Yeah, those guys at Ubuntu have a good sense of humor.  Well, anyway, I'm getting back into Linux and doing an install tonight.  It's been a few years since I delved into Linux.  Just wondering how many Linux users we have here and looking for tips on good software for it.

I have used the Linux Mint release 18.1 (Xenial Serena) off and on for 1-2 years.  I loaded it on a spare HDD for an old XP laptop due to security concerns using XP past EOL.  Very easy to load and setup and it worked great and I felt safer.  But all I really used it for was web browsing (Firefox, chrome) and I think I was using some open office or something that was fine for documents and spreadsheets.  Not sure if it still has VI editor...

I just had to get back in the Unix mindset because it's been about 30+ years since I was using BSD.

1 hour ago, leahcim said:

Not sure if it still has VI editor...

Neither vi or EMACS are installed, but they are available, if you are a glutton for punishment. 

I opened a command prompt in BB and typed in vi and it launched some kind of terminal emulator.

I loved the cryptic vi commands, and it was actually pretty powerful editor for the 80s

15 minutes ago, leahcim said:

I loved the cryptic vi commands, and it was actually pretty powerful editor for the 80s

I was actually really good at using it, somewhat brilliant at formatting complex tables.  The funny thing is, there was nothing actually visual about it, you had to imagine what it would look like.  If only I realized that what we did in vi was the precursor to HTML, I would have gone into web development. 

lol, 75 views and only one response.

I don't want to disappoint anyone, so here's a beaver for ya.

Wait...I though Bionic Beaver meant something TOTALLY different...

3 minutes ago, Displaced Texan said:

Wait...I though Bionic Beaver meant something TOTALLY different...

Jamie Sommers?

Dabbled in Linux before, starting to practice with it again for work.

Will look at BB for a home install.

 

 

1 minute ago, DirtyDigz said:

Will look at BB for a home install.

The install was super easy.  Downloaded the ISO, used a utility called Rufus to make a bootable USB stick.  Man, I really love how Linux handles hardware on the fly.

It's been over 20 years since I used Unix on a daily basis.  Not only do I feel old now, but I also feel stupid because I forgot almost everything except some basic command line stuff.

I'm looking for a new job and being predominantly a Microsoft/.NET guy I setup an Ubuntu 18.10 vm few weeks ago so I could familiarize myself with the LAMP world.  What a pain in the ass to get everything working correctly "out of the box".

I can help for any Linux-related questions around here.

11 minutes ago, Mossy500 said:

I can help for any Linux-related questions around here.

Have you ever set up a linux box as a dedicated firewall?  I have a couple of old PCs laying around and now thinking that might be fun.

1 hour ago, Scorpio64 said:

Have you ever set up a linux box as a dedicated firewall?  I have a couple of old PCs laying around and now thinking that might be fun.

I do, in fact, that's primarily the reason for me jumping over to the Linux side of things (from Windows). I used to run this Internet cafe/gaming shop and got tired of having my WinGate (!) gateway getting DoS'd all the time. Hence the jump to Linux.

In those times, the built-in ipchains program helped me configure the Linux gateway/firewall as my main route to the Internet. Since then, ipchains has been renamed to iptables, and most recently that has been replaced by 'firewalld' (at least on Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and it's clones like the CentOS). 

It is very tedious, however, you are able to fine-tune your firewall rulesets to your liking, with basics such as port blocking, allowing/blocking IP addresses to go in/out your local area network, specifying protocols to allow/block and doing NAT for your hosts sitting behind your Linux firewall.

Old PCs are always a good way to practice Linux on, just make sure you set it up without the complete GUI and just have the fundamentals installed. By default, iptables/firewalld should be available on newer versions of Fedora/RHEL/CentOS. I'm not well-versed in Ubuntu but I would imagine they'd still have iptables by default.

iptables - https://www.netfilter.org/

firewalld - https://firewalld.org/

As always, Google is your friend (also feel free to ask here).

2 hours ago, tomk62 said:

I'm looking for a new job and being predominantly a Microsoft/.NET guy I setup an Ubuntu 18.10 vm few weeks ago so I could familiarize myself with the LAMP world.  What a pain in the ass to get everything working correctly "out of the box".

What exactly did you need help with regarding LAMP?

1 hour ago, Scorpio64 said:

Have you ever set up a linux box as a dedicated firewall?  I have a couple of old PCs laying around and now thinking that might be fun.

Yeah, monowall, smoothwall, , Ipcop. pfSense is a popular one now.  Have used RH, Debian, Slack, Gentoo, etc. Since 1995. Slack was a stack of floppy images downloaded from finland. Used RH since 1.0, now use CentOS for a number of work related things and servers. Ubuntu is OK, but am very used to Debian, so I usually use that as an alternate.

For many years I used various linuxii and I don't know how many window managers as my primary desktop, mostly on old castoff laptops. I have one left running Debian 9 with xFCE. It is my home ssh/VPN gateway.

Lots of great Linux careers out there, particularly in cloud computing, OpenStack, etc. IBM is buying the rest of Red Hat-they owned a chunk of it for long while now--

8 minutes ago, Mossy500 said:

I do, in fact, that's primarily the reason for me jumping over to the Linux side of things (from Windows). I used to run this Internet cafe/gaming shop and got tired of having my WinGate (!) gateway getting DoS'd all the time. Hence the jump to Linux.

In those times, the built-in ipchains program helped me configure the Linux gateway/firewall as my main route to the Internet. Since then, ipchains has been renamed to iptables, and most recently that has been replaced by 'firewalld' (at least on Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and it's clones like the CentOS). 

It is very tedious, however, you are able to fine-tune your firewall rulesets to your liking, with basics such as port blocking, allowing/blocking IP addresses to go in/out your local area network, specifying protocols to allow/block and doing NAT for your hosts sitting behind your Linux firewall.

Old PCs are always a good way to practice Linux on, just make sure you set it up without the complete GUI and just have the fundamentals installed. By default, iptables/firewalld should be available on newer versions of Fedora/RHEL/CentOS. I'm not well-versed in Ubuntu but I would imagine they'd still have iptables by default.

iptables - https://www.netfilter.org/

firewalld - https://firewalld.org/

As always, Google is your friend (also feel free to ask here).

What exactly did you need help with regarding LAMP?

Eh. I still use a variation of an iptables-save script I had from the 2.4 days as a basis for rulesets. fw-cmd and some other wrappers make it easier. Very simple to set up a home fw/ipsec/ssh box, as long as your ISP doesn't block that inbound

I'm a computer guy and have done Linux. But I looked at this thread because I thought it was about sex dolls.

55 minutes ago, Mossy500 said:

It is very tedious, however, you are able to fine-tune your firewall rulesets to your liking, with basics such as port blocking, allowing/blocking IP addresses to go in/out your local area network, specifying protocols to allow/block and doing NAT for your hosts sitting behind your Linux firewall.

I used to do all that stuff, but have been out of the game for about 10 years.  My main thing was setting up networks and securing them.  People hated me because I blocked everything that was not work related.

I only messed around with a software (Windows 2K) based gateway/firewall once.  Most of my experience was with setting up routers, security appliances and VPNs.  It was tedious indeed, but I loved doing it.

The biggest learning curve for me will be the software and possibly how it interacts with the OS.  I'm hoping that once I'm good with that, all the networking stuff will come back naturally.

I think I'm going to start out with ClearOS or IPCop.

 

If someone wants to set up a Linux based firewall (and nothing else) take a look at MikroTik router running RouterOS.

A full suite of features in one small box and not expensive.

 

On 1/10/2019 at 1:18 PM, Mossy500 said:

What exactly did you need help with regarding LAMP?

I had issues getting MySQL and then phpmyadmin running.  Apparently it installs with --initialize-insecure so there is no root password, which I need to assign.  Nothing I try to set the password works.  https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/data-directory-initialization-mysqld.html

"2018-12-14T15:26:43.227565Z 1 [Warning] root@localhost is created with an empty password ! Please consider switching off the --initialize-insecure option."

I gave up trying to deal with the root user and just created a new user that had full privileges.  I could not find one straight-forward piece of documentation I could follow step by step on how to just install and be up and running right out of the box.

On 1/10/2019 at 1:18 PM, Mossy500 said:

 

What exactly did you need help with regarding LAMP?