Security Tutorials

In this tutorial, we will look at how to check your Debian version from the command line. It is quite normal not to know which version of an operating system you are running especially if it is a server that you have inherited.

In other cases, you may simply be administering quite a few servers with different versions of operating systems and you may not necessary remember what version of Debian is installed on a particular system. Whatever the reason is, we will learn how to check the version of Debian that is running using only the command line.

In this tutorial, we will look at how to check our CentOS version from the command line. As a system administrator, the first question you should ask yourself after getting a new CentOS server to manage is: what version of CentOS am I running? The version of the operating system in use on our server is important as it is critical that we have all the latest updates to ensure that the server is secure.

There are 3 main ways of checking the version of CentOS that is running using a terminal.

One may want to check open ports on Ubuntu to ensure that there are no services listening that shouldn't be. If we remember, a port is what an application will use to communicate with another application, provide a service, etc. To get an idea of what services are running on a system, we would need to check the open ports on the system.

To ensure that we have the latest version of the Apache web server running, we need to perform a check on our current version.

In the tutorial below, we will demonstrate how easy it is to check our Apache version on Ubuntu or other similar modern flavour of Linux.

To check what version of Apache we have running, we can open a terminal and execute the following command:

apache2 -v

In this tutorial, you will learn how to check your Ubuntu version from the command line. To get the version of Ubuntu or the kernel that is running is quite a simple task when using the terminal. Especially on an Ubuntu server where you may only interact with the system through a terminal, it may be easy to lose track of which version of the operating system is running. The version of the kernel which is running may also be obscure since you rarely need that sort of information.

Updating your Ubuntu Linux distribution using the command line is very simple two-step process. Using the package manager, you can easily update your system as it automatically finds newer versions of your installed software. To perform the update, you will need to:

• Refresh the apt system to ensure it contains all the newest information about packages
• Download then install any packages that have newer versions

Pretty simple isn't it? The details of updating are below.

By default, your Apache web server (and PHP if it is installed) will indicate to clients the exact version of the Apache software which is running. This version information can be seen in the HTTP response header.