It’s no secret–SSL is confusing. Creating and signing certificates is a convoluted process, especially from the command line. Fortunately, Debian-based systems have an easy way for Apache users to create, sign, and install their own SSL certs. This tutorial assumes that Apache is already installed with the default configuration. ### Configure SSL ### Step one is to configure Apache to enable `mod_ssl`: # a2enmod ssl Enabling module ssl. See /usr/share/doc/apache2.2-common/README.Debian.gz on how to configure SSL and create self-signed certificates.

If you are familiar with the **shred** command, you know it is an easy way to make sure sensitive data is *really* deleted. Shred overwrites a file with random data before deleting it, so that the original data cannot be recovered. Shred works by overwriting the data *in place*, or over top of the original file. But what if the file has already been deleted? One way to destroy the data is to overwrite all unused space on the drive (or partition) with random data.

I wanted a CLI-based strong password generator for Linux. mkpasswd is nice, but I wanted something more flexible. I didn’t like having to provide my own character sequence. I wanted something with a built-in character sequence generator with an easy way to control the likelihood of numbers and symbols. I wanted something that could read in a character sequence from a file or standard input. And I wanted something that not only had sensible default values, but was easily configurable.