 All right, we are live with homelab show episode 19 and we're going to be bringing you some command line help and This is me and G were tossing this around and say, you know what? This is just something that's really needed, you know the common commands that we type in to help sort out a problem Jay's covered this before in his channel with awesome Linux tools So we just call them awesome command line tools and these are the things that kind of will help you along your journey Because you're kind of wondering how much space is on the hard drive? What's the command for that and or each partition or however you have it configured? But so that's what's gonna cover in today's episode and let's have some fun with this Yeah, absolutely We want to first give a shout out to our sponsor Linode And we've been using Linode to help deliver this show to you So if you visited the homelab dot show downloaded this podcast you have pulled it off Linode server set up by Jay He's very familiar with Linode. I I've been around their service for a little while now So I'm pretty familiar with it and they keep out keep on coming out with new features, which is pretty cool, too And they have all kinds of things like one-click deployments Or you just set up your own Linux instance manually if you prefer that or if that's the only way to do it for that app Basically, whatever you could think of you could create a Linode instance for that They have support for containers as well object storage. They have built-in domain management So they have pretty much every tool you could ever want Yeah, it's it's a nice way if you want to test something out as much as we you know Encourage people to do everything and learn how to do it from the command line build it up Their app store is actually pretty cool We were discussing that this last night how easy is just to go deploy something that you want to test and it's great First you want to know the end result Is it a product I want because if you spend a lot of time learning it you're like well in the end It's not the thing I wanted to use or it doesn't fit my use case Hey, at least with the you can just destroy it and start over again Linno makes it really easy and we're gonna make it easy for you We have an offer code down below from Linno to get you some time on their servers to get started on there It's a pain-free sign-up. So if you're interested go ahead and click the link below It's in the show notes and thank you for Linno for sponsoring this video You're watching yep in the last dream All right, where do we start on this list of tools and I realized you know as soon as this show started I mentioned to Jay one minute ago I said there's at least one of them not on our list that we forgot But we'll give them a couple honorable mentions here is someone already in the comments of lol cat and cow say They're not useful tools at all, but I will throw them out there is awesome tools Probably it was the other one called toilet where it does a little ASCII stuff There's there's a couple of them they're off topic But if you're not there with cow say it allows you to draw a little ASCII cow and the cow can say things I actually have a tutorial on my channel oddly including cow say where I talk about how to pipe things through the command line and Piping is one of the you know functions using battery take the output and pipe it through to another system And I think if you're not sure what to do cow say is an easy example of how to do it So it's not as much an awesome tool But at least it gives you some entertainment if you are playing with some of these tools The rest of tools are more serious after this though Yeah An honorable mention I'll give and this isn't really a tool But it's just an example of like you could do pretty much everything in the command line Like somebody who had a lot of time in their hands decided to port Star Wars episode 4 to ASCII Oh, yeah, I don't know the command off the top of my head, but it's literally you could just Google it Obviously make sure it's a safe URL the URL I thought it included like blinking lights in the name. I'm not mistaken But it's literally Star Wars episode 4 in ASCII. Oh, yeah, I don't want to know how much time that would have taken to complete Yeah, there's there's also one for DNS And if you it does a series of DNS queries like through trace I think it's DNS lookups would be a trace route and it will kick out some fun ASCII on there But all right for you to off topic. That's Those are definitely just a lot of fun I'm a big fan because of me being an old-school computer person of ASCII art So I have a soft spot my heart for it, but um, let's get with the real tools that things Where do you want to start Jay? So what I'm gonna do is talk about two text editors and as an aside I set up a few short URLs for some of these because we have videos for some of these between Tom and I Or maybe we don't and we should which is where you guys can come in and let us know if we If there's something you want us to cover in a future episode of this podcast Because some of the things we're going to mention might actually get you guys thinking and if you want to see a video on something Or episode of something we didn't already do then pretty much anything we mentioned here is fair game But the short URLs will help you find some of these so the first category is a category of text editors I have to you're probably going to think that I'm going to mention Vim and nano if you thought about Vim You're right nano it can get an honorable mention. I think it's fine You know, it's really simple But I'm going to give you guys another text editor in its place called micro which is really cool You can essentially just download it. You can even curl it although. I don't really like curling things I don't like that being a habit But it's a very easy to use text editor Maybe a little bit more advanced than nano and it could do some of the things that Vim can do But micro is a really good text editor to start out with if you are just kind of getting your feel for the command line And I have a video on my channel For those listening all you have to do is and this is very easy syntax. It's a Linux video. That's the domain And in this case, it's Linux video slash micro So that should be very easy for someone to know we'll have it in the show notes as well If you want to see a video on that now Vim is my favorite text editor personally I think early in my Linux career I was kind of oppositional towards Vim because I'm like, you know, it's just too complicated I could just open up nano and it's quicker But once I saw some colleagues and what they were you know what they were able to do with it It actually wasn't as hard as I thought it was and you don't really have to learn everything about Vim You could just focus on the things that you want to use like copy and paste Maybe that's all you really care about opening files saving files And I have a video for that at Linux video slash Vim and that gets you to a playlist of a bunch of videos there I don't know how many like five or six or something like that That'll teach you Vim if you don't already know it but Vim and like Tom and I were actually discussing before the show Vim is everywhere. So it's one of those things that Even if you are on a server and the package base is just totally borked and you can't install anything Chances are Vim is already there So you could just simply go into Vim and if you're if you know the basics at least then you're in a really good shape and Years and years ago when I started in tech It was just by not them not the enhanced one But their commands are close enough that you can figure it out it's when I had to deal with and Way past its end-to-life people still had an HP UX and some old AI X servers that I used to administer Starting in the 90s, but they were still in use in the 2000 But that was the only editor available on those systems and it's why it's one of the reasons It's not it is a learning challenge, but there's also some different games you can play with them Literally if you type in like the Vim game, there's someone who teaches you some of the commands with the game So there's there's ways to make your life a little bit easier when it comes to learning it But I do recommend it and if you get really extensive in it There's one of the reasons Vim has survived so long and being one of the really Among the oldest tools in the Linux and Unix world is The modern versions allow a lot of plugins So if you're doing different types of code lookup and things like that it becomes a very enhanced editor for things So I really encourage people to learn that and watch these tutorials on it We're not gonna probably do an episode on them because an episode of them. It's very Visuals watch these videos on it for help on that. All right. Yeah Yeah, I totally agreed in you know The thing to keep in mind throughout all of this because I get a lot of people ask me How do I how do I memorize all of that and it could it's not just about them Whatever it happens to be what the subject is just memorize the things you care about You don't have to know all of them if you go in thinking or to learn every aspect of them You're gonna be defeated because there's many more features there than any human being will ever be able to memorize So just better to you copy paste like I mentioned opening saving files. You're good And then if you get into plugins, that's fine But yep, so those are text editors Vim and micro are the two that I listed here and nano gets an honorable mention Because that I have run yet exist I Never knew into a few situations where I can't remember what distro. It was Vin was not there I'm like whoa, but now no was so it could be one of those things to it could be a runner-up the next category is Resource monitoring general resource monitoring and things like CPU RAM and such And the first pick that I have here is H top now I don't have a dedicated video on that. I've covered H top in several different individual series on Linux distributions It's usually something I show in quite a few videos So I'm not really sure which one to point you to but H top it has replaced top for me top is the It's been the go-to Command basically to see what your resource utilization is. It's been the default for Probably decades or I don't know how many years now and H top in my opinion Is just one of those things that I install immediately because it just makes it so easy to see what? We're you know where your CPU is going what's saturating all your RAM things like that You can kill processes as well So if something's totally pegging your CPU you couldn't in the case of a server just SSH in kill the process if you have to So H top is really easy to use you can customize it. So in my opinion, that's the number one pick for that Yeah, now Top is pretty cool and it was back to HP UX and knows it's been around for a long time But H top one of the things that not every realizes one. There's a search function There's an expand function so you can expand what command so you can see the whole command line Also, I didn't realize in till some time long after I started using each top There's mouse wheel support So if you want you to scroll through things bring your mouse And you can scroll around with the mouse inside of each top to find different processes But being able to search and send the kill commands to kill or look at different processes each tops Not just a replacement but an enhancement over top But she when you're just trying to hunt down a process in there filtering for a specific process And when you're doing monitoring you're just trying to figure out kind of like Jason What what is really hogging the resources? It's very helpful It's also really cool Well as me and Jay have sometimes screenshotted when we're rendering something and we get to see all the cores in use that becomes kind of For my case a single process using like nearly if not 50 gigabytes of RAM and no I'm not exaggerating some of my render actually when I'm not even rendering some of my Caden live editing sessions on YouTube as we have literally gotten to 50 gigs of RAM usage and it's insane So yeah, like you could see that right there and just like Tom mentioned when you're rendering a video You just see all the cores going nuts. It's just fun Yep, another one. Okay. Sorry. Go ahead. No, I just want to say let's talk about Do you do you have a pronunciation for it or is it just BP Y top? Be pi top because it's Python Python Got it top written in Python First initial be so be PY TOP. I do have a video on this. So Linux dot video slash be pi top and I kind of put this right up there with H top it's almost like a more modern actually H top is fairly modern itself It's just prettier. It's the Python It's got a little splash screen that comes up you can disable that and I make that available on all of my systems H top as well. I have both H top is still muscle memory. Even though I prefer be pi top I type H top so habitually that you know, it's still a thing there So I do recommend at least looking at be pi top. I have a video on that I might actually have compared it to H top in the video I don't remember because when I create a video, I completely forget everything about that video So check the video on that you might see H top making an appearance there too So H top and be pi top and we also have I think this might have been yours possibly wave mon Yeah Now I've done a video on wave mon and this goes back into the networking side of things So we have it. It's is it a resource monitor? Is it a network monitor? depends on what you consider an SSID so when you're looking at wireless networks and Granted that falls in a category networking but you kind of want to monitor your signal strength and connection to that wireless network and all the tools that I've seen in the UI for Linux or and Windows is even worse, but wave mon on the other hand is awesome and gives you a lot of great detail Especially when I do a lot of testing as I do when we're testing Wi-Fi devices here One of the things you do like roaming is an easy example You want to know when you on that particular device roam to the next device when you're wandering around you want to watch that Transaction how did it work? One of the cool things wave mom will do because it always has the Mac displayed within there You can actually watch as you're connecting to the same SSID with a different Mac Which means you've roamed to another device and it just gives you some good granular data for signal strength interference Retries retries are one of the things you're trying to watch and it just puts it all on the screen all through the command line one of the reasons I like through a you know endcurses command line is because Compared to a UI one is just kind of concise needs easy to read also. It works over SSH So if you have a device Let's say even a Raspberry Pi and you connected a Wi-Fi adapter to it or using the Wi-Fi adapter within a Raspberry Pi And you wanted to monitor a remote site and to see if there's something causing problems on wireless drops Being able to quickly SSH into that device and have that on the screen cool. I have the stats I have the information I can see if there's something or some type of retries going on and Especially when you're tracking an intermittent connection connection problem when you can't be on site all the time But you can leave something on site that you can remote into and see what it's wireless is Wave mom's been kind of an invaluable tool for that. I don't think it really has an easy Parity with anything else. I don't know like it I don't even know it has a close second in terms of all the info it displays But it's all those things in broke don't fix it It's apt-get install wave mon on W and base distributions and of course it's supported outside of Debbie and whatever distribution probably has it in there Yeah, probably should have put that in the networking section, but yeah, we it's a great tool I don't think I knew about this one. So some of these the Tom brought up in our pre-show It's like yeah, I'm gonna be adding these to my ansible make sure all my systems have it I think that's one that's least of my systems with Wi-Fi that one's gonna be on there Or sure The next category is resource monitoring specific to discs like storage how much you know What's eating up all your space things like that now? The first thing is easy. I think most people know this one But if you you're super new to Linux you you probably don't then DF-H that's just that's the command and that's built in to I think every distribution I've ever used So you shouldn't have to install anything dash H is for human readable So you see megabytes gigabytes and things like that just makes it very easy to understand now the downside there is You have to kind of But there's also DU dash H as well So DF dash H is going to show you like how much space you actually have free or yeah for each mountain point For each mountain point, but once you understand which mountain point it is that's full you can use DU dash H disk usage DU dash H in that directory and then you'll find out which directory is the largest one and you can drill down now The issue for that for me is that it's a little time consuming depending on how many Directories deep the problem could be yes. I like to use ncdu which stands for n curses disk usage, I believe and That is almost never installed by default on any Linux distribution So what I tell everyone is make that one of the first things you install and here's why if your disk is a hundred percent full You're not going to be able to install ncdu because your disk is a hundred percent full. So I install something when you have no space left. So Make sure you install it before it becomes a problem Because running it after the fact if it if it's full is not easy to do but ncdu allows you to Traverse your file system. So it'll scan your file system I use dash X as a argument there because that makes it so that it doesn't search for any like network storage Devices that you might have mounted So if you have like, you know in a company for example a five terabyte mount that's mounted But your problem is on the local file system It's just going to be a complete waste of your time to have it scan a network file system So I use dash X unless I do want to scan that file system. So once it's done You basically can just traverse the directory tree It'll show you like which directory is using the most space and it orders by space from the most to the least And then you could just press enter to select a folder You just use the up and down arrow to select a folder and then when you're inside a folder You can actually forgot what it was you can actually delete a file in there if you have to so if you find a Really large file. You really don't need it in my case one of my other companies I don't know if I was in a good mood when I was working for this company this day, but Somebody basically downloaded a bunch of stuff to the home directory and the home director wasn't on a different Partition so the server was just out of space. So I went in that person's home home directory I just flat out deleted that folder They're not even supposed to be putting anything in their home director is anyway on that server and that of course Cured the problem just ran and cdu. I saw it was that person's home directory I saw what folder it was they just on tarred something they downloaded from the internet that was really huge like Source code. I think it was like a big blob of source code. They just extracted So ncdu for me is just indispensable. It's just great Yeah, it's one of the problems that we've run into a lot is people set up servers And they may not put any maintenance plan or a proper log rotation plan And they don't take into consideration The fact that there's a finite amount of space on this particular server And now that's actually a freaking problem solving is jumping right in and those tools are Like it's crazy. It is for all the problems we solve I got to say I've solved that one a lot for people of like you're just out of space like that's like I can't get this thing to work or it's behaving improperly If you're not familiar with one of the rules in the way linux works There's the 90 is 95 percent rules probably what I call it you can only get the drive 90 percent full For user operations. It forces the last five percent only available to root So things running is root are still able to function, but anything running in user space Can stops at 95 percent. I believe that's still true in all modern distributions. Am I right j Um, well, I don't know because I haven't seen that happen Ever. Um, so it might be where distribution you were using might have that it sounds like a good rule to me Yeah, it it stops non-root from writing I believe maybe it's just something I'd seen in the servers But at least allowed me enough space to install something as root to start doing the other things But it's amazing how many times I have Found because the application was told to stop writing. Basically is why they they just to to the user The application stopped functioning. They don't know why it's on linux. So they contact support Us and go we don't know why this linux server quit working It seems to be booting But it doesn't function and what happens is the app doesn't have any space to write to the drive so Right, I think it could be a default in in a distribution that you might have used But it seems it seems like a smart default What I've seen Is that the space would be full right up to 100 when this happens and there's not even root can write anything Because there's not even a single byte available to write to Um now obviously you should probably consider var log being on a different Partition, I mean this thing that could probably help that a lot because If an application goes out of control and normally this app doesn't even write that many logs But when it goes out of control, I mean it's just going to be spitting text out like crazy It could really fill up a disk so fast. It's amazing I've ran some experience or some experiments sometimes just just to see how fast I could fill up a disc I think I I was able to do it in seconds. So um, yeah Yeah, you have to be careful of that and uh, this is why when you set up a more advanced systems And that's why when you're installing links one of the questions is everything in one partition for normal users But for advanced users, you may want to start breaking everything on to a series of mount points Uh to help distribute that because that way things can continue to work Or you don't destroy something else by running out of space. You'll just not be able to log which is bad But yeah, at least things can keep moving forward Exactly. So the next section is going to be more about network and bandwidth I'm going to mention one myself. I think tom's going to be the star of the show here because I I'm kind of lame when it comes to this. So I literally if I have a problem I'm I have pf sense. I have all these different things and I just open pf sense. I see the traffic graph going crazy I know exactly where the problem is probably my kids playing online games. Let's be honest That's usually what it's going to be But I think having the command line tools are great because you know What if I'm not able to log into pf sense or I don't have anything like that I can use The one I'm going to mention real quick is it's an easy one speed test hyphen cli And that's a good way to just get a quick speed test If you want to see what your bandwidth bandwidth is like don't even have to open up a web browser and one of the reasons why I like this is that um It's really useful to traverse your network. So if you have a problem where Let's just say bandwidth is just sucky. It's horrible So you run a speed test and you're getting a minuscule amount of bandwidth there Is it that server? That's a problem or is it something ahead of it? That's the bottleneck So you can go like one level below that run speed test. Okay. That's also slow go level below that run it again It's fast. Okay. So the problem is between The the second and third server something there is really hogging the bandwidth you could kind of traverse it that way Obviously a speed test is not going to give you an accurate To the byte representation of your speed But it is going to be able to give you an idea of like where the bottleneck might be Or maybe your internet connection is just totally not getting What you're supposed to be getting there's always going to be a variance there So if you get a gigabit internet connection, you're probably not going to get the full gigabit all the time Maybe it's 800 at 1.9 50 of the next but it should be Um 800 or higher. I would hope but if you're getting something like 40 and you're paying for a gigabit Well, that's a problem Right and on the topic of speed testing one of the other options is Internally, this is a really important thing to do Does your internal network have a bottleneck somewhere and that's where I've used it in many videos We have it listed as iperf, but technically it'd be iperf 3 both are both work There's two different ones iperf 3 is the newest one And the command is different so it's iperf and then just the number three after it But that command right there iperf 3 i've done videos on this It's often used in all my speed test videos It is a tool that allows you to create single streams and figure out if the data At what speed the data can travel your network from point a system a to system b Now there's a lot of cool things you can do with this and for example When testing 10 gig routing on a pf sense I had pointed out that people who have trouble figuring out why 10 gig isn't working on pf sense Well, there's a few factors one 10 gig has trouble with single streams iperf by default with no parameters added to it runs a single stream a single tcp or udp stream between the two devices But you can also slice that up into 20 streams or two streams or five streams You can throw some command line options on it and you'll notice at that point Certain devices and pf senses included in this when you're setting up 10 gig can actually handle even with lower processors a 10 gig stream Provided it's a multitude of streams, which is actually more relatable to how your internet connection would actually work It's not like all your data is through a single stream when you're at that level It's often a series of things so you have a cumulative bandwidth But this is where you can do all that type of testing with iperf and understand your network because If as jay said if you're not getting the right speed on your internet connection You also do have to check internally just to make sure there's not something broke within your network a switch causing a hang up Or I think jay had discovered one Client that he was working with that had a old hundred 10 100 switch in between things Yes, I was I told the owner of the company I told them, you know, I understand you want to fly me out there But before you buy me a plane ticket I think I should just kind of look at the equipment and just understand what the capabilities are He's like no, we have a gigabit everywhere. We're paying for gigabit internet We have gigabit devices is absolutely perfect Just go over there gives me a plane ticket and has the I think it was Verizon or AT&T I can't remember meet me there And I so I get there and me and that individual walk down the stairs to the data center And as soon as I see the data rack, I told the guy, you know what I'm really sorry that we wasted your time I guarantee you there's nothing you could do here. It's a hardware problem He's like, okay, and then he walked away because when I I looked at the rack I looked at, you know, basically old switches that I would find on ebay for probably 15 20 dollars if I was going for ccna testing I wanted some example Switches or routers to practice on that are just 10 100. That's exactly what was in the rack So I called him up like, yeah, like I told you, you probably should have had me look at this equipment first or get someone over here to give me the model numbers Because you have Actually most of his devices other than the power edge servers. We're not capable of gigabit So there's no way that, you know, gigabit internet connection is even going to work So I basically set up I redid everything had him buy new switches a pf sense device Everything needed to be replaced even the bpn server. Yeah, it was really old On my purpose could have saved you a plane trip It could have but then again, I'm like, okay, you know, if he wants to buy me a plane ticket And I'll go I I did warn him. So um, it was a funny situation and you know, that's kind of one of the things you run into Now you can uh, I back to the pf sense real quick the pf sense does have iperf as a option that you can load into it And you can also set up iperf as Use our linode offer code and spin up a server and run iperf on there You may not want to leave it open to the public for long because people may find it and poke at it And then just start sucking up bandwidth, but you can do this between Internet connected devices to it doesn't have to be or restricted to and it's just a testing tool So I mean there may be some flaw in it. I don't know that I would leave it publicly exposed But yes, you can't publicly expose it use the linode firewall to restrict it to the devices you want to test because That's probably just a better idea because by the way when bandwidth in the cloud does cost money But you can use this um internal network outside the network or even spending up your own servers and understanding the interconnectivity of different things But maybe you want to drill down deeper and we have a couple tools for that One of them is if top now if top much like h top or top It's interface top So it's uh looking at your network interface and giving you the individual ip addresses and where that data is going back and forth It's kind of a cool little display that you can do to just watch the connections go back and forth It's not overly detailed, but it does give you bandwidth and for example when I open up on my computer and Test something. Let's see the vpn tunnel. I can look at what's traversing the vpn tunnel What ip is i'm connected to across my vpn tunnel But this works on really any interface including vpn tunnels And then you can watch the bandwidth going back and forth and maybe do an iperf test and use This at the same time to see the bandwidth going across see how the connections are traversing It's a it's a pretty handy tool But let's go deeper and that's where we get to ip traf ip tr af dash ng next generation I forget how old this tool is that it says next generation, but it's been around a long time So I don't know when the first ip traf came out, but this is the next generation one. It's been around forever great system That allows you to Drill into tcp and udb connections on your system I believe it'll filter icmp as well, but it actually is a all you know command line many many driven systems So you can really monitor all the connections This is helpful when you want to see what's connected to a server If you want to see if an ip address is connecting when you're doing some troubleshooting You can go into the filter rules drop some filter information in there I'm trying to remember I may or may not have done a video on this kind of like j occasionally You do a video and you're like I can't remember if I did but it's a great command line networking tool with a nice menu system That will dive into Understanding the different connections going to a system It's it it's something that I've used quite a bit for troubleshooting on linux servers When you're trying to just say all right What what is talking to this device and especially when it's the clouds to feel like what is currently talking to Okay, you can make a list of active talkers and it's you know apt to get installed It's in most all the repositories of any I know it's I have to get on any debbie and base drop Distribution, but it's in whatever you know red hat and everything else It's pretty popular tool across a lot of distros. So those are all solid networking tools to help you Dive into that and kind of understand those connections. So it's fun just to play with Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about session management And my personal pick is tmux. I don't think tom will disagree. In fact, you and I both have videos on this So yes, I have short codes for tmux. My videos as a playlist is at linux.video Slash tmux And then tom's video is a similar short url I've created linux.video slash tmux hyphen tom again in the show notes So tmux at its core will allow you to keep a session alive Even if your fsh connection is dropped now, I recommend tmux for every single person that uses linux It's not just because I like it. It's just because it can save you From damaging a server, believe it or not. So if you ssh into a server Let's just say you're installing a package and then your internet connection goes down So at that point your session dropped in the middle of a package install. That's not good That's going to be at its best. You're going to have to reinstall some packages when that happens it's even worse when you have like a very complicated deployment going on And you lose connection right in the middle of that tmux will allow that session to stay alive at the at the target You connect to it via ssh But tmux is running at the target and it stays alive Which is also why you can restart network interfaces through tmux And you'll still get disconnected, but you can reconnect your session And it'll come back up like nothing ever happened Now more advanced usage you you have things like tabs you could have splits So you could have like five different Servers on one terminal window you could send the same command to a bunch of servers at the same time So if you're rolling out five servers and they're going to be identical sure you could use an image That's probably the best way to do it, but you could also just sync the Terminals to fire off the same command in each one. So it can get pretty advanced, but it's super easy So check out our videos. I say watch both personally. I like to learn from multiple people. That's how I learn So if i'm watching a youtube video, I'll watch like two or three from two or three different people to learn it So definitely do that Now I have mentioned mash here as well And what that allows you to do is automatically resume a session So when you combine that with tmux, that's that's where the magic happens, but mash you don't need tmux with that So with mash you can use mash instead of ssh So if you have mash installed on both ends you could do mash and then the ip address the sort of ssh and the ip address So let's just say for example, you're on a laptop You're at home and you use mash to configure your home lab server Then you have to go to work So you bring your laptop to work and then you come back as soon as you're back on your wi-fi It'll reconnect you to the server as if you weren't ever disconnected. You can continue right where you left off Now combined with tmux. You really don't have to worry about your session going anywhere. It'll just resume it Now obviously there's some ports you have to open here. So be careful what you open I'm not saying you should open up mash to the world. In fact, you definitely should not But just understand the ports that it uses and how the traffic works before you start rolling it out everywhere With responsible usage. I think mash combined with tmux is actually very powerful Now one of the cool things is let's go back to the beginning here and we talked about having vim We talked about wave mom. We talked about doing some speed test with iperf This is where tmux becomes really helpful because what you do and this is one of the ways I've done the speed test videos when I'm doing wi-fi first I want to pull up wave mom, but I don't want to make a full screen. So I'll open up tmux So I'll create some splits. I only need I only need a really small amount Just a couple columns small enough to run something like iperfin But then we'll have wave mom on the other side running and this is where all this kind of stacks together So you I can kick off the commands without flipping screens and watch what happens when you Are trying to do a speed test while you're connected to a certain ssid And at the same time you're roaming and then I record the screen to make a video with it So this is kind of the stacking and glue that holds it all together is things like tmux It's very helpful because maybe you want to watch a connection. So you open up ip trap Ng you're opening that in a window and then you have another little window below it where you're ssh Going back and forth or bringing up a vpn tunnel and trying to traverse traffic But you're trying to see if that traffic hits this is why you know We mentioned tmux last because it's well almost last got a couple more things to talk about But it's really helpful once you kind of put all this knowledge together to be able to do everything in one And that's why you you get the insert joke hacker man when you watch people using linux terminal It looks really complicated looking over my shoulder to watch what we're doing But it's just a small iteration on using a few of these tools opening up something like tmux kicking off all this stuff and Learning it it's all these iterative learning things that kind of bring you to that Yep, I would even go as far as to say that a useful plugin for tmux and tmux does support plugins So I don't use many the one I do use is a tmux inator um, I don't it's not technically a plugin it kind of is kind of isn't but tmux inator something you can install you could define a tmux layout ahead of time as far as like what servers It's connected to what apps are running You could literally just create a config that's something like netmon If if you want to call it that call it whatever you want And then it just fires up tmux with the right splits and the right tools already there So I could have all your bandwidth monitoring tools each and every single one of them that you use right in one shot One command you don't have to manually create anything um The other plugin I like is tmux resurrect so you can actually freeze your tmux session And then when you reboot the server if you have to reboot it then you can Resurrect that tmux session and it'll restore it the way it was before you rebooted which is actually kind of cool So yes, so there are a few value ads that I wanted to throw in there And next Tom and I believe this is you if you want to talk about this one Linus for the security section Yes, now we have not done any video on this But I a lot of people really like this tool L Y N I S and it does sound very similar to the guy famous for linux curl line us Um, but it's linus. Well, I guess he pronounced it linus. I don't know. We're not going to get over semantics here Linus is a auditing tool for hardening and compliance testing If you search it up, it's pretty it's a pretty neat tool and Eventually me or j maybe one of us I'm not sure who's going to do it first We will in the future be doing a video on this What it does is it just audits for a lot of common settings because there's a lot of settings you Want to use to set up your computer and harden it and we're all human That means we skipped some settings, but linus was written by a human to automate all of these So it is the Tool to go through and just say all right. You've checked all the boxes. You've done these configurations I wanted to give it a mention because it's kind of cool to kind of get a baseline It's free by the way to start doing some of this Um, they actually the person that wrote it does offer some type of consulting services That wrote it. So there's actually some it's not a commercial product It is an open source product and it is apt to get install built in But I I want to mention because I've actually we talked to him a long time ago back when we did the sunday morning's linux review He emailed back and forth super nice person. Um, but it's definitely a cool auditing tool to at least help understand Yeah linus tech tips. I think that's really funny that someone said that Yeah, that that's it'll give you linux tech tips. All right Yeah Not so much no um, I am going to Bring up two apps at the same time and because they kind of solve the same purpose here And that's having a terminal file manager now. Yeah, I know I don't need a file manager We can just use all the file management commands every now and then it's useful We have midnight commander and we have ranger Now if I remember correctly, I'm pretty sure ranger is written in python And midnight commander. I don't remember what that's written in but it midnight commander is a little bit more advanced ranger Is really easy. It's simpler has fewer features, but it's just easier to get up and running with it So if you want to use the terminal and traverse a file system Like you would in a file manager and there's other features as well Midnight commander and ranger are both good picks if you want something easy go with ranger If you want something you don't mind learning midnight commander I would go that direction because it's you know, there's more to do there's more features and things like that just classic things that I think everyone should use at least once even if it's not going to be in in your muscle memory And you might actually like those and find yourself continuing to use them So one is ranger and again the other is midnight commander. So I definitely recommend that you guys check those out fi oh This is a really handy little file system benchmarking tool And I've used it in a few videos because well back to I do some storage server testing now This is a tool that's also used by the feronix test suite Which is obviously much more extensive and much more in-depth way to do some testing But if you just need to do some fio testing if you look up There's a couple easy write-ups on a few common command line switches But what I like about it is you can build a simple one line command throw it in bash or just copy paste it in And say run the speed test under these parameters to get a baseline i o then make whatever configuration changes You want run that same test again and see if the results are different It's a really basic tool that can give you a quick idea of the speed test of the ability when you're moving drive Moving files run on drive because it's a question that comes up a lot. How fast is this drive? Especially when you're dealing with virtualization Because you've created when you have an external storage server with virtualization You have a lot of complexities. You have the hypervisor. You have the underlying connections It has to a storage server whether that storage is local to it Or it is something like a true nastro terminology and you're kind of going well What if I changed this one parameter in the zfs settings on true nast? What are the results for this and this is where you can just it's kind of my quick and easy It's not a thorough benchmark But one of the things that can be done is it can be configured to the type of workload Because ultimately when you do any type of benchmarking it has to match what the workload is like a database with a lot of small rights or you're just moving large video files But you can tune when you learn the fio system to say move these big files Move four big files at once or a thousand small files or a thousand big files Whichever makes you happy But you tune that parameter and then you then go back and start tuning your storage settings And you can just keep running it until you get the more optimal result It's just kind of one of those easy things that not everybody knows about that You know how fast this is drive and that's a loaded question, of course How fast is it doing what task but that's where fio is then something i've used quite a bit to Start understanding with the different parameters I'm working on a much more in-depth video on that topic, but right now it's at like a two hour length of explaining some of that I think I need wendell to help me bring it down to Something like that tuning storage servers is in art form because it comes down to a lot But either way fio is a great tool for sending you down a rabbit hole. You may not return from When it comes to benchmarking drives and wondering what minor changes ripple out to big effect Absolutely Yeah, I think that reaches oh sip calc. Um, this is something from the command line. It's kind of fun Uh sip calc 192 168 dot zero slash 24 slash 22 slash 23 I I have at least one staff member that has everything committed to memory Like he can subnet and tell you the different splits of everything and where the gateways always are He doesn't in his head very very well. I don't So it's handy to have something on a command line in case you wanted to know When someone goes, oh, it's a slash 29 or slash if that is something you don't deal with every day It may I'm obviously I deal with it enough that I don't think about it much But I know there are times when I I may get stumped and I'm like, okay This is handy to have on the command line when you're doing it So a sip calc will just do some calculations tell you if it's a private address space or a public address Because in case you're new it's it's a handy little thing I'm gonna try that one out. I was using ip calc but I don't recommend it necessarily because Depending on the distribution you're using it's a completely different program unrelated on one distro versus another So if I tell you to go install ip calc, you're either going to love it or you'll get the other one I can't remember the other one does um same name different app I think this is probably better the one tom mentioned because yeah, it's up calc So they seem to do the same things essentially, uh, they display a little bit differently So they're not like just the same app, but um, obviously there's some name collisions as j pointed out with the other one So that can sometimes hamper things now. I think that's all we have for the tools. We do have an announcement Oh, we have any yes the bottom of the tools One more that I do want to mention though actually before we get to the announcement This one's easy And this doesn't qualify as a command line tool because I was going to skip it That's why we were thinking we were done But yeah, I kind of went back on that because mem test 86 Is very very important for every with a hardware device because and and this is kind of the reason When you have memory issues on one operating system versus another for example Let's just say you have a server that was running windows server physical server and it was totally fine You got some error messages, but you know, it's windows. So you just kind of cancel those out You don't think about it Then you go to install linux on it and it just won't install or it does install and it just doesn't operate right Linux does not handle memory issues very well at all and a lot of times when I have someone Switching from windows to linux whether it be a laptop a desktop a server doesn't matter. They'll um Come back and say well windows was fine Um, why doesn't linux work? Well, you have bad ram and for some reason the area of ram windows is able to work around that Um, maybe sometimes it doesn't you'll get some error messages, but linux just kind of throws up its hands I recommend running memtest 86 on all pieces of hardware that you acquire used again, whether it be a server desktop laptop Doesn't matter. I would even go as far as to say run it every year. Just just make sure You have no memory issues Because you'd be surprised how many times i've had people complain about linux just to find out they had a hardware problem Specifically with memory, which is a very common one that comes up, especially with used pieces of equipment So yeah memtest 86 is not a command line utility. It's a you know, kind of like a live iso image You can write to a flash drive. Unfortunately, they've gone a little commercial so far. It's still free. It still works They have some paid features now, which I never thought I'd see But it is what it is it works and I use it a lot I highly recommend everyone do that when they have a used piece of equipment So at least you know that you don't have memory issues All right that in very that's important running in hardware troubleshooting is Still a pain nothing yet to do in the cloud servers though. You don't have to run memtest in the cloud servers That's their problem. So Plus one for the cloud servers, but all right now the announcement we wanted to make we want to hear from you That's the announcement. I threw a link that's in the live chat here And if you're listening to the podcast, it's going to be in the show notes and it'll be live on the website We are doing a feedback forum. We want to hear back from you. We would love suggestions Comments questions concerns or just say hello We're putting this together and one of our goals is going to be to do just a q&a episode So if there's enough questions in there, we will summarize all these up and of course We'll be joined by the live people here, which by the way. Thank you There's 150 of you here right now just about So awesome that there's that many of you here, but we'll do some q&a sessions That'll be a future planned One we'll do we want to answer the questions We'll go through them and make sure we're covering the things you want to know about building your home lab and getting started Now there's so many questions and I know some of them may have scrolled by when we do these live streams We do as much as we can to answer and thank you to all the community members that are here That do answer a lot of the questions for people that are asking what me and j are talking about awesome linux tools Yep, and for those of you in the live stream if you're getting any permissions there We will have a fix just bookmark that link try it later today and Be fine. Yeah, okay. We didn't do testing before we me and j tested and I realized I gave him permission So there will be a permission Uh fix that'll be happening as soon as we're done with this Yeah, but it'll be on the website So for those of you that are downloading this podcast and are not listening live you this problem has been solved by the time you hear it Everyone it is listening live check back later. It'll work. Yep. All right. Well. Thank you everyone for joining us Thank you everyone for telling me I have a branch in this problem This is why we you know doing things live can be so much more fun than you know doing it in post Because we're gonna fix it in real time We heard you and I'm gonna go click fixing that link right now So all right. Thanks again everyone and links will be in the show notes. Uh, see you next week Thank you