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
I just started playing with RPCS3, the excellent emulator for Sony Playstation 3 games. After extracting a few of my games from disc, I found out that for a number of them, they will not play correctly unless they have been patched to the latest revision (see the section Installing PlayStation 3 Game Updates in … Read more
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
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
When I was installing Ubuntu linux, I tried to set up 20.04.2 with LACP bonding during the install, and the installer kept crashing. So, to get through the install, I just configured one port with the basic info, and then updated the OS after to have the bonding. I do recommend that you make the … Read more
Traditionally, on *nix systems, cron (or one of its derivatives) is used. It’s possible to use cron on the Mac, but it’s deprecated. launchd is the preferred method. The set up is a little more complex because it’s a bit of XML code, but it’s very straightforward. See the launchd.plist man page or the launchd … Read more