On Windbringer, I habitually run LXDE as my desktop environment because it's lightweight and does what I need: It manages windows, gives me a menu, and stays out of my way so I can do interesting things. For years I've been using a utility called GKrellm to implement not only system monitoring on my desktop (because I like to know what's going on), but to set and change my desktop background every 24 hours. However, GKrellm has gotten somewhat long in the tooth and I've started using something different for realtime monitoring (but that's not the …
So, you're probably wondering why I'm posting this, because it's a bit off of my usual fare. The reason is I think it would be useful to make available a fairly simple algorithm for implementing a general purpose dead man's switch in whatever language you want, which is to say a DMS that could conceivably do just about anything if it activated.
But what's a dead man's switch? Ultimately, it's a mechanism that has to be manually engaged at all times if you want something to happen, and if that switch turns off for some reason, something else happens (like …
UPDATE: 20191229 - Added how to rotate out the oldest backups.
As frequent readers may or may not remember, I rebuilt my primary server last year, and in the process set up a fairly hefty RAID-5 array (24 terabytes) to store data. As one might reasonably expect, backing all of that stuff up is fairly difficult. I'd need to buy enough external hard drives to fit a copy of everything on there, plus extra space to store [incremental backups]((https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_backup) for some length of time. Another problem is that both Leandra and the backup drives would …
Let's say there's a website that you want to make a local mirror of. This means that you can refer to it offline, and you can make offline backups of it for archival. Let's further state that you have access to some server someplace with enough disk space to hold the copy, and that you can start a task, disconnect, and let it run to completion some time later, with GNU screen for example. Let's further state that you want the local copy of the site to not be broken when you load it in a browser; all the links …
A couple of weeks back, somebody I know asked me how I went about deploying SSL certificates from the Let's Encrypt project across all of my stuff. Without going into too much detail about what SSL and TLS are (but here's a good introduction to them), the Let's Encrypt project will issue SSL certificates to anyone who wants one, provided that they can prove somehow that they control what they're cutting a certificate for. You can't use Let's Encrypt to generate a certificate for google.com because they'd try to communicate with the server (there isn't any such thing but …
I know I haven't posted much this month. The holiday season is in full effect and life, as I'm sure you know, has been crazy. I wanted to take the time to throw a quick tip up that I just found out about which, if nothing else, will make it easier to get up and running on a Raspberry Pi that you've received as a gift. Here's the situation:
You have a new account on a machine that you want to SSH into easily. So, you want to quickly and easily transfer over one or more of your SSH public …
Let's assume that your management workstation has SSH, the Tor Browser Bundle and Ansible installed. Ansible does all over its work over an SSH connection, so there's no agent to install on any of your servers.
Let's assume that you only use SSH public key authentication to log into those servers. Password authentication is disabled with the directive PasswordAuthentication no in the …
A couple of weeks ago a new release of the Keybase software package came out, and this one included as one of its new features support for natively hosting Git repositories. This doesn't seem like it's very useful for most people, and it might really only be useful to coders, but it's a handy enough service that I think it's worth a quick tutorial. Prior to that feature release something in the structure of the Keybase filesystem made it unsuitable for storing anything but static copies of Git repositories (I don't know exactly waht), but they've now made Git a …
Chances are you're running one of two major web browsers on the desktop to read my website - Firefox or Google's Chrome.
Chrome isn't bad; I have to use it at work (it's the only browser we're allowed to have, enforced centrally). In point of fact, I'd have switched to it a long time ago if it wasn't for one thing. I make heavy use of a plugin for Firefox called Scrapbook Plus, which make it possible to take a full snapshot of a web page and store it locally so that it can be read offline, annotated, and full-text searched …
Some time ago I wrote an article about what Keybase is and what it's good for. I also mentioned one of my pet peeves, which is that, by default the fonts used by the Keybase desktop client are way, way too small to see easily on Windbringer. A couple of days ago somebody finally figured out how to blow up the fonts on the desktop, so I can finally see what's going on without putting my nose on the display (and making the mouse cursor jump around because Windbringer has a touchscreen). While I wish that this would be a …
