Notes about beginning LDAP

One of the things I hadn't the chance of managing at work is centralized authentication, either via LDAP, Kerberos or ActiveDirectory (not sorry about this one). LDAP in particular, has always been in the back of my mind because it's often cited in conversation ("this service authenticates against the domain ldap server" or "the bind…

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Weird ZFS misbehaviors

(spoiler: on one of my machines, I run ZFS off a LUKS-encrypted device. I know this is sub-optimal, but at the time it's working okay for me). I try to host as much of my core services as it is reasonable to (without it becoming a second part-time job). Part of this means that I…

I’ve got too many computers

Oh boy, I should have seen this coming. I'll be moving shortly. Same city, just hopping from a flat to another. I am packing things around and one by one I had to touch all the computers I have accumulated during the last five years that I've spent in this house. They're just too many…

Some neat Vagrant tricks

I've been using Vagrant for a while now (though I'm not a Vagrant expert at all) and I've found myself setting some configuration over and over again as well performing some tasks on every new virtual machine the very same way I'd do on a physical one. Things I like to set on a new…

A Linux development environment on Mac OS

I've been given a Macbook Pro at work. It was actually my choice, since it was the only machine with an US keyboard layout, 16 gig of ram and last but not the least, the easiest way not to use Windows and have a Unix environment at my fingertips. It's not too bad, but I'll…

Installing VirtualBox-6.0 on CentOS 7.5

This is a quick set of notes about the installation of VirtualBox-6.0 on CentOS 7.5. This OS is not explicitly listed on VirtualBox's website, so.. Reference page: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads . Install the appropriate key: sudo yum install -y wget wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | rpm --import - (You might want to change the wget command to…

Passing Red Hat’s RHCSA certification (EX200): my experience

Just a week ago I passed the Red Hat Certified System Administrator exam, and here are some brief notes about my experience. Why the RHCSA certification? At first I didn't plan on taking the exam at all. But I have been using pretty much Debian/Xubuntu only for a long long time and for the last…

Learning Docker

I have been blogging very little and I've been thinking for a while about how to start blogging more. I have decided to publicly take some challenges, and to use this blog to write about said challenges. Since this blog is mainly a technical blog, most of said challenges will be technical challenges. So for…

On commenting code: external vs internal documentation

In my day job, I sometimes have to write scripts in order to automate things that either happen too often to be handled manually or need to be handled in the shortest amount of time possible.But more often, I am tasked with modifying the behavior of an already existing script and/or adding new functionalities.Needless to…

XDM, fingerprint readers and ecryptfs

how to setup pam/xdm to work correctly with fingerprint login and ecryptfs-encrypted filesystem