Steven Vona is a Linux administrator whose passion for technology extends beyond the day to day and into a love of teaching his skills to others. Steven is trained and certified in multiple technologies, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, VMWare and Cybersecurity, and has over 16 years of experience working in both the public and private sectors. Because Steven did not complete a traditional educational path, he is mostly self-taught and a strong believer in learning by experimentation. Steven began to teach himself programming at age 12 and ran a BBS in 1988; when teaching, he encourages others to try different solutions and learn from their mistakes and successes. Outside of technology, Steven is an animal lover and an avid photographer who enjoys exploring and photographing his native city, Philadelphia.
How to setup SSH Key Authentication
Learn how to generate and publish SSH key pairs to log into remote systems.
Changing a Linux Users Password in One Line Command
I have a group of users that have the same account on a few of my Linux systems. They seem to forget their passwords at least once every two months and like to blame my password complexity rules. I am tasked every so often with changing…
Basics of iptables – Opening ports on linux firewalls
Learn the basics of iptables including starting, stopping, opening ports and default policy rules.
Make GMail your Default EMail in Chrome / Linux
I have recently starting using google’s chrome browser on my Fedora 14 box and I love it. The browser leaves plenty of real estate for websites, it’s super fast and I love to be able to sync my bookmarks (although I have been doing this…
How to chroot users in SFTP server
I am an active member in quite a few linux online communities and I see this question asked repeatedly by users new to SFTP. First let’s start off with a short explanation of what SFTP is, and how it is different from FTPS. SFTP vs…
Configuring an NTP server in Red Hat
The NTP (Network Time Protocol RFC-1305) is a widely used Internet time protocol on most Linux systems. This service runs in the background and periodically gets time updates from one or more servers. Many large networks use NTP to ensure accurate log file timestamps and often deploy…
Using perl and expect to automate SSH connections.
Using perl to automate ssh login using Net::SSH::Expect module. This tutorial assumes you are using Red Hat or a Red Hat based distro (Centos, Fedora). The script itself will work on any operating system, but installing perl and modules steps may differ from OS to…
How to install perl modules with CPAN (perl-cpan)
Learn how to install, configure and install perl modules using CPAN from the command line on Linux.
Forcing Password Complexity in Red Hat
This article will help ensure your users are meeting password complexity requirements set by your organization. We will show you how to force password complexity for normal users on Red Hat 6 systems. This should also work on other Red Hat based systems like Fedora…
Using Filenames with Spaces or Special Characters in Linux
Learn how to deal with filenames that contain spaces and special characters in Linux by wrapping them in quotes or escaping them.