The only requirement to this share is having Python installed, which is pretty much a requirement these days anyway. Heh, I even used this method on my Mac without any additional setup.

The first thing that I do here is create a shell alias so that I don’t have to remember/type the full command. Edit your .bashrc or .bash_aliases and add the line:

alias webshare='python -c "import SimpleHTTPServer;SimpleHTTPServer.test()"'

. .bashrc && . .bash_aliases

You should now be able to run the alias webshare anywhere on your filesystem and be able to share those files with anyone that has access to your IP.

When you run the command it will tell you the IP and port that your share is accessible on. By default it should be 0.0.0.0:8000. This means all interfaces on port 8000. Simply share your LAN IP with those you want to share with and there you go!

I recently published my third article for them, Ubuntu User Interface Tweaks. In this article I talk about documenting your user interface customizations for easy, even scripted, replication in the future. The GNOME desktop environment makes it very easy to make customizations to your desktop. It then takes this one step further by way of the gconf-editor, which is a GNOME configuration editor tool. With this tool you can find and toggle values for nearly every aspect of your desktop environment. The part that I find the most appealing is the fact that you can use the command line to automate these customizations in the future. If you find yourself spending time reapplying desktop customizations on each new installation, you’ll definitely want to read this article!

The previous article was about Creating a Local Ubuntu Repository using Apt-Mirror and Apt-Cacher. These tools are both very useful if you have multiple Ubuntu installations in your network. In a nutshell, these tools allow you to download packages and updates once and then share them within your local area network. This allows you to conserve bandwidth and provide a local cache of packages. If you have multiple Ubuntu machines within your network this is likely something you’ll find very useful.

Finally, the first article that I published for them was regarding FreeBSD. FreeBSD has been a recent research project of mine, and I have to say that I’ve been very impressed with a lot of the technologies that I’ve come across. One in particular is FreeBSD’s concept of Jails. Jails are secure, chrooted environments each defining their own users, ports and services. I’ve implemented FreeBSD Jails and I very much like the way that I’ve been able to secure my many network services. If you’d like to learn more about segregating and securing processes and services I think you’ll find this to be an interesting read.

I have some more articles in the works. Some of the topics that I have upcoming in the queue are:

• Firewalling with UFW
• Using SELinux on Ubuntu
• SELinux vs AppArmour

Check back here or subscribe to our feed for more articles. I’m sure we’ll you’ll like what you find.