Tag: Linux
Le frisson de la mise à jour au matin
Si je vous écris, c'est qu'elle s'est bien passée. Infimes sont les soucis avec Linux Ubuntu. Surtout si je compare à ce que je vivais avant 2015 et l'enfer Windows. Mais, il y a toujours ce petit frisson d'inquiétude au moment de la mise à jour. Le noyau 7 est passé à une nouvelle version....
Direct USB Network connection RPi and Linux
After deciding to host my own Gitea server, I also wanted to be able to take my repositories on the road with me. And what better device to do this than a Raspberry Pi! I already had a spare Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM just sitting around and plenty of SD cards*. And I had previously tried connecting a Pi via USB to my laptop so I knew I could have it working with a direct connection rather than as a server sitting on the same network. But I quickly found out that things have changed, and previous meth...
Mein Umstieg von Windows 11 zu Linux Mint (Werbung – unbeauftragt, unbezahlt)
Werbung – unbeauftragt & unbezahlt:Aufgrund von Markennennung, Produktdarstellung und Verlinkungen handelt es sich um Werbung, auch wenn ich das Produkt selbst gekauft habe und keine Kooperation besteht. Inhalt Die Entscheidung Vorbereitung Die Installation Die weiteren Schritte Es wird gedruckt Eine AusweisApp bitte Das erste Zoom-Meeting Vorsicht DAU! Fazit Es ist nun circa einen Monat her,...
Determining Disk Space Usage on Linux/Unix
A simple guide on how to determine disk space usage on a Linux/Unix system.
The Joy of Virtual Environments in Python
A simple guide on how to determine disk space usage on a Linux/Unix system.
Updating Arch Linux After A Long Time
Stuck getting `Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.`? Well, have I got the solution for you..
git diff-highlight
Diff output from git can be hard to read. Luckily there’s a nice tool bundled with git that can help us out. Enter diff-highlight, a little perl script found in git’s contrib directory. From its own documentation: [diff-highlight] post-processes the line-oriented diff, finds pairs of lines, and highlights the differing segments. diff-highlight is shipped in a default git install but it needs to be bundled and added to your $PATH. Here’s how to do it on debian: Now you can pipe git’s diff output to to diff-highlight to get a better view of what actually changed. Optionally, you can configure […]
WordPress with sqlite3
Running WordPress with sqlite is a great alternative to mysql/mariadb.
Update Adventures
In which I ramble about my troubleshooting process
Retro Gaming with 351Elec
I recently was introduced to the wonderful world of mobile game emulation and I love it. Come join in on the fun.
My Favorite Vim Plugins
A curated list of essential plugins and command line tools to improve your productivity.
Solution for Linux apt-get "KEYEXPIRED - The following signatures were invalid"
Sometimes keys get old on a server you've had up for a while. We just need to update those third party keys.
Essential Command Line Tools
A curated list of essential plugins and command line tools to improve your productivity.
LEMP: Linux NGINX MySQL PHP Server Configuration Walkthrough
This is a quick and gritty guide to setting up a Linux based server for MySQL, PHP, NGINX.
Setting up Piwik (Matomo) analytics on Ubuntu + Nginx
I’ve used several website analytics services over the years, including Statcounter, W3Counter, Clicky and Gauges (Google Analytics always seemed kind of too complicated and pro-focused for me). I don’t really need any complex functionality - just show me the number of visits in a given period, which pages were popular, what parts of the world people come from, what browsers/devices they use, and who links to me - so I was mostly satisfied with these products. The difference was mostly the friendliness and readability of the UI. However, in the recent years, with the EU cookie law first and now GDPR, I started thinking about using something that allows me more control over the data and lets me avoid the dilemma of what kind of disclaimers I’m technically supposed to show on my site. Showing one of those idiotic “cookie banners” obviously isn’t an option since I’ve devoted so much time and energy fighting them, and I don’t think there’s a single person who actually wants to read them, but still, am I breaking some laws by not having one? I really don’t want to think about this. I found Piwik (now Matomo), which is a self-hosted analytics service, a couple of years ago - but I didn’t have time to research it properly and set it up on my server until now. It eventually took much more time than I planned (and that I’d like to admit), partly because of my specific setup, partly just because of my own personal requirements and the perfectionist approach… So I wrote down all the steps just in case I need to come back to this again later, and I’m sharing it with the hope that it will save someone else some time. Installation I’ve been using Ansible for configuring this current server since the beginning. This has the advantage that I feel pretty confident that I know exactly what was done where and why, and that I can repeat it again at any time. On the other hand, each thing just takes much more time, since for each step I need to find the right Ansible command and options instead of just running a command following the instructions. I’ll try to list both versions for most steps here. I’m also using a fairly old version of Ubuntu there - 14.04, which is the oldest currently supported LTS, which means some of the packages I need are in too old versions in the standard repository… So some changes might be needed on newer releases, but most things should probably work just fine. PHP The first step was installing PHP (yuck!) - most people may already have that set up, I didn’t. I think the last time I’ve configured PHP was with Apache, but now I’m using Nginx; its configuration is much simpler and easier to understand, but I think it’s still not as popular as Apache, at least in the PHP world, so guides are often written with Apache in mind first. Of course I had to make sure I understand everything I’m writing, which means that in the process I’ve learned more about Nginx and PHP configuration that I ever wanted to 😉 My Ubuntu includes PHP 5 by de…
LXD networking and additional IPs
Hetzner's networking can be strange
bashblog and your gopherhole
Integrating bashblog with public_gopher
git remotes with ssh aliases
Did you know that ~/.ssh/config aliases work for git remotes? ~/.ssh/config You can now use gh:username/repo as the remote in place of git@github.com:username/repo, which is much shorter and easier to type many times! git clone gh:benharri/learngit There are many other use cases for the ssh_config file. For example, here is my config for the tilde machine for easy ssh connections. Then use ssh tilde to start a new ssh session. This also works with scp: try something like this scp file.txt tilde:workspace/. in place of scp file.txt ben@tilde.team:workspace/. The ssh_config file is super useful. Check man ssh_config for a full […]
Why I chose Silex for this website
Another tale of spending more time messing with blogging software than actually writing
Setting up an HTTPS site on Nginx
This is my SSL configuration guide. There are many like it, but this one is mine… Last week I needed to set up my first HTTPS site for Hive Mac [link removed - site has been shut down since then], and I went ahead and did the same thing for my new blog domain. It took some figuring out, so I’ve written this all down, if only to save myself some time next time I need to do this. Update 22.01.2019: I’ve now switched to Let’s Encrypt which makes the whole process much simpler. See “Setting up Let’s Encrypt”, and then jump to “Testing the certificate” when you’re ready. Choose a Certificate Authority and buy a certificate The way the system works is that the certificate you receive when visiting an HTTPS site is verified by another certificate owned by your CA, which might in turn be verified by another certificate higher up, until you reach a root certificate which is supposed to be already installed on your system, like this: There are many root CAs and you probably have about a hundred of their certificates installed on your OS: What you need to provide as a server owner is the bottom certificate that belongs to you (which you buy) and all the certificates up the chain (which you can download from the CA’s site) except the one at the top (which the users should already have). To get your certificate, you need to get it from one of those CAs. They usually cost somewhere between $10 and $100 a year for the most basic one (“Domain Validation”), a couple times more for a wildcard certificate (for *.yourdomain.com) and much, much more for an EV (Extended Verification) certificate - it’s the one that shows the company name in the address bar apart from a lock icon: Safari doesn’t show the company name there, but it does show a green lock icon: These are much more expensive, because they require passing very thorough and formal verification to ensure that the company is what they claim to be and that they’re following all required procedures. However, now it’s also possible to get the certificate for free. Mozilla together with EFF have launched Let’s Encrypt, a new CA free for everyone that’s meant to help convert the whole web to secure, encrypted HTTPS. I’d strongly recommend switching to Let’s Encrypt, because apart from saving you some money every year, it also provides some tools that automate the whole process. You only need to run some commands once when generating the first certificate (or when you add new domains), and then the certificate automatically renews itself using a cron job every 2 months. Setting up Let’s Encrypt [2019] To install and set up Let’s Encrypt, open the Certbot site, select your configuration and follow the instructions there. In case of Nginx on Ubuntu, you’ll need to run: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install python-certbot-nginx And then there are a few ways of generating the certificate and updating your config - in the order from most automated to most manu…