Pages with tag Linux Hints

Block remote root login via ssh on Ubuntu/etc to keep your server safe A moment ago I was checking the system logs on my Ubuntu server and found that in auth.log reports that someone was repeatedly trying to SSH login as root. The "root" entry in /etc/passwd is setup so that no password will ever be matched, so perhaps this potential cracker would never get into my server anyway. But the requests are using bandwidth - and what if they were able to figure out a password that would work? Why not just block remote SSH login access to logging in as root in the first place? It's a bad idea to login directly as root - instead the recommended best practice is to login as a regular user then use sudo to perform things requiring super user access.
Make a bash script detect the directory it's stored in, to access data there

You may need to write a bash shell script that accesses data stored alongside the script, while your current working directory might be elsewhere. In my case the shell script needed to use Node.js scripts stored next to the shell scripts -- the shell script acting to simplify running the Node.js scripts. The "data" to be accessed in this case is the Node.js scripts, plus the support modules required to run them. You may have other data like a list of hostnames or who-knows-what.