Surfraw stands for 'Shell Users' Revolutionary Front Against the WWW'. It's a command-line shell program for interfacing with a big number of web-based search engines. With Surfraw you can search google and wikipedia a.o. from the command line. The results will be displayed with a browser of your choice. I suggest a text browser like links2, to keep it text based. Read more to find out how to install and use it.

Mobile access to your server is not only cool, it comes in handy in a lot of situations. With SSH access from your mobile phone, you can check your emails, logs, box status, irssi, torrents, execute updates, reboot and lots of other things, all on the go. In this short tutorial I will explain how to access and administer a Ubuntu (and any Debian based) server with a not so recent Mobile phone. For this to work, you will need a java supporting mobile device with GPRS enabled (Midp). You will have to install a .jar file of MidpSSH on the device (which you will have to download to your mobile) and install additional ncurses terminal definitions on the server.

Ubuntu comes with a good system monitor. If you like to keep an eye on your system all the time, you can put up to 6 indicators on your panel. (Just right click on your panel, 'add to panel' and select 'system monitor'. Right click on a graph and select 'preferences' to edit it.)

But If that isn't enough, there's always Conky. Conky is a very configurable, light-weight system monitor that among others displays system stats on your screen, like in the screenshot.

This tutorial will explain how to submit track info to last.fm (audioscrobbler) when you use cmus. For those who don't know it, cmus is a text-based music player for unix-like systems and it just rocks!

I just installed icecast2 with ices2 on the same machine, which is now a audio streaming server. Icecast2 is a audio streaming server similar to shoutcast. It listens to ices2 that send the audiofiles to the icecast server. Icecast2 sends the audio to the clients.
After installing and configuring icecast2 and ices2 and putting your music in the right directory, you'll have your own internet radio station!

This tutorial will describe how to install and configure Snort (intrusion detection system) from source, BASE (Basic Analysis and Security Engine) using MySQL, and Apache2 on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). Snort will assist you in monitoring your network and alert you about possible threats. Snort will output its log files to a MySQL database which BASE will use to display a graphical interface in a web browser.

I wanted to compile FiSH for irssi on Ubuntu Gutsy, but http://fish.sekure.us was offline. Now that I checked it again, it's back. So perhaps you better follow the walkthrough on http://fish.sekure.us/forum/viewtopic.php?t=145 . For my own reference and for the case the website is down again I'm posting here what I did to get it to work. This should work for every Debian based distribution