ZFS features (excerpt) Snapshots and clones. Useful for e.g. docker and system backups. Copy-on-write (making snapshots initially zero-cost). Raid. Encryption. SSD caching. See more on the ZFS wiki page (features) or this reddit post. Ubuntu has released Focal Fossa (20.04) and as I had just acquired my new laptop, I decided to test it out. Getting a software […]
Setting up PWM as a password recovery tool for OpenLDAP
A running LDAP implementation without a password recovery service for users can be a real hassle for system administrators, in our case every time when a user forgets his/her password the only way to reset/change it was to go to the system administrator let him fix it. As a solution for this problem we stumbled […]
Ansible – Simple module
In this post, we’ll review Ansible module development. I haven chosen to make a maven module; not very fancy, but it provides a good support for the subject. This module will execute a maven phase for a project (a pom.xml is designated). You can always refer to the Ansible Module Development page. Which language? The […]
Ansible – Example playbook to setup Jenkins slave
As mentioned in my previous post about Ansible, we will now proceed with writing an Ansible playbook. Playbooks are files containing instructions that can be processed by Ansible, they are written in yaml. For this blog post I will show you how to create a playbook that will setup a remote computer as a Jenkins […]
Bash – A few commands to use again and again
Introduction These days I spend a lot of time in the bash shell. I use it for ad-hoc scripting or driving several Linux boxes. In my current project we set up a continuous delivery environment and migrate code onto it. I lift code from CVS to SVN, mavenize Ant builds and funnel artifacts into Nexus. […]
Ansible – next generation configuration management
The popularity of the cloud has taken configuration management to the next level. Tools that help system administrators and developers configure and manage large amounts of servers, like Chef and Puppet, have popped up everywhere. Ansible is the next generation configuration management. Ansible can be used to excute tasks on remote computers via SSH so […]
Building a Captive Portal – controlling access to the internet from your network
What is a captive portal? Wikipedia says: “The captive portal technique forces an HTTP client on a network to see a special web page (usually for authentication purposes) before using the Internet normally. A captive portal turns a Web browser into an authentication device. This is done by intercepting all packets, regardless of address or […]
Automated Configuration Management with Puppet
Puppet is a systems management platform that enables sysadmins and developers to standardise the deployment and management of the IT infrastructure. This blog entry shows you how to automate your configuration management using Puppet.
Decrease the double click speed for Java Applications on Ubuntu Linux
When running any Java swing application (like intellij idea) on Ubuntu the double click speed is by default set to 200ms. If like me you find this anoying you can decrease the double click speed by taking the following steps In your home directory create a file called .Xresources and add the following line *multiClickTime: […]
Disabling URL rewriting for the Googlebot
Http is a stateless protocol. To work around the problems caused by this, web applications have the concept of a session. When a user requests a webpage for the first time the user is assigned a unique 32 character string. This string can be send along in subsequent requests to indicate that these requests are […]