Category: sysadmin

An Audio / Video profile switcher (and app launcher) script for Linux

Since the start of Corona, my company has been mostly working remote. That means more video conference meetings. A lot more. So much in fact, that I decided to automate the process of setting everything up correctly for that and other audio video profiles. For example, my webcam is in my laptop, whose screen I […]

Finding and removing packages installed from non-standard repos in Ubuntu

Update: Oh, look, right in the nick of time: “Valve Steam through 2021-04-10, when a Source engine game is installed, allows remote authenticated users to execute arbitrary code because of a buffer overflow that occurs for a Steam invite after one click” As part of my big spring cleaning, as well as given all the […]

Shared folder on Virtualbox Ubuntu 20.04 guest fails with “No such device or address”

In an Ubuntu 18.04 virtual machine in VirtualBox, I could define a Shared Folder like so: And then mount it like this: mount -t vboxsf Projects -o uid=1000,gid=1000 /home/fboender/Projects/ Or with the equivalent fstab entry like this: Projects /home/fboender/Projects/ vboxsf defaults,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0 This fails on an Ubuntu 20.04 guest with the following error: /sbin/mount.vboxsf: […]

Sla (Simple Little Automator 🥗) v1.1 now supports long rule descriptions

Version 1.1 of the Simple Little Automator adds the ability to have long descriptions for build rules. For example: install () { # Install sla # Install sla to $PREFIX (/usr/local by default). # # You can specify the prefix with an environment variable: # # $ PREFIX=/usr sla install # Set the prefix PREFIX=${PREFIX:-/usr/local} […]

sla: The Simple Little Automator

I’m tired of using Make and its arcane syntax. 90% of the projects I write or deal with don’t require any kind of incremental compilation, but that’s all any build system talks about. That, and how insanely fast it is. The drawback is usually that you need to install several terabytes of dependencies, and then […]

multi-git-status can now do a “git fetch” for each repo.

Just a quick note: My multi-git-status project can now do a “git fetch” for each repo, before showing the status. This fetches the latest changes in the remote repository (without changing anything in your local checked out branch), so that mgitstatus will also show any “git pull”s you’d have to do. 

direnv: Directory-specific environments

Over the course of a single day I might work on a dozen different admin or development projects. In the morning I could be hacking on some Zabbix monitoring scripts, in the afternoon on auto-generated documentation and in the evening on a Python or C project. I try to keep my system clean and my projects […]

SSL/TLS client certificate verification with Python v3.4+ SSLContext

Normally, an SSL/TLS client verifies the server’s certificate. It’s also possible for the server to require a signed certificate from the client. These are called Client Certificates. This ensures that not only can the client trust the server, but the server can also trusts the client. Traditionally in Python, you’d pass the ca_certs parameter to the […]

A short security review of Bitwarden

Update 2021-02-25: (Disclaimer: I’m not a cryptographer, and not affiliated or sponsored by Passbolt in any way, shape or form). I’ve reviewed another Open Source personal and team password manager called Passbolt. Without going into a full review, its security looks impressive. Passbolt uses plain, old, trusted GPG with asymmetric public / private key encryption […]

Multi-git-status now shows branches with no upstream

Just a quick update on Multi-git-status. It now also shows branches with no upstream. These are typically branches created locally that haven’t been configured to track a local or remote branch. Any changes in those branches are lost when the repo is removed from your machine. Additionally, multi-git-status now handles branches with slashes in them […]

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