Tech Stuff - Survival Guides

We forget stuff - frequently. These survival guides are meant as quick and dirty overviews of various open-source software that we use on both Linux and FreeBSD and depending on the software - occasionally on Windows. While some may call this kind of thing a cheat-sheet we prefer the term survival guide since it plays to our sense of drama and in more than a couple of instances was no exaggeration.

If this stuff is useful - print the page and save our bandwidth. If it is not useful - well that's just too bad. Though if we do miss something obvious you could drop us an email.

The general style of each guide is to describe the basic functions - locations, logging, configuration files, basic commands and the occasional weird stuff and then link to more detailed sources where appropriate.

Digital Audio	The beginning of a new section on digital audio - since the field is enormous these pages are a mere splash in the ocean. But they make a nice sound. Equalization. Glossary. Frequencies and harmonics, digital sound primer. And some other stuff even we forget.
Cron	Scheduling a task seems to be a simple enough process - but quickly gets real confusing 'cos of all the features and options. For FreeBSD and Linux (Fedora Core).
Cryptography	Overviews and tutorial material on Cryptography, Authentication, Authorization, Hashes, Digest, MAC, digital signatures and other eye-popping stuff.
FreeBSD Update	Information about upgrading FreeBSD, keeping it up to date using the superb freebsd-update, updating ports and if you are into ruby whether to use ports or RubyGems to keep up to date. We also include some notes on using rsync to keep backups.
Kerberos	Kerberos V. The only network authentication (and authorization) protocol in town. As used in Active Directory (AD). And GSSAPI. I feel a headache coming on.
MySQL	The ever popular MYSQL. Good Database software but operationally a bit confusing. IOHO.
NT LAN Manager	Some information on NT LAN Manager that we collected some years ago for a Samba PDC project. We were trying to understand LAN Manager. Bad mistake.
Postfix	Postfix SMTP Agent. We use in combination with Dovecot as the Mail agent. Includes configuring virtual_mailbox_domains, virtual_alias_domains, TLS, spamassasin, amavis, greylisting, spf, piping mail to scripts and some UCE controls.
sed	Sed is incredibly useful and brutally complex. Some notes on its uses and links to other material on our page introducing regular expressions.
SSL/TLS/X.509	All you never wanted to know about SSL/TLS and X.509 certificates - including generating self-signed certificates with OpenSSL. Gruesome stuff. Take a couple of days off after reading this section.
wxWidgets	We had an 'up close and personal' encounter recently with wxWidgets (2.8.10). Gobs of documentation. Really superb job. However, couldn't find anything on tooltips, menus and context menus (a.k.a. popup menus). Bound to be there. But where? This page was the result.

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