Windows Software Update Services provides a way for Windows sysadmins to control the distribution of updates to windows computers. It also helps to save a lot of bandwidth if you don’t have a superfast internet connection. Unfortunately many think that it is easy to setup and maintain. On newer version of Windows Server it is easy to setup but it needs a lot of care and feeding. I you want to run WSUS you will have to run the “Server Cleanup Wizard” at least once a month, or run Invoke-WSUSCleanup in a scheduled task. If you don’t lots of frustration awaits after a few months. Read more

Before you post or share links on social media do all of us a favour and quickly fact check for fake news. URLs similar to newatlastsa.online is also a giveaway. In fact I would regard anything ending in .online or .info somewhat suspect.

Use the following command to get a list of files sorted from large to small on your unix machine. du -ak |sort -rn |less If you want the output to be more “human” readable use: du -ah |sort -rh|less This is useful if you want to cleanup your files, or when a disk is filling up.

Most of us get irritated by Facebook’s news feed at some stage of our lives. You can take some control back by installing Social Fixer

If you run a so called “New Generation Firewall” it will probably have an IDS/IPS system that scans all traffic. This eats a lot of CPU and slows down your firewall. There are lots of reliable lists (blocklists) of IP addresses out there that you can use to drop traffic from the bad guys before scanning, saving lots of CPU and increasing your throughput. Research the lists you plan to use, here is a good place to start your research: FireHOL IP Lists. Make sure the listing and delisting policies of a list works for you. Read more

To make your own soap is really easy and you know exactly what is in it, unlike the stuff you buy at the store. Homemade soap is often much higher quality than store bought. Here is two links that will get you started. http://soapcalc.net/ https://www.thesage.com/index.html Run all soap recipes through one of the lye calculators you can find on these sites.

There are various methods to get CPU information on FreeBSD sysctl -a | grep -i cpu | less sysctl -a | egrep -i 'hw.machine|hw.ncpu|hw.model' “sysctl” retrieves the kernel state. You can also use dmesg to get the information: dmesg | grep -i cpu grep -i cpu /var/run/dmesg.boot

If you don’t like the default shell on your system you can easily change it with the chsh command e.g. chsh -s /opt/local/bin/bash You will be asked to enter your password to make the change.

Wordpress is a very nice publishing platform that is very easy to install and use. Unfortunately with its plugin system it can become very bloated and slow. This site uses ghost. It uses node.js. It is much faster than wordpress, but your typical shared web hosting doesn’t support it. This site runs on a small Google cloud compute engine instance. If you can’t/don’t want to use Google cloud and can’t find a hosting provider that will support node.js you can also try hugo. Hugo generates a static site that you can upload to almost any type of server. Read more

To reset (flush) the DNS cache on Mac OSX depends on the OS version. One of the following commands in the terminal should do it for you. sudo dscacheutil -flushcache or sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder or sudo discoveryutil mdnsflushcache