Category: linux

Enable dnsmasq DNS query caching on Ubuntu 16.04

It appears that by default, DNS query caching is disabled in dnsmasq on Ubuntu 16.04. At least it is for my Xubuntu desktop. You can check if it’s disabled for you with the dig command: $ dig @127.0.1.1 ubuntu.com $ dig @127.0.1.1 ubuntu.com Yes, run it twice. Once to add the entry to the cache, […]

Criticize grsecurity? Get sued.

Thinking about using the grsecurity linux kernel hardening patches? Better check with your legal team. Not only are they likely violating the GPLv2 with their patch-set, but if you point out that, in your opinion, they are violating the GPLv2, they’ll sue you. And not only you, but anybody that is even remotely involved in […]

How to solve RPMs created by Alien having file conflicts

I generate release packages for my software with Alien, which amongst other things converts .deb packages to .rpm. On Fedora 24 however, the generated RPMs cause a small problem when installed with Yum: Transaction check error: file / from install of cfgtrack-1.0-2.noarch conflicts with file from package filesystem-3.2-20.el7.x86_64 file /usr/bin from install of cfgtrack-1.0-2.noarch conflicts […]

ScriptForm v1.1: Webserver that automatically generates forms to serve as frontends to scripts

ScriptForm is a stand-alone webserver that automatically generates forms from JSON to serve as frontends to scripts. It takes a JSON file which contains form definitions, constructs web forms from this JSON and serves these to users over HTTP. The user can select a form and fill it out. When the user submits the form, it […]

Multi-repo Git status checking script

I’ve got a whole bunch of Git repositories in my ~/Projects/ directory. All of those may have unstaged, uncommitted or unpushed changes. I find this hard to keep track of properly, so I wrote a script to do this for me. The output looks like this: As you can see, it shows: Untracked files: File that […]

Ansible-cmdb v1.17: Generate a host overview of Ansible facts.

I’ve just released ansible-cmdb v1.17. Ansible-cmdb takes the output of Ansible’s fact gathering and converts it into a static HTML overview page containing system configuration information. It supports multiple templates (fancy html, txt, markdown, json and sql) and extending information gathered by Ansible with custom data. This release includes the following bugfixes;: A bug that caused whitespace to be […]

Disable “New release available” emails on Ubuntu

We have our Ubuntu machines set up to mail us the output of cron jobs like so: $ cat /etc/crontab SHELL=/bin/sh PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin MAILTO=admin@example.com # m h dom mon dow user command This is encrible useful, since cronjobs should never output anything unless something is wrong. Unfortunately, this means we also get emails like this: /etc/cron.weekly/update-notifier-common: […]

cfgtrack: A simpel tool that tracks and reports diffs in files between invocations.

Sometimes other people change configurations on machines that I help administer. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t know when they changed something or what they changed. There are many tools available to track configuration changes, but most are way overpowered. As a result they require too much time to set up and configure properly. All I want is […]

Alien Deb to RPM convert fails with error: “Use of uninitialized value in split…” [FIXED]

TL;DR: Run alien under the script tool. I was trying to get my build server to build packages for one of my projects. One step involves converting a Debian package to a RPM by means of the Alien tool. Unfortunately it failed with the following error: alien -r -g ansible-cmdb-9.99.deb Warning: alien is not running as root! […]

Terrible Virtualbox disk performance

For a while I’ve noticed that Virtualbox has terrible performance when install Debian / Ubuntu packages. A little top, iotop and atop research later, and it turns out the culprit is the disk I/O, which is just ludicrously slow. The cause is the fact that Virtualbox doesn’t have “Use host IO cache” turned on by […]

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