Do you need to install Windows via a network? Forget about Microsoft’s complicated setup. Rather use serva. It is easy and quick to set up. You can also install other operating systems if you wish.

Updated 23 February 2021 Cloudflare is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) service with a free basic offering. To provide the content delivery service they need to manage your DNS and provide a very nice interface to set up DNS. You can use the free DNS service without making use of the rest of their services. If you use Cloudflare for DNS it is adviseable to use their reverse proxy (CDN) service. It really speeds up your site and also provides some protection against attempts to hack your site. If you use a system like Wordpress for your site you will find many articles on the web to assist in setting up Cloudflare correctly e.g. how to stop /wp-admin from being cached. Read more

Building up a decent toolkit doesn’t need to cost a fortune. Rather than buying cheap poor quality tools that won’t last, try looking out for second hand options if you are short on cash. Good quality tools make you job easier and older, quality tools from the second hand shop will last much longer than new low quality tools.

You can use whereis to search standard binary, manual page and source directories for the specified programs. This can be particularly handy when you are trying to find where in the ports tree an application is. Try whereis firefox and whereis whereis.

You can use aliases to decrease the amount of typing you need to do to get commands you commonly use. Examples of fairly popular aliases include (in Bourne shell style, as in /bin/sh, bash, ksh, and zsh): alias lf="ls -FA" alias ll="ls -lA" alias su="su -m" In csh or tcsh, these would be alias lf ls -FA alias ll ls -lA alias su su -m To remove an alias, you can usually use unalias aliasname. To list all aliases, you can usually type just alias. Read more

Need to do a search in a man page or in a file you’ve sent to a pager (like less or more)? Use “/search_word”. To repeat the same search, type “n” for next.

FreeBSD and other Unix systems use man pages for system documentation, they are called by the man command. For FreeBSD the following are useful man pages: man firewall will give advice for building a FreeBSD firewall man hier will explain the way FreeBSD filesystems are normally laid out. Man pages are divided into section depending on topic. There are 9 different sections numbered from 1 (General Commands) to 9 (Kernel Developer’s Manual). You can get an introduction to each topic by typing man <number> intro In other words, to get the intro to general commands, type man 1 intro man ports gives many useful hints about installing FreeBSD ports. man security gives very good advice on how to tune the security of your FreeBSD system. man tuning gives some tips how to tune performance of your FreeBSD system.

If you need to get the text from a scanned PDF or Image file you can use the free Optical Character Recognition (OCR) provided by google drive. Learn more at Google Help

If you accidentally end up inside vi, you can quit it by pressing Escape, colon (:), q (q), bang (!) and pressing return.

If other operating systems have damaged your Master Boot Record, you can reinstall it with boot0cfg(8). See man boot0cfg for details.