Meta: The State Of Linux-Tips #11

Today’s article is yet another meta article, in which I discuss the state of Linux-Tips. It’s basically an easy day for me and an article that lets you know how the site is progressing. It’s generally an easy article to write and I appreciate that.

This is a pretty long article. Longer than most. I do encourage folks to read it all, but I doubt that’ll change anything. 🙂 

As folks may know, I pay a lot of attention to the site’s statistics and those statistics influence how I do things. I try to optimize the site, as best as I can, for the viewer. For example, the day this article will be published is on a Saturday. That’s the day I consistently get the least amount of traffic. So, that’s the day I’ll cover the state of Linux tips.

I’ve actually been wanting to write this article for a while. I’m really excited about some of the changes going on, especially now that Google has taken me out of the dog house for accepting a paid article. Yes, Google, I learned a lesson!

While you might not like that I optimize for Google, that’s where I get the majority of my traffic. I don’t get squat from other search engines, but Google loves my site! For a blog, I’m doing VERY WELL in the traffic growth department. We’ll give you some details below.

So, let’s just jump into the meta stuff and see where that goes.

The State Of Linux-Tips #11:

Let’s just get this started by sharing this:

Oh my! The site’s traffic is increasing rapidly. For example, in the past 28 days (the easiest stats for this), the site has shown up in 227,000 searches. Out of all those, nearly 4,000 people have clicked on those search results and visited Linux-Tips! (That’s actually a good percentage.)

Last month, the month of September, was the first time I’ve exceeded 10 GB of traffic. Now, the site’s mostly text with almost no images and almost no videos. That’s a lot of traffic, and it took  over 9,000 unique visitors to reach that level.

To put that into some contrast, in January of this year I had a total of 6,400 unique visitors. 

Also, in May I hit 7,800 visitors – but then Google threw me into the doghouse for the paid article. In June and July, I got about 7,200 unique visitors. In September, those visitors would visit 14,900 times! It’s amazing how fast the site is growing now that it’s out of the doghouse.

I should also mention that I was getting, in the previous 28 days as a running total, no more than 3,200 visits from Google. In less than the past month, that running total is what is represented by the 4,000 clicks mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago. Google considers this a ‘high traffic site’.

My most popular pages are:

How To: Disable Sleep And Hibernation on Ubuntu Server
How To: Restart TeamViewer From The Terminal
Let’s Learn How To Change The Default Terminal

Previously, the ScreenFetch vs Neofetch was the most popular article, and today it continues to get the most search results. Direct visits can sometimes outnumber that, so that’s why the stat might look a little weird.

I still use a CDN, a Content Delivery Network, for a variety of reasons. The biggest reason is that it means the site loads faster for people around the globe. When you load the site, you’re getting a cached result from a server somewhere near you, instead of needing to access my server directly.

The CDN recently stopped a DDoS attack. There was a CDN free tier but I am no longer in a position where the site fits the free tier, so it costs me even more money. As far as I know, it’s only useful for WordPress sites that use LiteSpeed as the server. That fits this site, so I use it. It works brilliantly, but I now use enough traffic to also have to pay for the CDN service.

It’s worth every penny, given how the site didn’t stumble in the slightest during the attacks. So far, donations only add up to like $10 USD. I do appreciate them and put the money towards hosting and the CDN. There aren’t any other real expenses. Ad revenue does help.

attempted DDoS attack
They gave up not long after, or so that’s what it appears to be. Good… It wasn’t working.

The site’s busiest days are Tuesday through Thursday. I’m not sure why Monday isn’t all that busy? Maybe folks encounter the problem on Monday  and finally find my site on Tuesday? I really don’t know. I do know that I get a lot of traffic from within corporate networks, so that’s professionals searching the site – or entertaining themselves while they should be working.

There really aren’t that many newsletter subscribers. I’m thinking about making it pop up a notice when people visit, but that seems like it might be annoying. On the other hand, it’d likely result in more folks subscribing. Do you find those newsletter popups annoying? Do you sometimes see them and decide to enter your email? I know I do, but I’m sympathetic to others running websites.

From watching the way people work through the site, few scroll down far enough to actually see the newsletter. Putting it at the top seems like a worse idea than a popup. If you have any thoughts on the matter, feel free to leave a comment. I could use some input.

Anyhow…

Closure:

As you can tell, I’m pretty happy about the growth. Not a whole lot of folks click ads, so the site really isn’t making much of anything for ad revenue, but it does make a little. Then again, money wasn’t really the point. I do want the site to at least break even, but I dunno if it’ll ever do that. That’s all I really care about. I don’t want to make money, I have enough. I do want the site to break even, just as a matter of principle. 

Either way, this is the most excited I’ve ever been about a meta article. Things are going great, according to all the stats I keep. As for the stats, don’t worry, I couldn’t single anyone out if I tried. I don’t store any personal information because it just seems like the right thing to do. Your privacy is reasonably assured when you visit. I too value my online privacy – sometimes. Other times I’m an open book, but I like to pick when and where that happens!

Also, in case anyone is confused… I do store any information you give me. But, I only keep what I need to make the site work. I figure if I don’t store information, I can’t lose the information. I obviously store your email address if you sign up for the newsletter or register for the site. It’d be pretty hard for those things to function without that.

The rest of it is information I really don’t care about and don’t care to keep. If you give me your address so that I can send you something, you can be certain that I deleted it afterwards ’cause I don’t want to be in charge of securing that securely.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

How To: Show An SSH Banner

Today’s article is another SSH article, and it will show you how to show an SSH banner. What’s an SSH banner? It’s a message shown when someone logs into the computer via SSH. This can include warning messages, reminders that they’re being logged, etc…

Why would you want to do this? Well, you can include specific directions in there. You can also do so for regulatory compliance, should you be obligated to warn people that you’re storing their information. Some of the messages are quite formal, but you can write your own.

Once again, SSH stands for ‘Secure Shell’. It’s a way to remotely login and use a remote device. It’s usually done in pure text, terminal mode. You can actually forward x11 and control some graphical applications. That’s easy enough and quite a load of fun.

I’ve actually written many SSH articles. Feel free to peruse them at your leisure. If you have questions about SSH, odds are good that I’ve covered them already. I think SSH is a brilliant tool and so quite a few articles cover the many things you can do with SSH.

I find SSH to be a useful, brilliant tool even when it’s just me in my house. As I also manage some remote stuff and SSH beats flying across the world just to update a computer. The good news is that I’ll eventually run out of SSH article ideas!

With the above in mind, let’s just jump into the article…

Show An SSH Banner:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

Note: We’ll be using ‘nano‘ in this article. Click that link to learn more.

With your terminal now open, it’s time to set up an SSH banner. To start with, we’ll create the banner. You’ll need to start with creating a file like so:

With your banner file open (and you can name it anything, or you can even place it anywhere), just enter the text you want people to see when they login via SSH. You can make it anything you want, but I tend to keep it brief. Some folks go for the giant ASCII banner types, but I like to keep it simple.

When you’re done writing your banner, you need to save it. To save it in nano, you just press CTRL + X, then Y, and then ENTER.

Now, you need to edit your SSH configuration. To do that you use:

Scroll down until you see the following:

Edit that line to read:

If you stored your banner in a different location or a different file name, you must also change the path to suit. Then, save your SSH configuration by pressing CTRL + X, then Y, and then ENTER.

Your next step will be to restart SSH. That command is nice and simple:

Next, login again with SSH and you should see your new SSH banner! It’s really that simple. If you don’t see it, make sure to double check because all those steps are necessary.

Closure:

And there you have it. You have another article! This one has shown you how to show an SSH banner. It’s not terribly difficult. It’s also potentially useful. Users are effectively agreeing to the terms you set in them, which may be legally binding. Enjoy your new SSH banner and, if it’s not in a professional setting, feel free to be creative with it!

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

Use Your Hostname With SSH Instead Of Your IP Address – In Ubuntu

Today’s article will show you how to use your hostname with SSH instead of your IP address. This should actually be a very short article, like really short. We’re only using Ubuntu for this example, because it consistently uses the .local for your hostname. This will work with any distro that does that.

If you don’t know what SSH is, it’s ‘Secure Shell’ and is a way of connecting to remote computers. I’ve written many articles about SSH. Go ahead. Click that link and have a browse around. This will be a short article because I’ve already written a good amount of material. I’m trusting you to search for things you don’t already know.

You’re also going to need to know your hostname. To do that, read this article:

What is my Hostname in Linux?

You’ll need that hostname information because that’s how you’ll be using your hostname with SSH. I’m going to assume you already know the IP address, because that’s what you’d have been using for SSH instead of using your host name this entire time.

With all that in mind, let’s just get to it…

Use Your Hostname With SSH:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

Now, again, I’m going to assume you know the IP address and that’s how you’ve been connecting to the device with SSH. I’m going to assume that you read the above link, learning how to find your hostname.

So, with that in mind, login to your remote Ubuntu (or official Ubuntu flavors) computer using your IP address. Next, find your hostname. You can just use the hostname command, to make it easier.

Now that you have your hostname, add .local to it. This works because it’s on your local network. If you had a VPS somewhere, you’d just use the FQDN (like example.com) to connect. Then, with that hostname information in hand, exit your SSH session with exit and try logging in with the hostname.

So, if your computer was called ‘mydevice’ you would connect to it with:

That’s it. Just put your hostname in front of .local and you should be able to use your hostname with SSH. This will work for other distros, of course. However, I’ve only verified it with official Ubuntu flavors. So, that’s the caveat should you try this with other distros.

Closure:

See? I told you that this would be a short article. It really doesn’t need to be longer and I’ve padded it more than enough. Seriously, this one could have been so much shorter!

This site could really use a better author and an editor! Alas, you get what you get and that’s just me at the moment. Do feel free to offer to help. I have thought about doing more of these fairly short articles, as there are some great subjects that really don’t need an 800+ word article.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

Check System Information With uname

In today’s article, we’re going to show you how to check system information with uname. This is a pretty handy command to have in your toolbox, and it’s really simple to use.

Once again, I’ll probably not cover every option, but only show you the commands I think you’ll find most useful. This should be both quick and easy enough for anyone to understand. Even a rank beginner should be able to follow along.

If you’ve ever asked a question on a forum, you may have been asked to show the output of the ‘uname -a‘ command. That’s a fine generic command to run, but you don’t have to output all that information. This could come in handy when you’re scripting and only need some of the information.

We’ll be using the uname command, as you might have guessed. According to the man page, the command defines itself as:

uname – print system information

That’s a pretty accurate definition and, sure enough, matches the headline and the introductory paragraph. Like I said, we’ll be collecting system information with uname. There’s not much more to it, so let’s just jump into the article.

Check System Information with uname:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

In it’s basic usage, the uname command can be run without any modifiers at all. To do so, simply type the following to get the system’s name:

The output of that will almost certainly just say ‘Linux’. Handy! 

Ah, but the uname command can do so much more. Want to know if you’re using 32 or 64 bit, the architecture? Easy enough, just use:

Would you like to use uname to check your kernel version? Try this command:

If you want to know your kernel release, that is the specific release you’re using at the moment, you need the -r flag. Try this:

Want to know the name of the network? Amazingly enough, that would require you using the -n flag. So it looks like:

Finally, as I mentioned in the intro, there’s the granddaddy of uname commands, which will output all the information you really need. Sure enough,  it’s accomplished with the -a flag:

As you can see, the flags mostly make sense for this command. Because of this, they should be easy to remember when you need to recall system information with the uname command. To see the complete manual, use the man uname command.

Closure:

Well, that’s yet another article. I hope you liked reading it as much as I enjoy typing these silly things out. It’s probably time to do a meta article soon – as I’m really itching to do so. There have been some pretty good changes. So, that’ll be a fun article to write and I may do so soon.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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