Ever since I switched to podman, I really appreciated the rootless setup. Something about increased security. Recently I had to help someone out with docker rootless and I was really missing podman unshare. Which basically is the unshare subcommand. Luckily something similar exists, which can be used for docker rootless, namely nsenter. To execute a command in the namespace of the docker rootless daemon, you can use this: nsenter -U --preserve-credentials -n -t $(pgrep dockerd) somecommand

Recently I started playing Fallout 4 by Bethesda via Steam on my Ubuntu desktop with Awesome WM. Quite quickly in the game (once you gather different bits of ‘junk’ and other pieces), you will get annoyed by the fact you can not do a simple search in a cabinet/container for an item. You have you manually scroll through the entire list and I was fed up with that. Luckily there appears to be a perfect mod to fix this issue: Fall UI - Inventory.

Recently I had to use the nsset commandline tool, which can be used to modify the DNS records of your Ubuntu LoCo (Local Community). The nsset tool can be found on the LoCo Teams DNS Admin wiki page in the attachments section. Just want to say that I really appreciate this tool and want to thank all contributors! I’ve discovered a bug (deprecation actually), which I can not fix. To be honest, I am a SysAdmin and not a programmer.

Mozilla Firefox has been a privacy-first browser for years and is excellent. Recently I found my way to (yet another page on the excellent) page on the Arch wiki, about Firefox privacy. There I found out about the following setting (which can be modified in about:config) to increase/enhance your privacy to resist fingerprinting even more: privacy.resistFingerprinting The wiki page includes a warning (which, I hoped for, would have been exaggerated). It made me find a bug in the website of a primary school, but also broke DRM playback for a major streaming service.

Veeam has a plugin for Oracle RMAN. Unfortunately this plugin encountered a slightly grumpy sysadmin who wants to keep servers secure. the documentation In the the official documentation they state to run the tool and it should just work. We got the following output (I’ve omitted the output after the error): user@host:~$ ./OracleRMANConfigTool --wizard Enter backup server name or IP address [hostname]: Enter backup server port number [10006]: Enter username [username]: Enter password for username [(do not change the existing password)]: Available backup repositories: 1.

Somewhat recently I was reading about x265 (High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC)) and noticed it had quite some (space) advantages over its predecessor x264 (Advanced Video Coding (AVC)). I have a large family video collection (which keeps growing) and thought I might save some space and bandwidth, by converting them from 264 to 265. Reading up on my GPU ( 6600 XT ) specifications, it should support hardware encoding! Then my time got consumed by other projects, until…

Preferbly I use podman, but sometimes you are forced to use docker. Ideally you then switch to docker rootless, because of, well, security. I noticed that the docker rootless installation instructions are not ideal (e.g. contain a bug). Took me a while to figure it out though, but wanted to share. Especially since this might mean, more people (who explicitly want or need to run docker) can run docker safer (rootless).

Recently I upgraded my main Ubuntu system from 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu) to 23.04 (Lunar Lobster). I’m used to having little downtime and only minor issues. The same applies now, except that I had some small issues. Since I can not be the only one, I wanted to share these (YMMV). pipewire Sound worked fine after the update, except for the volume knob of my Das Keyboard 4 (Ultimate Edition). Controlling the volume via the GUI worked fine by the way.

TL;DR Do not buy Patriot Burst Elite 1920GB if you expect normal SMART information. If you have one and are looking for the SMART values, skip to the end. Price / performance So I started looking around for a large SSD with a good price/performance ratio. Then I found the Patriot Burst Elite 1920GB SSD from Patriot Memory. It has a 3 year warranty and 800 TB TBW (Total Bytes Written), for about 96,- euro (including shipping).

Recently I was using podman and started prometheus and was unpleasantly surprised with the following errors: ts=2022-07-13T06:35:38.724Z caller=query_logger.go:113 level=error component=activeQueryTracker msg="Failed to create directory for logging active queries" ts=2022-07-13T06:35:38.724Z caller=query_logger.go:91 level=error component=activeQueryTracker msg="Error opening query log file" file=/prometheus/data/queries.active err="open data/queries.active: no such file or directory" panic: Unable to create mmap-ed active query log goroutine 1 [running]: github.com/prometheus/prometheus/promql.NewActiveQueryTracker({0x336d549, 0x5}, 0x14, {0x3d8ba20, 0xc0004e3590}) /app/promql/query_logger.go:121 +0x3cd main.main() /app/cmd/prometheus/main.go:618 +0x69d3 exit code: 2 At first I focused on the mmap-ed panic message, but that was the result of an earlier error.