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nano aka GNU nano

I just realized that tomorrow (November 18, 2021) marks the 22nd anniversary of the release of nano.

I have been using nano for 21+ years. I remember when I first tried it and thought this is never going to catch on. I was familiar with vi, which was the most popular CLI text editor at the time, and every tutorial was written using vi as the CLI (command line interface) text editor. Over the years I began to use it consistently and it became one of the first applications that I would install every time I booted into a fresh install of any Linux distribution. It is standard in Ubuntu (and many others) today. It is so easy to use especially when you get the hang of the control interface.

I will demonstrate the use of nano to edit the nameservers on one of my machines, so you can see how easy it is to use. Let me know what you think in the comments.

You can also follow me on twitter:

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in this example I will edit my name server listed in /etc/resolv.conf file.
nano /etc/resolv.conf

Then you just press Enter/Return.

an open file in nano.

the interface is really easy to use, you can see all of your options at the bottom of the console, for example if you need to find a line (more for files with thousands of lines within it, this file only has 19 lines, and I can very clearly see the “nameserver” directive. however for your benifit I will demonstrate the Where Is comand by pressing CTRL + W.

CTRL+w will show you the “Search:” interface, and here you can see that I have typed “nameserver” and I will press Enter/Return.
as you can see the caret (aka text cursor) has moved to the line that contains “nameserver”.

Now that we are on the correct line, we will use the directional keys to move over to the start of the 1.1.1.1 IPv4 address representing the nameserver that is currently configured for this Ubuntu instance.

Now I will delete the content on that line, being careful not to pull the line below up onto the line that I am working with. This can be done by pressing the Del/Delete key (adjacent tot he End key on most keyboards) to remove the data.

Now I will enter the correct dns server using the numbers above the main keyboard (I have not figured out how to use the NumPad within nano) so that you do not trigger other commands.

Okay, now we have the correct nameserver in the correct position, I will save by pressing CTRL+X to exit.

You will see that I have now been prompted that there are unsaved changes that need to be written to the file. Simply press “y” to save the buffer to disk.

Here you are given an option to change the name and directory of the file, overwrite the original file by pressing Enter/Return.

All done. Now I’ll just check the identity of the server that is responding to my DNS queries, by using the following command in the CLI.

dig id.server TXT CH

Great. So the server that is responding is 1.0.0.1 on port 53 and it is showing it’s identity as YYZ (aka Toronto). In case you are not aware most networking engineers like to identify the locality of devices, routers, and servers; by using IATA (International Air Transport Association) airport codes.

Who am I?

Hi there! My name is Adam Vallee, I live in Northern Ontario, but I am originally from the Niagara Region. I have been on Facebook since 2006, but today (Sept 26, 2021) I have decided to delete my account. I have so many reason why I have made this decision, but the simplest way to explain my decision is to just say that it is time.

I will for the time being keep another profile on Facebook for the sole purpose of having access to Messenger, however my long term goal is to rid myself of Facebook completely. I believe that it is a terrible platform, with terrible people and I felt imprisoned by the negative and deranged posts in what were supposed to be community groups, but in reality were nothing more than echo chambers filled with ignorant individuals unaware of their own cognitive biases and fallacious reasoning. I would get looped in to the nonsensical arguments about subjects that are not up to debate. It really began to negatively effect my mental health, so I have had to take a different approach to save myself from the never ending insanity of trying to help people who don’t want to be helped. It’s much easier to just walk away.

There is so much more to the internet then one social media platform. When I first stated out on the internet I remember having a GeoCities account, I was in the Area51 neighborhood, because my little page was about Star Trek: Voyager at the time. I was obsessed with Harry Kim and Seven of Nine’s potential Romance, It was a different time. I remember playing the Midi files of the Star Trek Voyager theme song on my page, it would play over and over and over.

Yahoo bought GeoCities in 1999, and that was the beginning of the end, I just didn’t realize it at first. I began to explore Yahoo.com more, and found many interesting websites. Previously I had only ever used Dogpile.com as a search engine, but I found that Yahoo had really good results.

Anyway there is so much more to the store… I will try to make another post, next Sunday.