I'm still around and kicking, just taking it easy (or as easy as feasible right now). As I write this, we're well into March and I'm trying to be gentle with myself - not forcing writing if I can't string words together (which is annoying when ideas come in the shower), not really looking for anything specific to do, just letting things unfold for a while. I don't have any big projects lined up, nor am I looking for any (I do, actually, but it's going to be one of those "pick at it off and on for a while" kind …
Note: The purpose of this post is mostly to document how to reconfigure laptops like my mom's to boot from a flash drive. The actual imaging process is only parenthetically laid out. If you're in a position where this is something you find yourself doing chances are you're already a competant sysadmin and know how to use dd anyway. However, I can't just leave it unfinished.
Due to how many things are now inextricably tied to one's computers these days, from banking to paying bills, it seemed a good idea to back up my mom's laptop while I was in …
If you've been to anyone's house in the last 20 years you've undoubtedly seen a bunch of stuff plugged into a power strip. Once found in office most of the time they've become as essential to everyday life as mobile phones. However, everybody has also encountered the most common failure mode of power strips - accidentally hitting the power strip and accidentally turning everything off.
This is far from a strange problem; if it's got a power switch chances are somebody's hit it by mistake. The obvious thing to do is put a cover of some kind over it. It's even …
Given the proliferation of spam on just about every vaguely workable platform these days it seems sheer insanity to attempt to run your own mail server. If it's out there, it's ripe for abuse in one way in another. And yet, e-mail is still probably one of the best ways to get status reports from your machines every day (my SMTP bridge notwithstanding). It is thus that the default configuration for mail servers these days defaults to "no way in hell will I relay a message for you," which is a net good for the the Internet as a whole …
Let's say that you need to be able to access a server somewhere on your network. This is a pretty common thing to do if you've got a fair amount of infrastructure at home. But let's say that your computer, for whatever reason, doesn't have the horsepower to run SSH because the crypto used requires math that older systems can't carry out in anything like reasonable time. This is a not uncommon situation for retrocomputing enthusiasts. In the days before SSH we used telnet for this, but pretty much the entire Net doesn't anymore because the traffic wasn't encrypted, so …
cave diving - noun phrase - The act of tunneling through multiple VPNs, bastion hosts, and chokepoints to access some network assets, usually production infrastructure in a more restricted network. Less hazardous than but just as easy to screw up as real life cave diving.
software installation roulette - The practice of piping the output of a web browser or other HTTP tool directly through a system shell, usually as root to install something important. The danger is that you don't know if the shell script has anything nefarious in it (such as rm -rf / or the installation of a rootkit) and by the time you find out it's far too late.
For example: sudo bash -c "$(wget -q -O- https://totally.legit.example.com/install.sh)"
Longtime readers have no doubt observed that I plug a lot weird shit into my exocortex - from bookmark managers to card catalogues to just about anything that has an API. Sometimes this is fairly straightforward; if it's on the public Net I can get to it (processing that data is a separate issue, of course). But what about the stuff I have around the lab? I'm always messing with new toys that are network connected and occasionally useful. The question is, how do I get it out of the lab and out to my exocortex? Sometimes I write bots to …
20221229: UPDATE: Added what to do when you change your Backblaze application key.
20201023: UPDATE: Added command to clean the local backup cache.
20200426: UPDATE: Fixed the "pruned oldest snapshots" command.
A couple of years back I did a how-to about using a data backup utility called Duplicity to make offsite backups of Leandra to Backblaze B2. (referer link) It worked just fine; it was stable, it was easy to script, you knew what it was doing. But over time it started to show its warts, as everything does. For starters, it was unusually slow when compared to the implementation …
