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Check if port is open on remote machine
Check if port is open, if you don't have ncat on your machine.

Lookup hostname for IP address

get rid of lines with non ascii characters
found here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9035939

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

from the console, start a second X server
This starts a very basic X session, with just a simple xterm. You can use this xterm to launch your preferred distant session. $ ssh -X john@otherbox gnome-session Try also startkde or fluxbox or xfce4-session. To switch between your two X servers, use CTRL+ALT+F7 and CTRL+ALT+F8.

Simple complete system backup excluding files or directories
You can exclude more system folders or individual files which are not necessary for the backup and can be recreated after the restore procedure, like /lost+found, /mnt, /media, /tmp, /usr ... Restoring the above backup procedure is as simple as becoming root and typing: $ tar zxpf backup.tgz -C / You can extract any file or directory out of the backup.tgz file for recovery, for instance, if you have a corrupt or mis-configured fstab file, you could simply issue the command: $ tar zxpf backup.tgz /ect/fstab -C / Other options: v add verbose option to see files processed A far safer solution is to restore the desired files under a different directory, and then compare, move, or update the files to their original locations afterward.

Quick and dirty RSS
runs an rss feed through sed replacing the closing tags with newlines and the opening tags with white space making it readable.

monitor memory usage

Update your journal
prerequisite: $ mkdir ~/journal

mysql bin log events per minute
shows number of mysql bin log events (which are mysql server events) per minute, useful to check stress times postmortem


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