Electricmonk

Ferry Boender

Programmer, DevOpper, Open Source enthusiast.

Blog

Category: sysadmin

Re: The shell and its crappy handling of whitespace

I saw an interesting article on The Universe of Discourse about The shell and its crappy handling of whitespace. I’m about thirty-five years into Unix shell programming now, and I continue to despise it. The shell’s treatment of whitespace is a constant problem. The fact that for i in *.jpg; do cp $i /tmp done […]

An Ansible safeguard

At my work, we use ansible to provision all kinds of things, from servers to monitoring. Ansible is very powerful, but with great power comes great responsibility. One downside of automating many things with ansible is that you could also accidentally destroy a lot of things with a single wrong command. In a perfect world […]

Firefox SEC_ERROR_OCSP_FUTURE_RESPONSE [fixed]

My dad had an issue with Firefox failing on certain sites with a “SEC_ERROR_OCSP_FUTURE_RESPONSE” error. He recently replaced a dead battery in his desktop computer. These batteries are used to keep time when the PC is off. These days generally you won’t ever have to replace it, since computers are throwaway devices now. They’ll fail […]

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 […]

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