GNU/Linux


How to Start/Stop or Enable/Disable firewalld on Fedora 25

firewalld (Dynamic Firewall Manager) tool provides a dynamically managed firewall. The tool enables network/firewall zones to define the trust level of network connections and/or interfaces. It has support both for IPv4 and IPv6 firewall settings. Also, it supports Ethernet bridges and allow you to separate between runtime and permanent configuration options. Finally, it supports an interface for services or applications to add firewall rules directly.

Disable firewalld

To disable firewalld, execute the following command as root or using sudo:

systemctl disable firewalld;

Enable firewalld

To enable firewalld, execute the following command as root or using sudo:

systemctl enable firewalld;

Stop firewalld

To stop (or deactivate) firewalld,execute the following command as root or using sudo:

systemctl stop firewalld;

Start firewalld

To start (or activate) firewalld, execute the following command as root or using sudo:

systemctl start firewalld;

Status of firewalld

To check the status of firewalld, execute the following command as root or using sudo:

systemctl status firewalld;

CONCEPTS

systemd provides a dependency system between various entities called “units” of 12 different types. Units encapsulate various objects that are relevant for system boot-up and maintenance. The majority of units are configured in unit configuration files, whose syntax and basic set of options is described in systemd.unit(5), however some are created automatically from other configuration, dynamically from system state or programmatically at runtime. Units may be “active” (meaning started, bound, plugged in, …, depending on the unit type, see below), or “inactive” (meaning stopped, unbound, unplugged, …), as well as in the process of being activated or deactivated, i.e. between the two states (these states are called “activating”, “deactivating”). A special “failed” state is available as well, which is very similar to “inactive” and is entered when the service failed in some way (process returned error code on exit, or crashed, or an operation timed out). If this state is entered, the cause will be logged, for later reference. Note that the various unit types may have a number of additional substates, which are mapped to the five generalized unit states described here.
— From man systemd

The above, in a nutshell:

  • enabled is a service that is configured to start when the system boots
  • disabled is a service that is configured to not start when the system boots
  • active is a service that is currently running
  • inactive is a service that is currently stopped and may be disabled, but it can be started and become active

GNU/Linux: start System Settings from terminal to view error/warning messages

Recently, we tried to understand why creating a hotspot would not work in Fedora 25 with Gnome 3.

Starting the control panel from the GUI (the launcher, or the power cog) did not provide us with the debug messages needed to understand what was going on.
So we needed the command to use that would start the control panel from a a terminal window

For Ubuntu 14.04 and newer, which by default are deployed with Unity, we used:

unity-control-center;

For Ubuntu 13.10 and older versions, which were deployed with Gnome 2, we used:

gnome-control-center;

For Fedora 25 with Gnome 3, we used again:

gnome-control-center;

 


Just some notes for setting up a new OS to develop projects on GNU/Linux Fedora

If the project is in C++ and uses mysql then install

sudo dnf install mysql++-devel;

If the project is in C/C++ and you are missing talloc.h install

sudo dnf install libtalloc-devel;

Set your name and email for all git projects

git config --global --edit
Then fill-in the configuration file similar to below
# This is Git's per-user configuration file.
[user]
# Please adapt and uncomment the following lines:
#       name = Michael, George
#       email = george@bytefreaks.net
[user]
        name = Michael, George
        email = george@bytefreaks.net
[gui]
        editor = gedit

or use these individual commands to set the configuration

[george@fedora ~]$ git config --global user.name "Michael, George"
[george@fedora ~]$ git config --global user.email "george@bytefreaks.net"

Increase amount of inotify watchers

If you are using CLion or IntelliJ IDEA by jetbrains increase the amount of inotify watchers.
CLion, IntelliJ (and other tools of jetbrains) use inotify on GNU/Linux to monitor directories for changes. It’s common to encounter the system limit on the number of files they monitor.

inotify requires a watch handle to be set for each directory in the project. Unfortunately, the default limit of watch handles will not be enough for sized projects, and reaching the limit will force the jetbrains platform to fall back to recursive scans of directory trees.

Create a file (as root) called /etc/sysctl.d/idea.conf and add the following content to it to increase the number of watchers to 512K

fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 524288

Then call sysctl to reload the settings and apply the new configuration

[george@fedora ~]$ sudo sysctl -p --system;
  •  -p[FILE] or --load[=FILE]: Load in sysctl settings from the file  specified  or /etc/sysctl.conf if none  given.
    Specifying - as filename means reading data from standard input. Using this option will mean arguments to sysctl are files, which are read in the order they are specified.
    The file argument may be specified as regular expression.
  •  --system: Load settings from all system configuration files.
     /run/sysctl.d/*.conf
     /etc/sysctl.d/*.conf
     /usr/local/lib/sysctl.d/*.conf
     /usr/lib/sysctl.d/*.conf
     /lib/sysctl.d/*.conf
     /etc/sysctl.conf

How to “pause” (suspend) an active process

Recently, we were executing the following time-wasting application and we wanted to pause it somehow and release the CPU that was being used temporarily for other tasks.
Unfortunately, the process was not executing on an active console, so we could not press CTRL+Z and suspend it.
Conveniently, the kill command provides us with the suspend functionality as long as we know the PID of the process to be suspended.

Using ps x, we found the PID of the application even though it was not attached to an active console.

Then to suspend the application, we used

kill -TSTP "$PID";

which instructed the process to stop by sending it the SIGTSTP signal.

Fortunately, our application did not block the signal and it was suspended.

Note: In case an application ignores the SIGTSTP signal, you can still force it to suspend by sending it the SIGSTOP signal as follows

kill -STOP "$PID";

After we were done, we resumed the execution of the process by sending the SIGCONT signal to it

kill -CONT "$PID";