I have implemented a new passwd policy and am forcing users to change their password. The problem I’m facing is I don’t they dont’ know what the password requirements are. How can I communicate this to them before they change their password using passwd?

That’s a great question, and it’s actually really simple. What we have to do is create our own custom script that displays the password requirements and then calls the passwd program. And we have to call the script whenever  a user types passwd command at the prompt.

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The network tool ‘ping’ has been used by almost everyone who regularly uses a PC at one point or another. The tool is so ubiquitous that it is installed by default on every modern networkable operating system and has been for some time. It is both simple to use and can be a powerful means of exploring your network locally and the internet at large. We are going to go over some use cases and explain exactly what it is and how it works.

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The Linux Academy brought to you by Pinehead.tv is happy to announce two new premium courses to take our total number of lessons to 114 as of today!

The first of the two courses is Enterprise Amazon Web Services. This course focuses on advanced Amazon Web Service concepts such as:

• Running large scale web applications
• Load balancing
• Auto scaling
• Amazon RDS
• Automatic code deployment

Our second course was highly requested and brought to you by our new Instructor. He has 20 years of technical expertise managing and leading Linux teams. That course is Linux Security Essentials and focuses on:

• Hardening your server for public access
• Testing your system and correcting common security issues

Visit Linux Academy by Pinehead.tv and begin your journey towards Linux Certification today!

With the increases in bandwidth available to everyone, rich media services, and available information via the internet, video streaming is going to explode. You might think you see streaming everywhere now, but in realty video streaming is still in its infancy. There are many options for video streaming such as YouTube (yes, they have live streaming), Livestream, Ustream, and I’m sure there are a few others. However, some of those are expensive and others we just don’t want to use because of their branding. So what is the solution? Wowza! Seriously, the name is Wowza and we just happen to know a few experts that are going to help teach you to get started streaming with Wowza.

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It’s here! The long awaited and much requested Introduction To Bash Scripting And Linux Automation course. This course is at the 101 level and is very much geared towards anybody who has never done any bash scripting. We cover the basics, how to run scripts, conditions in bash scripting, loops in bash scripting, accepting user input, creating interactive scripts, practice examples, writing bash scripts that communicate with MySQL, and a little bit more. This is our first course that is “open ended” meaning if there is an “example” script that you would like a lesson for, the Linux Academy will add on to it!

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