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Grab an interface's IP from ifconfig without screen clutter
Sometimes, you don't really care about all the other information that ifconfig spits at you (however useful it may otherwise be). You just want an IP. This strips out all the crap and gives you exactly what you want.

Open Remote Desktop (RDP) from command line and connect local resources
The above command will open a Remote Desktop connection from command line, authenticate using default username and password (great for virtual machines; in the exampe above it's administrator:password), create a shared folder between your machine and the other machine and configure resolution to best fit your desktop (I don't like full screen because it make the desktop panels to disappear). The command will run in the background, and expect to receive parameters. You should enter hostname or IP address as a parameter to the command, and can also override the defaults parameters with your own.

converting vertical line to horizontal line

Find the processes that are on the runqueue. Processes with a status of
Want to know why your load average is so high? Run this command to see what processes are on the run queue. Runnable processes have a status of "R", and commands waiting on I/O have a status of "D". On some older versions of Linux may require -emo instead of -eo. On Solaris: ps -aefL -o s -o user -o comm | egrep "^O|^R|COMMAND"

Quickly ping range of IP adresses and return only those that are online
Tested in Debian, ymmv. - c 1 : send only one ping;; -W 1: wait for one second and then exit ping, assuming target IP is not available; change as needed (-W 0.5 for half a second, smaller or greater value depending on network speed/latency)

ANSI Terminal Color Test using python
Pre-packaged python script that comes with Debian/Ubuntu.

Filter IPs out of files

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"

Screencast with ffmpeg x11grab
requires ffmpeg & xwininfo to be installed replace hw:0,0 with pulse if you like using pulseaudio press q to quit

Find brute force attempts on SSHd
Searches the /var/log/secure log file for Failed and/or invalid user log in attempts.


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