For experimental reasons I was running a RAID0 array (the speed!) off of two Sandisk Cruiser Mini USB sticks connected to a Raspberry PI.
As expected, due to wear and tear one of the flash memories eventually failed causing the array to go read-only and crash everything that was writing to it, including the array activation.
Same as one can never have enough memory, one can also never have enough disk space. Luckily, on virtual machines that’s easier to resolve than with physical hardware. But increasing the disk space available for a VirtualBox machine is still a multi-step process.
There are cases where you’d want a particular site or subfolder to be easily accessible from specific locations (like the intranet) but apply a minimum protection from public eye for the wide internet.
Apache does support this mixed configuration for its sites through its htaccess functionality.
When things have been running for long enough various updates and configuration changes start adding up with leftovers bound to cause an issue sooner or later.
With Virtualmin, one such issue is the system’s inability to automatically update its scripts to newer versions based on the incorrect detection that an older PHP version is running on the server instead of the actual one.
OpenWRT upgrades itself by saving configuration files from known locations (plus manually defined files), overwriting the partition with the latest firmware and then restoring the saved configuration.
This usually works for the configuration itself, however the process doesn’t take care of any custom packages that were previously installed manually (either through LuCI or with opkg). These packages need to be noted down beforehand and then reinstalled.
There are times when you need to filter out what some hosts in the network can or cannot do. When you have a router running OpenWRT this can be done at the firewall level.
But if you’re not much into advanced configuration and just want to completely block out some network hosts from reaching the internet (and hence phoning home) then it’s a lot simpler to do this directly from the DHCP and simply leave them without a DNS and gateway configuration.
If you’re looking for a quick and simple method to redirect your plain HTTP site visitors to the SSL edition without fancy server-side configuration (or asking your host for help), this can be easily done through the ubiquitous .htaccess file present and supported on most Apache-powered hosting services.
Due to their write-sensitive nature, flash storage (both USB sticks and SD cards) normally don’t get zeroed out when data is deleted, making any images created for backup purposes contain random data in the empty sectors. This makes images take up the full size of the disk/card even if very little is actually used from it and also makes image poorly compressible.
The solution is to zero out the unused space in the image file before compressing it. Linux has all the tools necessary for this task readily built-in. If one is not available, a bootable self-contained system such as SystemRescue can be used instead.
The TCP Wrappers suite of programs is no longer included in RHEL 8, meaning the hosts.allow/deny files no longer exist nor work. This makes quick filtering SSH connections per IP address a bit more difficult as it requires configuring the firewall.
Luckily, the tcp_wrappers package is still available in the EPEL repository even for versions 8 so the previous functionality can be restored, albeit with some additional steps.
Due to lacking driver support for newer hardware I have been missing hardware monitoring on my home server for more than 4 years now, having access to only hard disks temperatures.
Now the time has come to upgrade the good ol’ machine to a new hardware configuration – and of course the new hardware is also unsupported in even the latest CentOS kernels.
The Raspberry Pi is very handy for fun projects, and sometimes these projects require running specific events (like playing a sound) on startup or shutdown, or even in both instances – for an interactive machine that reacts to user input and presence, for example.
Sounds on startup and shutdown can also be used as a means of confirming those specific actions taking place – startup is complete and shutdown is taking place (and will complete in a very short while).
Proxy virtual hosts are very handy when you need to publicly access a tertiary system on your local network and you only have one IP address to use but there’s a master web server already configured.
If that server is running Apache, adding a proxy vhost to pass outside requests to the correct LAN system is as simple as adding a new virtual host to the configuration.
