today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 22, 2023

• Notes to self: Ansible, SSH, and a password

  Using a pipe lookup, the password can be read directly from a password manager API program which emits a single-line password to stdout. Not super elegant, but workable to the point of being usable directly in an inventory file, and the variable is not visible in the play.

• Grafana Loki doesn't compact log chunks and what this means for you

  Many of these streams of log messages are low volume and infrequent because some parts of their labels are uncommon. Some systemd units only emit a few messages a day; systems may not log kernel messages for weeks; 'warning' level syslog messages (especially for specific units) are uncommon, and so on. Certainly you'll have some frequent, high volume log streams, but you'll also have many that only emit at most a few messages a day. These low volume streams are where your problems are in a default Loki configuration.

• How to password protect a static HTML page with no JS

  I recently saw Robin Moisson's method of password protecting a statically served HTML page. It's quite neat! But it does rely on JavaScript. That got me wondering if there was a way to encrypt a static page only using CSS?

  And... I think I've done it!

  I'll warn you now, this is a deeply stupid way to solve the problem.

• How I organize my digital music collection

  Unfortunately, the hard drive space required to store my collection in a lossless format was far out of reach for me at the time, so I resigned myself to keeping everything as lossy low-bitrate MP3s. Later, a new free/open-source and patent-unencumbered format called Ogg Vorbis turned up on the scene, and my enthusiasm for it overpowered my horror at re-encoding from one lossy format to another, so I gritted my teeth at the quality degradation and converted everything.

  Now in the present, Vorbis has been surpassed by Opus, FLAC exists, hard drives are cheap, and it’s time to start over.

  My objective is to end up with a high-quality lossless “archival” version of all my physical and digital album purchases on my home storage server, comprehensively tagged with a full set of accurate metadata. Along with that, I want at least two sets of derived Ogg Opus re-encodings with differing levels of compression/quality: a lower-quality one for keeping on my cellphone, and a better one for desktop and laptop personal computer use.

• Use Rocky Linux ISO as a Local Repository

  There are various cases when you may want to utilize the local repository such as on a temporary basis, the internet connection is not allowed and you want to install a specific package.