and word usage therein.

Triggering scripts with incron and systemd.

I've written about and trained folks on various DevOps tools through the years, and although they're awesome, it's obvious that most of them are designed from the mind of a developer. There's nothing wrong with that, because approaching configuration management programmatically is the whole point.

In the September 2016 issue, I wrote an article called "Papa's Got a Brand New NAS" where I described how I replaced my rackmounted gear with a small, low-powered ARM device—the Odroid XU4.

A few articles ago, I started a Sysadmin 101 series to pass down some fundamental knowledge about systems administration that the current generation of junior sysadmins, DevOps engineers or "full stack" developers might not learn otherwise. I had thought that I was done with the series, but then the WannaCry malware came out and exposed some of the poor patch management practices still

I was reading about the history of The Beatles a few days ago and bumped into an interesting fact. According to the author, The Beatles used the word "love" in their songs more than 160 times. At first I thought, "cool", but the more I thought about it, the more I became skeptical about the figure. In fact, I suspect that the word "love" shows up considerably more than 160 times.

Phishing is one of the most dangerous threats to modern computing. Phishing attacks have evolved from sloppily written mass email blasts to targeted attacks designed to fool even the most cautious users. No defense is bulletproof, and most experts agree education and common sense are the best tools to combat the problem.

Anyone who reads Linux Journal knows about my fascination with birdwatching. I've created my own weatherproof video cameras with a Raspberry Pi. I've posted instructions on how to create your own automatically updating camera image page with JavaScript. Heck, I even learned CSS so I could make a mobile-friendly version of BirdCam that filled the screen in landscape mode.

In the April 2017 issue, I wrote about how to use ticketing systems as a sysadmin to organize your tasks better.

One of my first exposures to computers in a work environment was using a Wyse terminal to access a console-based application for data entry. It wasn't until a while later that I learned about terminals in UNIX and how they work. Once I understood it, I wanted to create my own self-contained application that was tied to a telnet or SSH session.

In my last few articles, I've been exploring the capabilities of ImageMagick, showing that just because you're working on a command line doesn't mean you're stuck processing only text.

In my last few articles, I've looked at a number of ways machine learning can help make predictions. The basic idea is that you create a model using existing data and then ask that model to predict an outcome based on new data.

In a previous article, I explained the process for setting up Cacti, which is a great program for graphing just about anything. One of the main things I graph is my internet usage. And, it's great information to have, until there is internet activity you can't explain.

My day job pays me on the 15th and last day of every month, unless those days land on a weekend, in which case I get paid the Friday before. With those rules, creating a Google Calendar event is shockingly difficult. In fact, it's not possible to create a recurring event with those rules using Google's GUI scheduling tool.

Us geeks mostly think of the command line as the best place for text manipulation. It's a natural with cat, grep and shell scripts. But although you can't necessarily view your results from within a typical terminal window, it turns out to be pretty darn easy to analyze and manipulate images from within a shell script.

Let's dig back into some chemistry software to see what kind of work you can do on your Linux machine. Specifically, let's look at Jmol, a Java application that is available as both a desktop application and a web-based applet.

When you deploy a web application, how do end users access it? Often web applications are set behind a gateway device through which end users can access it. One of the popular products to act as an application gateway on Linux is the Apache Web Server. Although it can function as a normal web server, it also has the ability to connect through it to other web servers.

In my last article, I had some fun looking at the children's game of rock, paper, scissors, writing a simple simulator and finding out that some strategies are better than others. Yes, I used "strategy" and "rock, paper, scissors" in the same sentence!