‘Remind’ is a nifty tool to help you remember all the important events dates that you dont remember. One can argue that they can achieve the same thing by sending mail to themselves by setting up an at job, apart from being feature-rich excellent concole based reminder program. ‘Remind’ has some nice GUI front-end to brag about.

First of all we will start off by setting up some reminders to remind ourselves to remember something.

This can be easily done by adding a line like this “REM Nov 22 2007 MSG Thanksgiving Dinner!” to your ‘~/.reminder’ file, if it doesn’t exist make one with ‘touch’ command.

‘Remind’ has a wide range of options and syntax and many ways to play with them. To learn more about the range of options you either check out the remind MAN page or the wikipage.

‘Remind’ also has three GUI frontend that the non-console users will love.

tkremind – is a tk-base frontend that is included with the remind package.

Wyrd – is a text-based remind frontend that display and edits remind (with the help of vim) in a much convenient manner.

wxRemind – is a wxPython based frontend. In addition to letting you set reminders and events using Remind, wxRemind can integrate with Festival to announce your events, and will automatically produce a PostScript version of your monthly calendar and open it in gv for you.

Other resources about this handy program:

Remind wiki: http://wiki.43folders.com/index.php/Remind
Remind MANual: http://www.go.dlr.de/htbin/man?remind
Remind Linux.com article: http://www.linux.com/articles/55928
Remind Linuxjournal article: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3529

Tail is a very import part of linux administrative tools. Apart from using it with a combination of script to achieve day to day goals “tail” can be used by itsef for some important administrative tasks. Observing live log files is one of those tasks. Tail by default only shows the last 10 lines of a file. In case of log file you can make it update “live” by using the “-f” extension. In linux systems by default all logs files are saved in “/var/log” to view a list of log files in this directory just type “ls -l /var/log/*.log”

In our example we will use the syslog file and observe it in real time by typing this: “tail -f /var/log/syslog”

It is a packet sniffer which runs as a background process and serves its statistics to a web browser:
- input and output IP traffic by machines, ports and protocols,
- last minute, hourly, daily and monthly global input and output graphics.

It is known to be smaller (in terms of memory footprint) and stabler than ntop.

Darkstat website: http://dmr.ath.cx/net/darkstat/

Perhaps one of the most important network monitoring tool in linux out there ngrep strives to provide most of GNU grep’s common features, applying them to the network layer. ngrep is a pcap-aware tool that will allow you to specify extended regular or hexadecimal expressions to match against data payloads of packets. It recognizes IPv4/6, TCP, UDP, ICMPv4/6, IGMP and Raw across Ethernet, PPP, SLIP, FDDI, Token Ring and null interfaces, and understands BPF filter logic in the same fashion as more common packet sniffing tools, such as tcpdump and snoop.

Website: (http://ngrep.sourceforge.net/)

ngrep has traditionally been used to debug plaintext protocol interactions such as HTTP, SMTP, FTP, etc., to identify and analyze anomalous network communications such as those between worms, viruses and/or zombies, and to store, read and reprocess pcap dump files while looking for specific data patterns. On the other hand, it can be used to do the more mundane plaintext credential collection as with HTTP Basic Authentication, FTP or POP3 authentication, and so forth. Like all useful tools, it can be used for good and bad.

ngrep can be easily setup tp monitor certain ports for plaintext packets, by using simple commands as
ngrep -d any port 80

This will monitor plaintext packets for port 80 when you are browsing the web.

Or get more specific information with this command:
ngrep -d any -W byline port 80

So now we know that linux.com (66.35.250.176) is using the above server with above mentioned mods; lets verify this information with netcraft: http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=linux.com and confirmed.

There are many other usage of ngrep I suggest you check out the man page and also their website.