My Little Pocket Universe
With Ubuntu starting to push their snap architecture, more and more apps break using old school X11 remote display methods. With traditional applications, you can just ssh to a remote host with -X or -Y to get X11 forwarding. You just run the X11 command, and it’ll “magically” come back and display on your local … Read more
So you have your shiny new Mac, and you want to back it up to a Time Machine volume, but you don’t want to have it dangling from a USB cable, a great option is to back up to a linux host using Samba. In the past, you would have used netatalk over the AFP … Read more
As anyone who has upgraded to Ubuntu 22+ will know, they have deprecated and removed the traditional firefox package, and only the snap version is available and supported. And this is fine for anyone running the desktop. But for those of us who use the server version of Ubuntu, and often need to use a … 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
It seems like everywhere you log in these days wants you to use some kind of 2 factor (multi-factor) authentication. The most common one you will have likely seen is the OATH time based code generation where you use an authenticator app to generate codes that cycle every 30 seconds. Well, it turns out you … 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
While I was updating some settings with my bind server on Ubuntu 20, I noticed a lot of queries for “pizzaseo.com”, which appears to be some kind of marketing company trying to scrape for data. On reading out in forums about it, apparently they’re looking for vulnerable pi-hole servers that are exposed to the internet. … 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