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.
Force User to Change Password Upon Next Login
Q: When I create a new user in Red Hat, how can I force this user to change their password the first time they log on via ssh? A: Using a few well known commands, we can make sure the user is forced to change...
How To Grep Out Blank Lines In A Text File
Q: I have a large configuration file with a lot of comments and blank lines. When I cat the file I can only see the last seven lines. There are only about sixteen lines that are not commented out or blank. How can I use grep...
Creating IPsec Tunnel Between Two Hosts using openswan
Learn how to create an end to end IPsec tunnel between two hosts using openswan.
Configuring Transaction Signatures (TSIG) on BIND 9
Learn how to configure TSIG keys to secure DNS transfers.
How to configure system proxy settings in Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Here we will examine how to set proxy settings in RHEL 5 or 6. This will also work for centOS 5 and 6 as well as most versions of Fedora. We will cover the following three topics: Setting the proxy via Gnome GUI Setting the...
Block Unwanted Advertisements with a Hosts File on Linux
I surf the web an awful lot, probably slightly more than your average 13 year old geek. I notice that a lot of sites load rather slowly mostly because your waiting on content from outside the specific domain. For example if you go to a...
Extract a Single File From a tar Archive
The tar command is designed to combine multiple files together into a single archive. In this Linux quick tip we will learn to extract a single file from a tarball archive using the tar command. For this example we will use my Pink Floyd mp3...
Grep All Email Addresses from a Text File
Q: I need to use my Linux system to grep email addresses out of a text file. Is there a way I can tell grep to just look for emails? A: You can use regular expressions with grep. If you construct a good regex you...
How to setup SSH Key Authentication - SSH Passwordless Login
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...