"Blogs are a conversation nobody wanted to have with you" — Michelle Wolf
The Wi-Fi adapter on my VivoBook 17 has been acting up under Ubuntu 18.04 LTS insofar that at a random point in time, possibly accelerated by power saving features, the Wi-Fi will stop working with suspicious syslog entries: ath10k_pci 0000:03:00.0: failed to wake target for read32 at 0x0003a028: -110 The usual tricks (suspend/resume, reload driver, … Continue reading Resetting a PCI device
If you're a seasoned server administrator then this post will boring beyond oblivion to you; the ingredients: a headless server (no screen, keyboard)years of personal backups on a linux software RAIDa botched system upgradehappy ending The pretext Several years ago I bought an HP Proliant microserver on discount and set up a NAS with Ubuntu … Continue reading A crazy server recovery
As time goes by, my [place appropriate interval] backups may not grow much, but the size of my entire data archive exceeds the largest available hard disks (don't ask). Taking into account correctness guarantees by hard disk manufacturers, transmission errors over the network and who knows what else, I don't feel confident that I'll flip … Continue reading parchive: protecting backups against data corruption
Following the proud tradition [1],[2],[3] of documenting Linux installations on all the hardware I break, I'm happy to report that Ubuntu 18.04 works fine on the ASUS VivoBook 17 (model number X705U). Things I tested and that work: OS boots from USB and from harddisk Secure boot WLAN USB On board and external (USB) camera … Continue reading Ubuntu on the ASUS VivoBook 17
After a simultaneous Thunderbird upgrade and profile migration from Windows to Linux the mail program permanently forgets passwords. The setting: Thunderbird 52 on Windows Back up profile Restore profile to Thunderbird 60 on Linux Observe that all passwords to all accounts are lost even if entered again This seems to be some … Continue reading Thunderbird forgetting passwords
I have been moderately content [1] with Ubuntu 14.04 on the Acer Aspire E15 for about a year. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, another long term support release, has recently been published and of course I had to try it out! Installing the live image on a USB stick: bring some patience The first obstacle is that … Continue reading Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on the Acer Aspire E15
I increasingly use Ansible not only for glorious tasks like setting up my various VMs I use for prototyping but also for mundane things like resetting my personal laptop every time I get a new one or break it (dedicated readers of this blog will know me to do that a lot [2],[3],[4]). Most of … Continue reading Ansible local_action privilege de-escalation or: how to wait for a reboot
In this post I talk about setting up and securely operating development tools like Jenkins and Gitlab on a server connected to the internet. All applications run behind a firewall and a reverse HTTP proxy which allows only HTTP requests from selected users through who authenticate themselves with client certificates. Putting web-facing software on the … Continue reading Securing a development server
Abstract: In this post I'll describe how to create a private cloud with Docker, Varnish and a lot of shell scripting on a set of private (virtual) servers. This post assumes intermediate knowledge of related techniques. I will still once in a while go into setup details because, well, this is also an exercise for … Continue reading Building a private cloud with Docker
Just a little reminder to self: when running Tomcat with Java 8 in an Ubuntu Docker container, Tomcat will take a very long time (minutes!) to start with even the simplest web application. The issue is actually documented (not entirely Docker-related). The solution is to modify JAVA_OPTS to use a different random device: JAVA_OPTS=-Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/urandom
