My Little Pocket Universe
When you install Ubuntu with the default partitions, for some reason, it uses only half of the available disk. If you forget to create a home/var/whatever partition during the install process, you can do it after the fact. To use all of the remaining space in a volume group, you can use the following syntax: … Read more
So you have your nice shiny linux box, and you are properly not allowing remote root logins, but you still need to be able to run X11 apps as root through ssh. But when you try, you get the dreaded error like: Gtk-WARNING **: 19:41:13.383: cannot open display: localhost:10.0 Well that is a pain. This … Read more
Sometimes you need things in life to slow down. Modern terminal emulators are great tools, and they can render text very quickly. This is usually the desired effect. But there are times when you need things to come at you a little slower. I have some old vt100/ansi animations that essentially do nothing when they … Read more
Sometimes you will end up with a linux host that is swapping, and many times it will be obvious which process has been chewing up swap (hint: it is always java). But in those cases where it is not as apparent, I whipped up a little bash script to walk the process tree and list … Read more
Linux has great facilities to view what is happening with the hardware and kernel, but the information isn’t always in one place or organized for humans to look at. Seeing the fibre channel HBAs and the attached devices is a prime example. Getting a quick view is a royal pain. Here is a bash script … Read more
Sometimes it’s desirable to have a back door into a system that is behind a firewall. ssh is a security person’s best friend, and worst nightmare. This is more in the latter category, but as an admin, incredibly useful. I have a server that I can get outbound connections to anywhere, but do not have … Read more
Install gpsd and chrony (chrony should already be installed) Connect your GPS and determine its device name. If it is a USB GPS, the easiest way to do that is to do an ls in /dev, then plug in the device, and do another ls and see what changes. The device name will likely be … Read more
Finding good documents on how to set up a site-to-site VPN with a Ubiquiti UDM to a non-Ubiquiti node (i.e. linux) has been a challenge. The documents on Ubiquiti’s site are laughably incomplete (and generally way out of date). So I am working through each of the steps and trying to shoe horn in a … Read more