The Linux kernel often uses available memory for disk caching unless its otherwise needed by a program running on the system. This feature can speed up the system, but the RAM will be marked as used in the top command. It might seem that you are out of memory and need to do something to resolve the problem, when in fact everything is normal and the kernel will simply give programs resources from the disk cache when required. It never takes resources away from programs, just makes use of idle memory sitting in your system. This is such a common question that it even has its own website - http://www.linuxatemyram.com/.

If you really want to clear the disk cache and free the memory, run the following command:

sudo sync && sudo echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Note: there isn’t much point though, as the kernel will just start using the memory again for disk caching straight after you free it.

FFmpeg can easily be used to extract the audio tracks from virtually all video files and save them to new audio files:

Copy audio track from video file:

This example assumes that the video’s audio track is already an MP3 so can be simply copied over without re-encoding.

ffmpeg - i video.mkv -acodec copy audio.mp3

Convert audio track to MP3 (CBR):

This example assumes that the video’s audio track is something other than MP3 (or whatever target format you want). FFmpeg will re-encode the audio track so you can also specify some additional quality options.

ffmpeg -i video.mkv -b:a 192K -vn audio.mp3

In this command we specify the that the bit rate of the new audio file will be a constant 192kb/s (CBR).

Convert audio track to variable bit rate MP3 (VBR)

This command creates a variable bit rate (VBR) MP3 instead of the CBR file as in the above example. This will reduce the size of the new MP3, but may sacrifice some quality.

ffmpeg -i video.mkv -q:a 0 -map a audio.mp3

• Part 2 - Securing Login
• Part 3 - Installing a Firewall
• Part 4 - Setup Nginx Web Server
• Part 5 - Install Git, Ruby and Jekyll
• Part 6 - HTTPS With Let’s Encrypt
• Part 7 - Email Forwarding with Postfix
• Part 8 - Sending Email Through Gmail
• Part 9 - Setup a Reverse Proxy with Nginx
• Part 10 - Install Docker and Docker Compose

In this set of posts I’ll be running through setting up a new Ubuntu server - from initial setup and security through to installation of some of the most common packages. You can get your very own server/VPS through companies such as DigitalOcean or OVH - in this case we’ll be using Ubuntu Server 20.04, but the same concepts should apply to previous and future releases as well.

In this post we’ll be covering how to login to your server for the first time through SSH and creating a new user with root privileges.

Logging in as Root

When you create your new server, you should receive an email with directions on how to login to your server. This will normally include the public IP address of your server and a randomly generated password which will allow you to login as the main root user. The root user is the main administrator in a Linux system and so has privileges to do pretty much anything. You therefore generally don’t want to be logged in as root for day-to-day operations where you can potentially cause damage quite easily. We do however need to login as root initially (as at this point we don’t have any other users).

In this post we’ll be using PuTTY as an SSH client, however all other alternatives will work just as well. Inside your initial email you should have the public IP of your server along with the root password. In the PuTTY client window enter the IP address into the Host Name field and press ‘Open’ (assuming SSH is selected and the port is set to the default 22).

You should be greeted with a black window prompting you for the user your wish to login as - in this case ‘root’. Enter the root password when prompted. As this is the first time you are logging in, you will also be prompted to change the default root password (make sure to choose something strong).

If you see a new bash shell, then you have successfully logged in to your server and you can move on to setting up your own new user.

Creating a New User

As I said before, working as root is generally considered a bad idea. Instead, we will be creating a new user which we will be logging in as in all future sessions.

$ adduser demo

This command will create a new user called ‘demo’ (change the name to be something more relevant). You will be prompted for a new password (again choose a strong one) along with some general information for the new user (you can skip this be pressing Enter).

Granting Root Privileges

We have just created a new user, but by default they have very limited privileges which prevents them from installing new packages or modifying any system files. Obviously for us this is not ideal, so instead we can grant the new user ‘sudo’ privileges, which allows us to run commands as root without having to actually be logged in as root. To grant these privileges, run the following as root:

$ gpasswd -a demo sudo

or

$ sudo usermod -aG sudo demo

You can now run commands as root by simply adding sudo to the beginning - essentially meaning that you never need to login as root anymore. For additional security we can also completely disable root login through ssh (which stops a lot of brute force attacks) which will be covered in a future post.

Now we have a new user setup, we still need to do some more work to better secure our server. In the next post we will set up public key authentication which is a much more secure method than the simple password we have at the moment.

Redirect stdout/stderr to a truncated file:

# StdOut
cmd > out.txt # (stderr printed to console)
# StdErr
cmd 2> err.txt # (stdout printed to console)

Redirect stdout/stderr to a file (appending):

# StdOut
cmd >> out.txt # (stderr printed to console)
# StdErr
cmd 2>> err.txt # (stdout printed to console)

Redirect both stdout and stderr in same command to different files (truncating):

cmd > out.txt 2> err.txt

Redirect both stdout and stderr to same output (truncating):

cmd > out.txt 2>&1

“Redirection statements are evaluated, as always, from left to right. >> file - STDOUT to file (append mode) (short for 1>> file) 2>&1 - STDERR to ‘where stdout goes’ Note that the interpretation ‘redirect STDERR to STDOUT’ is wrong”

Source

Htop is a great expansion to the top command in Unix based systems. Rather than just spitting out metrics to the console, htop provides a complete ncurses-based interface which makes it extremely useful when managing processes.

The header of htop contains a number of bars that show CPU usage, memory usage and swap usage. The bars are all colour coded to show different aspects of the usage. This is great when you know the what the colours mean, but htop doesn’t make it too obvious what they mean. The F1 (Help) menu offers a guide to the colours of the usage bars: