Having a good backup is a matter of course for sys admin columnist Charly Kühnast, but devices could still fall victim to fire or theft some day. Because he has enough free space on Google Drive, he doesn't need to search long for a solution. The only thing missing is the right tool.

Stop fiddling around with the mouse or trackpad – do your file management in the terminal, with vi-like key bindings.

If you just need to encrypt a file or two, a descendant of crypt can do the job. Which one you choose depends on your objective.

Whether you are writing code or text, vim-abolish can help you customize search and replace functions in Vim.

Debian discourages the use of pinning to set preferences for package repositories, because the practice can have disastrous results. We take a closer look.

A strange rule seems to dictate that the most useless products and services have the most annoying online advertising. Columnist Charly blocks the garish advertising for all computers on his network centrally with the Pi-hole tool, which is not only for Raspberry Pi devices.

Sys admin Charly does not tend toward hostilities, but he has huge problems with mosquitoes. Despite this, he does make an exception for the Mosquitto message broker.

When human error stumps the Debian package manager, familiar tools like apt-get, aptitude, and dpkg can help restore functionality.

Httpstat is a special stopwatch you can use to discover how long web servers take to serve up a static or dynamic HTML page. Visible performance lags indicate optimization potential for the server.

Running a security audit periodically on your system lets you spot unexpected changes and possible weak points.