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Send a backup job to a remote tape drive on another machine over SSH
I use this all the time for taking manual backups of stuff i want to keep but not important enough to backup regularly.

Remotely sniff traffic and pass to snort
I have a small embedded linux device that I wanted to use for sniffing my external network, but I didn't want to recompile/cross-compile snort for the embedded platform. So I used tcpdump over ssh to pass all the traffic as pcap data to a "normal" Linux system that then takes the pcap data and passes it to snort for processing.

backup a directory in a timestamped tar.gz
creates a tar.gz with a name like: backup20090410_173053.tar.gz of a given directory. this file was made 10 April 2009 at 5:30:53pm see date's man page to customize the timestamp format

Command for JOHN CONS
Would create a file with a meaningful title. Dedicated to John Cons, who is annoying us users. Merry Christmas!!!

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

put current directory in LAN quickly

Create a video that is supported by youtube
Takes an mpeg video and coverts it to a youtube compatible flv file. The -r 25 sets the frame rate for PAL, for NTSC use 29.97

view certificate details

Console clock
Shows a simple clock in the console -t param removes the watch header Ctrl-c to exit

Monitor progress of a command
Pipe viewer is a terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline. It can be inserted into any normal pipeline between two processes to give a visual indication of how quickly data is passing through, how long it has taken, how near to completion it is, and an estimate of how long it will be until completion. Source: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/unix-utilities-pipe-viewer/


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