Mark Dickinsons Tutorials

These are a collection of little mini-books I have created to explain how to easily do something that commercial books either make difficult to understand, or don't even cover at all.

The below tutorials are for fairly static setups that are likely to survive between major OS changes. Implementing things that have major changes between releases so not suitable for a static 'book' are covered in my blog.

picture of a book Writing CGI applications using shell scripts, a simple walkthrough on how to write web applications using nothing but the bash shell script.
Covers handling form input, using cookies etc. all using nothing but bash shell scripts.
picture of a book Polling and Health Checking a Web Server using PERL, usefull as a quickstart on using perl to do tcpip queries.
picture of a book DRAFT Forwarding mail between Servers with Sendmail, Shows how to configure sendmail to allow for mail routing between Linux (Fedora) servers in a home network. Also includes very brief sections on switching from MBox format to Maildir for mail and installing and using Dovecot. The main focus is on forwarding mail however, as it is based upon my need to forward mail from all my servers to one 'collection' server so I just had to read it in one place. No longer being worked on, using a different approach now.
picture of litter If you have multiple Fedora servers use a local repository for updates, pull all update RPMs down to a single server and use that to supply the updates to all your other servers, a bandwidth saver.
This is no longer maintained as I use a mix of different OS's now so I do not need it
picture of a book DRAFT A quickstart tutorial on how to setup Fedora to be a network install server, designed more to introduce how to setup a fully hands off kickstart network boot environment but also covers in passing normal network install (and network boot to recovery mode if needed).
picture of a book Fast start to Installing the SNORT IDS (Intrusion Detection System) on Fedora systems.
picture of a book DRAFT a BASh shell introduction for beginners,
picture of a book A walkthrough on how to dynamically blacklist hackers that try to probe your Apache website if you are using iptables. Contains information on doing the same thing with firewalld. Allows hands-off real time blacklisting of website hacking attempts.
This is now static, as I have misplaced the master copy used to create the PDF