I see a hundred different guides online but none of them really document the easy way to setup a reverse tunnel. Q: What is a reverse tunnel? Great question! A reverse tunnel is needed when you are trying to connect to a client computer from an outside connection. A typical scenario is the device you need access to is behind a firewall or proxy. Since you can’t make a direct connection to it (say you want to VNC, RDP, SSH to it, etc), a tunnel is the best way to poke a hole.

If you manage a bunch of Redhat Enterprise Linux servers (RHEL), it can be wasteful or difficult to update packages from the internet each time (or you don’t have enough subscriptions). So let’s create a package repository on a local server which will update every night and allow the other internal servers to access it. This is particularly useful if only one server on your network has internet access or you have a slower connection.

This post will explain how I backup mine and my clients Linux servers to Amazon’s S3 file storage service via bash shell scripts. It’s cheap, quick, and it takes care of off-site backups. I prefer to use a different provider than my hosting company in case of major system disruption. I hope everyone has great documentation on how to stand up a new server! With this design, it gives you ultimate control over how many backups you want, and how long to keep them.

I have quite a few wordpress sites under management, and updating the plugins and themes can get quite tedious. This script will update all of them automatically (you will need SSH and CRON access for this) to whatever time-frame you set it to. The trick is to use “wp-cli” which is a command line toolset for WordPress that lets you do just about anything (you can even reset admin passwords so be careful who has access to this stuff).

If your not familiar with tor, check out https://www.torproject.org/ to get more information. Its a secure proxy system that basically anonymizes your ip address. You can install the Tor client and connect or a super easy way is to run your own proxy and just have traffic flow through it. Don’t have to start up anything, its always running if you want to use it. The Beaglebone black is a perfect device to run a Tor proxy on your home network.

I am a super Geek, so having my own ESXi server is a necessity. I have been using Vmware stuff since the company was created back in the day. I had Dell T310 from my old business so its a perfect Vmware server. Has 4 hard disk slots, upgraded it to 16GB RAM, and two Ethernet ports. I have a small Belkin home wifi router which only has 4 gigabit ports, and I wanted to plug one more device in.

This is kind of general holding place for commands that I run into and need to keep track of in Linux. I mainly play with Ubuntu and Kali but these should work with almost any distro. If you run a ssh server on the internet, you want to minimize the risk of brute forcing. Its best to not allow root logins via anywhere, so that removes the easy job of guessing a username.