Category: Networking

Save A Web Page As Text

If you’re at all like me, you document all sorts of things and you too might find it handy to know how to save a web page as text. It’s not a complicated task; you can do it in the terminal easily enough. So, if you want to save a web page as text, read on! 

This intro should be rather short. Imagine that!

I don’t have to explain what a web page is. It’s a page (just a page) on a website.

I don’t have to explain what text means. We’ll just be using .txt files.

While this isn’t something I’ve bothered with in a long time, you might find it interesting and helpful. If you’re into keeping notes of things you want to learn more about and remember, you may find saving a web page as text worthwhile.

You can organize the text files however you want and one of the best benefits is that you can perform searches on your local documents easily enough. This might be something that interests you, especially if you’re new and browsing around the web looking for things to learn.

We’ll only be using a couple of tools. We will be using the terminal.

curl:

The first application you’ll need to save a web page as a text file will be the curl application. The curl application is used to transfer a URL. A curl command downloads a file and shows it in your standard output.

If you check the man page, you’ll see:

curl – transfer a URL

See? Exactly as I had said. It’s the correct tool for the job. 

You can also see this article about curl:

Let’s Have a Limited Look at Linux’s cURL Application

html2text:

This should be obvious by the title. It should be made further obvious by the title of this article. This is an application that turns HTML (Hypertext Markup Language – what is used on web pages more often than not) into plain text.

If you check the man page, you’ll see:

html2text – an advanced HTML-to-text converter

Once again, a fine application for the task at hand. You’ll see!

Save A Web Page As Text:

As mentioned above, this is a terminal-based operation. We’re going to save a web page as text, but we’re going to do it in the Linux terminal. More often than not, a terminal can be opened by pressing CTRL + ALT + T on your keyboard.

I’ll give installation instructions for the apt-using distros out there. These packages will be available in your package manager if you’re using any of the major distros. Just adjust these commands to match your needs.

curl:
html2text:

We’re interested only in the -o (output) flag for this application of html2text.

The Process:

The syntax to save a web page as text is simple. It looks like this:

Simply, we’re using the curl application to grab the data, we then send that data through the pipe command where it’s processed by the html2text application.

An example would look like this:

You can, of course, save individual pages as text. Here’s an example:

The terminal output is interesting:

Then, you can use a plain text editor to read (and edit) the text file. You can view it in the terminal with just the cat command. That’d look like this:

Though, it’s probably easier to read the saved file with a decent plain text editor that has a GUI. There’s an abundance of text editors available for Linux, so pick your favorite and use that to read the saved output.

Closure:

Well, if you have ever wanted to save a web page as text, you now know how to do that. This was an article that came not from my notes but from my memory. I used to do this with some regularity but I’ve stopped doing so as of late. I haven’t kept so many new notes lately, though I’m not sure why not.

Anyhow, this is a nice and simple exercise that anyone should be able to follow. If you’re using a different package manager it may take a bit more effort, but it’s not complicated. The packages should be available in all the major distros, or something similar. The curl application will certainly be available and might even be installed by default.

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Monitor Wireless Link Quality

If you’ve ever had issues with your wireless connection, and many of us have, you might have wanted to monitor wireless link quality. This is a good task for an article, so let’s learn together one way to monitor wireless link quality. This will be a pretty easy article to follow.

You need a wireless adapter and wireless connection to follow along with this article. It’s not complicated, but you will need those things. Even if you don’t use wireless often, you might want to learn how to monitor the link’s quality – just in case you’re put in a position where you’re using wireless. It’s better to be prepared!

Wireless connectivity issues have plagued many people. Some of those people will jump to it being a hardware problem, like a driver acting up. They’ll try all sorts of things before checking the link quality. I’d suggest checking link quality early on in the troubleshooting process.

If you don’t know, wireless signal strength is measured in decibel milliwatts (dBm). They’re measured between 0 and -100 dBm. In this case, higher is better. -30 is perfect and -90 is disconnected. In simple terms, -30 is closer to 0. I don’t have a great connection, but it’s adequate. 

We won’t need to install any tools for this exercise. You have everything you need already installed and enabled, or you should. These are fairly basic low-level commands. They’ll be a part of any major distro for regular desktop use.

So, what will we be using?

The watch command:

The watch command is used with other applications, allowing you to monitor the process and to get continually updated information from that command. For example, the following command will watch your memory usage:

If you check the man page (with man watch), you’ll see that this is the correct tool for the job. You’ll also see that it’s not that difficult to learn how to use the watch command.

I’ve not yet written a watch article, but it’s pretty basic. In this case, we’ll introduce the -n flag but that’s just an indicator of frequency. You could simply use the watch command without any flag and it’ll refresh every two seconds. So, there’s that.

If you want to verify that watch is installed before going further, just run this:

The output should match this:

Which is where these sorts of things belong.

By the way, I’ve covered the which command before:

Find A Command’s Binary

You could also use the ‘whereis’ command.

Another Way To Find The Binary For A Specific Command

See? Lots of information is available. 

The cat Command:

We’ll also be using the cat command. The cat command is used to show the text in a file. When used in conjunction with the watch command, you can monitor a file to see if it changes. That’s exactly what we’ll be doing in this article.

Once again, you can check the man page ( man cat) for more information, but doing so will show you that the cat command is described as such:

cat – concatenate files and print on the standard output

The cat command is also useful for linking things together, such as the content from multiple files. We’re just concerned with the standard output (that’s what shows up in your terminal) and printing to said standard output. 

You can verify that cat is installed with:

Of course, the output is:

You can also read:

A Quick Look At The Cat Command

It’s not something you should have to install. Any desktop (or server) is going to include these two commands by default. They’re considered basic building blocks of a POSIX-compliant system. That’s something we all want!

Those are the only two tools you’ll need if you want to …

Monitor Wireless Link Quality:

If the commands mentioned in the intro section weren’t enough of a clue, this is one of those things you do in the terminal. That’s also something your distro came equipped with. Most folks should be able to open their default terminal emulator by pressing CTRL + ALT + T.

With your terminal open, you can check the current status of your wireless connection’s link quality. You simply need to run the following command:

That output is just for a single snapshot in time. If you’re having connectivity issues, you may want to monitor the state of your wireless connection over time. That’s why we use the watch command.

In its basic form, a command to monitor wireless link quality would look like:

That will run the cat /proc/net/wireless command every two seconds and output the results to your terminal (that is standard output). That’s all you need.

Of course, you can change that watch command a bit to change the frequency. You can make it more or less frequent, but the syntax is simple.

A reasonable interval might be every 10 seconds. That looks like this:

Every ten seconds, your system will run the command and output the results to the terminal you used to run said command. It’s quite basic, I’d think. 

While you probably don’t want to do so for this command, you could use decimal values. If you wanted the command to run 5 times every second, your input would be:

Here’s an example of that command. Yes, I made you a video!

The quality of the link is as a percentage. No, I do not know why. If you know why, leave a comment. The noise is measured according to dBm. If you’ve ever heard the expression ‘signal to noise ratio’ this is a good example of this. You want more signal and less noise, so you want a higher signal-to-noise ratio – which is something people often get backward when used conversationally.

This just shows you something you can do with just two basic Linux commands. That’s just two commands that you have installed already and you can use them to monitor wireless link quality. There’s nothing fancy here. There’s nothing advanced here. You can perform this sort of troubleshooting without any additional applications being installed – and you probably should do so if you’re having wireless connectivity issues.

Oh, before I forget, you can exit the watch command by pressing CTRL + C. That’s about all you’ll really need to know.

Closure:

One of the reasons why I wrote this article was because I wanted to show something that looks advanced but isn’t. This isn’t something that requires much. You only need the tools you have installed already. These tools are going to be available on any Linux desktop (and server) you are likely to touch. 

It also seems like a good idea to share how you can monitor wireless link quality in the Linux terminal. It’s something everyone can do and it’s something you can remember easily enough. If you’re having wireless issues, check to ensure that you have a good signal. It’s as basic as checking to make sure the power cord is plugged in and the device is turned on.

Don’t forget that you can sponsor an article. LOL You can do this even without something to promote. It’d pretty much be a donation, but you’d get a cool message and a link to almost anything you want. (If it’s just a donation and a personal thing, you can do so for much cheaper than the listed price.) I’m hoping to turn this sponsorship thing into a thing, meaning no more of the ads folks are used to and block.

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Learn About Your Wireless Connection

Many of us rely on a wireless connection for our connectivity and this is for those who want to learn about your wireless connection. It should be a relatively simple article. Though, if you do not use wireless internet this won’t be very interesting.

Today’s article about your wireless connection will show you how to learn things like the quality of your connection, the transmission power, the frequency you’re using, and other sundry wireless bits. It’s a bit technical, and we will learn about your wireless connection in the terminal, but it’s all good information and not very complicated.

The tools we’ll be using should be installed in all current major distros. For example, we won’t use ifconfig because it is deprecated. We’ll be using the ip command instead. We’ll also be using iwconfig in this article. You shouldn’t need to install anything for this article. All the tools you need should be installed by default.

Side note: The site sure does load fast without ads! I’ll be finding a new ad provider soon enough, I just haven’t done so yet. I may appeal to Google. We shall see, but the site sure is fast! Alas, it generates no income to offset my expenses. So, we will have ads again. It’s going to happen.

As for the tools we’ll be using…

The IP Command:

The first tool we’ll use will be the ip command. As I mentioned above, the ifconfig tool has been deprecated. It is no longer supported and we’ve moved on to bigger and better things. Most major distros will have made this change. For a bit of completeness sake, I’ll include details for the old way.

You can verify that the ip command is available with this command:

If you check the man page, with man ip command, you’ll see that this is the correct tool for the job. The job is what was indicated in the article’s title. Anyhow, the ip command is described like this:

ip – show / manipulate routing, network devices, interfaces and tunnels

We’ll be using the command to identify the name of your wireless connection. It’s easy enough and you can easily follow along.

The IWCONFIG Command:

The iwconfig command is how we’ll be gathering information about your wireless connection. You should find that you don’t have to install anything for this. If you’re using a major distro that’s modern, you’ll almost certainly have iwconfig available. You can confirm that iwconfig is available with this command:

Just like we did above, you can run the man iwconfig command to see that this is the tool for the job. The output should include the following:

In our case, we won’t be doing any configuration – but we will be using this command to learn about the wireless connection. It’s a handy tool, but we’ll just be using it to gather data.

So, let’s get into the actual article itself…

Learn About Your Wireless Connection:

I mentioned above that this is something you do in the terminal. You probably know how to open your terminal by now. If not, you can usually press CTRL + ALT + T to open up your default terminal.

With your terminal now open, you can check your network connections. The purpose of this command is to learn which of your connection names is the correct one for your wireless connection.

If you’re using an older system, and some modern systems still contain the command, you can use the deprecated ifconfig like so:

Scroll through that data to find your wireless connection. It’ll begin with a W. It used to have a nice simple name by default, but times have changed. In my case, it looks like this:

In this case, you can see that the name of my wireless device is wlxe4beed0e5f5c. Unless you’ve renamed them, your wireless connection should start with a W and should be the only connection that starts with a W.

With that information in hand, you’ll next want to learn about your wireless connection with the iwconfig command. The syntax is quite simple:

So, in my case, the command would look like this:

The output would look like this (in my case):

From there, you can see the access point you’re connected to. You can find out the bit rate, frequency, and power management status of the device, and much more. See? Pretty easy.

HINT: If you don’t want all that information, you can always pipe it through grep. That’s pretty simple:

An example output would be:

This is a quick and easy way to learn about your wireless connection. It’s something that’s not too difficult and something everyone can practice to get a little bit more comfortable working in the Linux terminal.

Closure:

Someone asked if I was running out of ideas for articles. I do not believe I am. There’s just so much to write about and so many things that are worth covering. Today we’re learning about your wireless connection. Tomorrow we’ll be on to something else. And that’s okay… 

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Monitor Your Wi-Fi In Linux

If you use a wireless connection on your computer, or wi-fi for short, you might want to monitor your wi-fi. This is a simple task in the terminal and won’t take too long to learn. So, if you’ve ever wanted to monitor your wi-fi, this is the article for you!

There’s more to your wireless connection than just the throughput. There are things like link quality and signal strength that might interest you. It doesn’t stop there, there are all sorts of other bits of information you can learn if you decide to monitor your wi-fi in Linux.

I’ve written a few similar articles, each using a different technology. If you’re interested in those articles, click one of the following links:

Visualize Your Network Traffic With ‘darkstat’
‘vnStat’ A Tool For Monitoring Your Bandwidth Usage
Monitor Bandwidth In Real Time
Monitor Bandwidth With nload

Those are all about monitoring bandwidth and your network connection speed. They’re all fit for purpose, but this article covers wavemon, which is quite different and more specifically about monitoring your wi-fi connection as a whole. This isn’t very complicated or anything. You’ve got this!

This will be done in the terminal, so you might as well prepare yourself for that. So many of my articles do indeed require an open terminal.

wavemon:

The tool we’ll be using is known as wavemon. Like most of these articles, it’s another tool that’s fit for purpose. We want to monitor the waves, radio waves that is. This is one of the tools for the job. In fact, you’ll find the man page describes wavemon like so:

wavemon – a wireless network monitor

To install wavemon, we’ll need an open terminal. You can frequently just press CTRL + ALT + T to open your default terminal emulator. Give that a go. If it doesn’t work you can find the shortcut in your application menu.

With your terminal now open, we need to install wavemon.

Debian/Ubuntu/etc:

RHEL/CentOS:

Arch/Manjaro/etc:

Fedora:

I think I have all of those correct. If not, please leave a comment down below so that I can fix it. If you’d like to add the code to install wavemon on other distros, please leave a comment below. I’m pretty good at getting back to commentators and tend to be quick at fixing articles.

Anyhow, wavemon is the tool you’ll want to use to monitor your wi-fi!

Monitor Your Wi-Fi In Linux:

Leave your terminal open from the installation phase.

This section of the article will be nice and quick. You don’t need to do anything else besides run the command. You don’t even need elevated permissions (such as sudo) for this.

With your terminal open, just enter the following command:

You’ll get a handy output (it may help to resize your terminal for this one) that’s full of information. An example of that output would be this:

using wavemon to monitor wi-fi in the Linux terminal.
It’s fairly easy to understand the output from the wavemon command.

I can’t get F1 to do anything, but F2shows a histograph.

If you do start wavemon with sudo, you can scan for wireless networks with the F3 button.

You can change some settings with F7 if you want.

The F10 button should quit the program. 

If that doesn’t work, CTRL + C will exit wavemon.

But, you can see how much data you’ve received (during this session) and how much data you’ve sent (during this session). It’s all pretty basic stuff and wavemon is a nice and easy way to monitor your wi-fi in Linux.

Closure:

Well, that’s one way to monitor your wi-fi in Linux. If you use a wireless connection and want more information about that connection, wavemon is an acceptable tool for the job. There are certainly other tools out there and this is just one of them. It’s an easy tool to use and I find it’s familiar enough for anyone to understand with relative ease.

I did say that this would be a fairly easy article. It is indeed a fairly easy article! This is one of those things you can learn in just a few minutes. You never know when this information will come in handy. Then again, you might just be curious and want to know this information. You can customize it a bit but I didn’t need to do so.

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Block A Specific Port In Linux Mint

If you’re using Linux Mint, you’ll find you have ufw already installed which means it’s easy to block a specific port in Linux Mint! I’ll explain how to do that in this article and do what I can to make it easy enough for a new Linux user to follow. If this interests you, read on!

You might want to block a port for all sorts of reasons. If you’re open to the public web via your router, you might find bots hammering at the default ports (such as 22 for SSH) trying to find the login credentials, even if none exist. This is unnecessary traffic and can cause the system to slow down if it’s overwhelmed with connection requests.

Also, Linux uses a lot of ports. There are a bunch that are reserved, for example. You can also designate your ports for many things. I’ve written articles about ports before, so here’s some light reading material:

How To: Check If A Specific Port Is Open
How To: Scan A Remote Host For Open Ports
Find Out What Process Is Listening On A Specific Port
Prevent Brute-Force SSH Attacks With fail2ban

About Ports:

Now, I think I’ll let an AI tell you what a port is in Linux.

A Linux port is a virtual concept that helps access different services within a network. A port is a 16-bit integer ranging from 0 to 65535 with no physical existence.

A port acts as a communication endpoint for identifying a given process or application on the Linux operating system. A port is a 16-bit (o to 65535) number that differentiates a single application from others on various end systems.

As the blurb says, these are virtual ports. They’re not like the physical ports on your router, or anything like that. They’re used for communication and sending traffic to a specific port is asking for traffic on that port. 

If you have nmap installed, you could run nmap localhost to find out which ports are open on your computer. You probably should run that command (you’ll need to install nmap with sudo apt install nmap before you can run this command in Linux Mint). If the port isn’t open, then you don’t need to block that specific port.

UFW:

Linux Mint comes with ‘ufw’ already installed. It is not enabled by default, however. It’s good that it comes installed, which means it’s almost ready for use and you only need to enable ufw for it to be of use. If you don’t know what ufw is, you can check the man page with man ufw to learn more. For simplicity’s sake, you’ll find that ufw is described as:

ufw – program for managing a netfilter firewall

We will be using ufw to block a specific port in Linux Mint. You’ll learn that ufw stands for “Uncomplicated Firewall” and is a frontend for iptables. You can do anything with iptables that you can with ufw, but ufw is much easier for a new Linux Mint user. It doesn’t need to be complicated, as you’ll see in this article.

Use UFW To Block A Specific Port In Linux Mint:

While there is a GUI front-end for ufw, we won’t be using that. Instead, we’ll just use the installed terminal and ufw. As you’re using Linux Mint, you can open your default terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T.

With your terminal now open, we first need to enable ufw because ufw is not enabled by default. To enable ufw, run the following command:

That will enable ufw on system startup. That command should output something that looks like this:

You can later disable ufw if you find you no longer wish to use it. That command would look like this:

Now, to block a specific port in Linux Mint with ufw, the syntax would be easy enough to figure out. It just looks like this:

If you want to block the default SSH port (port 22) then you can do that like so:

If you change your mind at a later date, the command to undo this would be:

All you need to do is remember ‘deny’ and ‘allow’ and that ufw commands require elevated permissions which means you need to use sudo. If you can remember that, you can block and unblock specific ports in Linux Mint!

Closure:

Yes, this article is about blocking a specific port in Linux Mint with the ufw command, but it applies to many other distros. I just happened to be using Linux Mint when I wrote the article and didn’t want to test on other systems before smashing the schedule button. So, I wrote it specifically for Linux Mint. This will likely be an accurate tutorial for Ubuntu, the official Ubuntu flavors, other Ubuntu derivatives, and maybe Debian. I’m not sure about Debian.

And now you know…

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