Most people getting into cybersecurity eventually hear the same advice: “Install Kali Linux.” Apparently, the path to becoming a security professional now begins with downloading an operating system that looks vaguely intimidating, opening a terminal, and pretending to understand what metasploit does. Of course, every YouTube cybersecurity expert, self-appointed or otherwise, will tell you to install Kali Linux. Because nothing
Category: Linux
A sysadmin’s look at the improbable persistence of BASH in a world increasingly convinced everything must be modernized immediately. The Black Screen That Terrifies Ordinary People Technology has spent much of the last three decades attempting to persuade humanity that computers ought to feel effortless. Tap here. Click there. Swipe gently. If something goes wrong, an agreeable interface appears bearing
I started getting myself re-acquainted with C programming again tonight under Linux using CLion and C Primer Plus by Stephen Prata. And immediately remembered why C has survived while entire generations of “revolutionary” technologies have quietly died behind abandoned GitHub repositories and unpaid cloud invoices. C does not flatter you. It does not tell you you are a “creator.”It does
There is a particular species of lie told by technology tutorials. It usually begins with: “Setting up Git is easy.” No.Boiling an egg is easy. Git setup is a procedural interrogation conducted by Linux, SSH, and GitHub working together like three hostile government agencies refusing to acknowledge each other’s paperwork. The mission sounded simple enough: That was the theory. Reality
There is a certain temptation when learning Linux to immediately build a gigantic home lab with: (Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating quite a bit) And then three days later you realize you can no longer remember which VM broke DNS. So I decided to start smaller. Way effing smaller. Instead of building a fake Fortune 500 data center in my laptop,
Excerpt I was following a Linux networking course and just wanted to run Ubuntu in GNS3. Instead, I spent the evening fixing permissions, ports, storage, virtualization, and my own bad assumptions. Post I was following a Linux course for networks by David Bombal. The plan was simple: You know… a lab. Instead, I ended up learning and debugging the damn
Starting Chapter 7 I’m starting Chapter 7 on Mastering Linux Administration, and this is where things begin to feel different. Up to this point, working in Linux feels contained. You install software, manage files, and run commands on your own machine. Everything stays local and predictable. It feels like you are in control of a single system. But networking changes
Today I was working through Chapter 6 of Mastering Linux Administration by Alexandru Calcatinge and Julian Balog, and it reminded me of something most people never think about. When people say “disk space”, they imagine something simple. Like a big digital warehouse. You put files in.You take files out.The end. Linux politely laughs at this idea. Because under the hood,
While I was watching some CCNA tutorial videos, I noticed something strange. The instructor was clearly speaking, the audio meter was moving, and the volume icon on my Ubuntu laptop proudly claimed it was at 100%. And yet the sound was barely audible. This is not the kind of problem you expect in 2026. We have gigabit internet, cloud computing
Spring break is upon us. So what does a grad student and full-time IT administrator do when escaping the usual cycle of late nights, research papers, production systems, and those mysterious alerts that only happen at 2:17 AM? We game. Because after weeks of debugging networks, writing GIS papers, and explaining (again) that yes, rebooting sometimes fixes things, the only