#realterm

Good afternoon, gentle readers! Today I will wrap up my discussion of Linux. See, wasn't that quick and painless? Today will simply be a quick rundown of some of the tools that I use in Linux to communicate and manipulate my network environment. As always, go with what you know! I will include Windows alternatives as I am aware of them. MacOS users, please feel free to chime in with Mac alternatives if you know of them too!

SSH: This is one of the first things I set up. This allows me remote access to my server. Even though it's across the room, I'm lazy and don't like constantly getting up and down to configure stuff. You can install this on most Linux distros by installing open-ssh or searching for it on your graphical package manager.

Once you've gotten ssh installed and configured to your liking you can connect remotely to your server by opening a terminal window and typing:

ssh [user]@[IP address or domain name]

Enter your credentials when prompted and you're in!

For Windows PCs WinSCP should provide similar functionality and with the correct credentials you should see the terminal on your server!

Minicom: this program is what's called a terminal emulator. It is useful for connecting to switches with a COM link or null modem. We'll come back and explore this another time in more detail! A Windows alternatives would be RealTerm.

VirtualBox: This software is widely available on most platforms. This can be run locally or remotely on your server in "headless" mode. I primarily use this to test features and programs to ensure compatibility before doing a live install, and to extend functionality of my server.

PFSense: This is an operating system that functions as a UTM (Unified Threat Management) system. This sits on the edge of my network between my router, switches, and my modem. Some have said they see increased throughput running PFSense, however I'm running it for the additional level of control and monitoring that it provides -- any additional throughput is a bonus.

Yakuake: This is more preference than convenience but Yakuake is a drop-down terminal (quake-style).  I prefer this style terminal because with a press of a key I can call and then hide the terminal window, this is useful when I’m making changes to programs or inputting commands from another website.

Qreator: This is a nifty program that allows you to create custom QR codes.  Not sure that we’ll ever cover this in great detail, but a useful tool all the same.

GIMP: Stands for the Gnu Image Manipulation Program, this is an open source alternative to Photoshop, but be forewarned it is not Photoshop.  Don’t make the mistake and assume that it will work exactly the same.  This is a great program capable of light image editing.  Again, probably beyond the scope of this blog, but who knows?

Thank you for tagging along!  Next time we will cover something much more interesting, I promise!  In the mean time, explore on!