May 3, 2020

Automatic Debian Installs

When embracing “devops”-style workflows as a sysadmin, one of the most important things is to reduce time to get tasks done; this is why we use Ansible, Docker, and all manner of other tools. Creating VMs is not a quick pactice most of the time. One of the common ways to get around this is to have a golden image and clone it for new VMs, but I don’t find that cloning is the best practice, as images may need to be changed or adapted to fit other workflows. It also does not help as much for physical installs. I found that the best way is to use Debian Preseed configuration to do this all for me, automatically, in an extensible manner.

April 30, 2020

Digital Archiving: Camera to PDF

I wanted to get a system up and running for scanning my own books and documents into digital, primarily PDF formats, without being destructive or expensive, and I have managed to take care of that today. I set a camera up on a tripod, rested a book on a cardboard rest at a 45 degree angle, and captured every page behind a sheet of glass as I turned the pages. Once I took the pictures of the individual pages, I loaded them onto my computer, and cleaned the pages up with scantailor, a program that can change the files to clean up lighting, orientation, margins etc. I found that this program worked pretty good with the defaults, and dumped every page into .tif files. The images could converted into individual pdfs with tiff2pdf, another free tool that worked well with a script to convert it all over. Lastly, I had to combine all of the individual PDF pages into the finished document; this was the hardest step for me. I had taken pictures of every file on one side, then the other, so my pages were out of order. I then had to use pdfunite to alternate the page numbers, which I did manually. For anything longer than what I did, I would have worked on getting the page numbers sequentially, or work out a good way to script it out.

April 26, 2020

RTFM Culture

RTFM, or Read The Fine Manual, is a common saying around the Linux community, among others. Some distros, such as Arch and Gentoo, take this to almost be their slogan (although Arch has their own. I am using Arch, btw), while other cultures have emerged around other distrobutions no quite so brow-beatingly stringent. Evaluating the benefits of one way or the other is not the purpose of this prose, but instead to just talk briefly about RTFM.

April 19, 2020

Arma 3 Server

I set up an Arma server for my friends during the downtime of socail isolation, which was fun and fairly easy. I did it on a Linux host, and then on a Linux VPS, and had some good and bad experiences. For bad, Arma is primarily a Windows game, and the anti-cheat, BattleEye, does not work properly even in Wine, so it has to be disabled for me to play on my Linux rigs. That means I could not use the RCON BattleEye features, which I wanted to use to do some remote management and monitoring. Installing mods was a bit of a pain, but doable once I found some download sites for downloading mods from the Steam workshop, as steamcmd does not have that capability (wishlist!). But there is a Linux server binary, and it works fine, is stable, and uses minimal resources. The config file is pretty easy to work with, and although the documentation isn’t great, it isn’t insurmountable. Always happy to answer questions for anyone wanting to run servers on Linux, based on my experiences!

April 19, 2020

Matrix

I have a pretty small working group of friends that I talk to, and the primary friends that I game with were using Discord. I had been using third party clients, in an effort to fix the reliability problems I was having on Linux (which didn’t help), and to keep out of what one may call “botnet.” I wanted off of that, and to move to something more usable and extensible. So I went ahead and set up a Matrix Synapse homeserver.

April 14, 2020

Built vs Bought

As I transition to a new job, and can see how a bigger organisation handles their infrastructure, workflow, and software, I have an oppurtunity to reflect on a question which has followed me through my previous positions, and is really a life-defining philosophical question. The debate of building something entirely oneself, versus buying parts or an entire solution, is not just relevant to IT admins, and something that is increasing relevant to everything as more and more things are being comoditised.

April 14, 2020

Thinkpad X270

I recently got a Thinkpad X270, used, and have been using it as my daily for a few weeks. I have some impressions that I wanted to share, which may be helpful. First, I have the 1080p IPS panel, and it is a lovely laptop screen. A huge improvement from the 2010-2012 era 768 screens I was used to, and I am very happy with the extra screen real estate, viewing angles, and quality. The keyboard is a pretty standard new-era keyboard, with the Trackpoint recessed too much for what I would prefer. The new-type fingerprint scanner has not yet had its drivers released on Linux, and I don’t see that happening soon, so if that is a priority, it may be best to stick with an X260. One big selling feature is the inclusion of USB-C, which I plan on setting up with a dock. Batter life is quite excellent; with the spilt batteries it is difficult to estimate, but somewhere between 8-10 hours sounds reasonable. Overall a decent purchase, but waiting for the price to come down on these models or even the Ryzen ones is probably a safer bet, sticking with whatever old model is still kicking around.

February 20, 2020

Getting to Grips with Docker

I had a job interview recently, and I learned how this prospective employer was doing their infrastructure: using Docker and Ansible. I have been using Ansible more and more, getting to grips with how best to employ the tool. I have some work to do catching up there, but totally doable. I did feel lacking in my practical skillset with Docker; I had just docker run some things before. So I set about wrapping my head around the technology, and it just clicked.

February 6, 2020

LFCS

This week I earned the Linux Foundation Certified Sysadmin certification. This is a cert that I got in hopes of following a career path in exactly what the name denotates. For those who don’t know, the cert is very similar to the RHCSA, and a probably interchangeable aside from the signing authority and the LFCS allows one to use Ubuntu for the exam. It was not an easy exam, being performance based, but I was well prepared and passed with flying colours. Find and various invocations thereof was perhaps the most useful command for me during the exam, but I had thankfully mastered most uses for it already. There were some other sections on the test that I found surprised to see on there, given the official study material. This material is really not beneficial, and I found the best cram-study refrence on a github page.

January 23, 2020

cyberchargen

I have been working on a another, actual coding project in my spare time. I enjoyed learning Python the first time, and I thought making a quick and easy character generator for pen and paper RPG Cyberpunk 2020 would be a fun reentry. Plus, its 2020! The goal is to have a few options of character templates, get into some guts of Python, and learn to package it by the end of the year. Where it goes from there, who knows. The things that could be done with a simple character generator are pretty vast, so we will see where my ambitions end up. Anyway, follow along on my github.