six demon bag

Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

2020-06-11

Installing Discourse on Devuan

Before deciding on setting up my Q&A site with Question2Answer I evaluated several programs, one of them being Discourse. And even though I ultimately decided against Discourse (because the setup was too complex and it doesn't have all the features I wanted) I don't want my experiences go to waste, so I'll publish them here.

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Posted 19:57 [permalink]

2020-06-02

Privacy-friendly Logging With Nginx

IP addresses are considered personal information, so your web server is not supposed to log them, at least not in a way that would allow tracing the address back to a person. The usual way to comply with this requirement is to mask part of the visitor's IP address, e.g. 192.168.23.42 → 192.168.23.0 (IPv4) or fd22:e03e:f88a:ea84::42 → fd22:e03e:: (IPv6).

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Posted 15:27 [permalink]

2019-05-05

Firefox extensions disabled due to expired intermediate CA certificate

As most people probably know by now Mozilla fucked up the certificate chain for Firefox extensions. Great. And their proposed (temporary) fix is "just enable telemetry for us, and you'll probably get the fix in the next couple hours". Let me think about that for a moment ...

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Posted 12:59 [permalink]

2017-08-04

Useful settings for grub on Debian

Boot a kernel just once

If you want to test a new kernel without having access to the console you need to make sure that the system comes back up with the old kernel if the new one panics. Add a setting panic=2 to the kernel commandline in /etc/default/grub to have the system automatically reboot in case of a kernel panic, and tell grub to boot a saved kernel by default:

GRUB_DEFAULT="saved"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="panic=2"

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Posted 01:45 [permalink]

2016-12-17

Disable AVAHI Daemon on Debian

To prevent the AVAHI daemon on Debian systems from running without actually uninstalling the package avahi-daemon or touching the runlevels do this:

touch /var/run/avahi-daemon/disabled-for-unicast-local
sed -i 's/^#\?\(AVAHI_DAEMON_DETECT_LOCAL\)=.*/\1=1/' /etc/default/avahi-daemon
service restart avahi-daemon

I've seen people suggest putting a line exit 0 into /etc/default/avahi-daemon, but I wouldn't recommend that, because it would prevent not only starting the daemon, but also stopping it.

Posted 13:31 [permalink]

2013-03-12

TSM BA Client 6.4 on Debian

Although IBM doesn't officially support its TSM client on Linux distributions other than SLES and RHEL the client works quite nicely on Debian. With version 6.4 you need at least the following 4 packages on AMD64 systems:

  • TIVsm-BA
  • TIVsm-API64
  • gskcrypt64
  • gskssl64

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Posted 00:46 [permalink]

2012-11-16

Loop-mount VirtualBox Disk Images

On Linux you can mount disk images via loopback devices. Partitions inside disk images can be made accessible via kpartx from the multipath-tools. Unfortunately this does not work for VirtualBox disk images (.vdi). It's possible to loop-mount those disk images as network block devices, though.

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Posted 01:53 [permalink]

2012-08-29

Linker Errors When Building Xlock on Debian

When building xlockmore (version 5.39) on one of my Debian boxes I encountered two linker issues, one with libxext, the other with libcrypt. Both issues persisted even after running configure with the --without-ext and --without-crypt options. WTF?! Why would anyone with at least half a brain provide --without-FEATURE options for apparently required features?

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Posted 02:03 [permalink]