A strange rule seems to dictate that the most useless products and services have the most annoying online advertising. Columnist Charly blocks the garish advertising for all computers on his network centrally with the Pi-hole tool, which is not only for Raspberry Pi devices.

Sys admin Charly does not tend toward hostilities, but he has huge problems with mosquitoes. Despite this, he does make an exception for the Mosquitto message broker.

When human error stumps the Debian package manager, familiar tools like apt-get, aptitude, and dpkg can help restore functionality.

Httpstat is a special stopwatch you can use to discover how long web servers take to serve up a static or dynamic HTML page. Visible performance lags indicate optimization potential for the server.

Running a security audit periodically on your system lets you spot unexpected changes and possible weak points.

It goes against the economic rationale to assume that commercial search engines have the best interests of users at heart when it comes to data protection and use. Sys admin Charly has found an alternative.

Paperwork was developed to manage the paperless office – a dream as old as desktop PCs.

The new networkd component of the systemd project supports basic network configuration. Despite its early stage of development, one thing is clear: This is a daemon with brains.

Recently, sys admin Charly was faced with the task of synchronizing a directory on a server with two NFS-mounted clients. He wanted the whole thing to happen quickly and to be easily manageable, which ruled out DRBD and GlusterFS.

Sunflower is a highly configurable graphical file manager with two windows that implement an unusual concept by trying to integrate the command line with the file manager.