Month: January 2010

Network Emulation with Linux Netem

Back in the day, I used an open source program called NistNET to emulate a WAN for my company’s network test lab on a linux machine.  I was able to solve a multitude of issues and test our applications in a WAN environment with this product.  Unfortunately, NistNET is no longer maintained, and until recently […]

SSH Tunnelling (aka Poor Man’s VPN)

Tunnelling of TCP traffic can be performed from the ssh command on Linux or with Putty on Windows, and can be thought of as a poor man’s VPN.  A VPN is a virtual private network, or a method of using a public network such as the internet to  securely transmit data via an encrypted “tunnel”. […]

Boot Sector Management

As promised, tonight we explore boot sector management on X86 style hardware.  Anyone who works with PC hardware long enough, and especially those using linux as primary or secondary OS in a dual boot configuration will find this information valuable. The system boot sector on x86 style hardware is crucial to being able to boot […]

Disk and Partition Imaging using dd

Linux provides an abundance of advanced command line tools to manage and modify just about anything on your system.  Today we will explore the use of dd, the primary tool on linux for creating and restoring disk images, among other things. The dd (diskdump) on Linux can be used to backup an entire disk or […]

Hello, world!

Welcome to LinuxPowerUser.com!  With this blog, I intend to publish my experiences using Linux as a desktop and server operating system.  I have been using Linux since 1995 and around 2000 I completely replaced Windows with it as my primary personal computing environment. I use linux for personal productivity, gaming, multimedia, programming, and as a […]