today's howtos
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My Offsite Backup - March 2023
Having a disaster recovery strategy for my most important data that is easy to maintain.
The offline backup should be stored offsite in a secure and trustworthy location. The data must be saved on at least two mediums to reduce the risk of data loss due to hardware failure. The data must be encrypted to secure my data in case of theft. The case should be easily transported and protect the mediums against common risks like shock and water. The frequency of the offsite backup should be around every 1-2 weeks.
For more information, please visit my backup guide.
One of the main things to consider is: I must be able to recover everything with just this one offsite backup.
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How DigitalOcean became MANRS compliant
DigitalOcean peers on some of the largest peering exchanges in the world, with thousands of bilateral peering sessions. To become compliant with this action, we engineered a solution to scalably ensure that our peers were sending legitimate prefixes on our bilateral peering sessions. In the process, we had to work within the hardware and software scaling bounds of our current network. For this process to be operationally sound, it must be automated with no operator intervention and must use information already published by peers — mostly, Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) and Internet Routing Registry (IRR) objects.
To understand the scaling concerns of filtering bilateral peers, we built the histogram below (Figure 1) based on the published IRR objects of our peers. Each histogram bucket represents the size of the prefix list we’d need to generate and apply — the y-axis being the number of peers that would require a prefix list of that size. For example, there are roughly 30 peers that would need a prefix list with 200 to 300 entries.
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What I like using Grafana Loki for (and where I avoid it)
These days we have a Grafana Loki server that collects system logs from our Linux servers (which has sometimes been an exciting learning experience), along with our long standing central syslog server and, of course, the system logs on servers themselves (both in the systemd journal and the files written to /var/log by syslog and programs like Exim). As I've written before, we have both because Loki doesn't duplicate our central syslog server, but that old entry sort of begs the question of when I use Grafana Loki instead of looking at another source of logs.
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Retrocomputing is as much optimism as an escape
I also appreciate their optimism. I didn’t connect the dots before, but retrocomputing fans are natural allies to the right to repair and homebrew tech communities. Keeping these systems alive, and expanding upon them with modern enhancements, hints to an alternative future which is more inclusive, empowering, and fun.
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How to Create Device Files in Linux Using mknod Command
In Linux, everything is a file, even physical devices such as disk drives, CD/DVD ROM, and floppy disks are represented using files. However, these files are not regular data files. Instead, these special files are called device files and they can generate or receive the data.
Usually, all the special files are present under the /dev directory. Some of the common examples of special files are /dev/null, /dev/zero, /dev/full, and /dev/sr0.
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How to Install Icinga2 Monitoring Tool on Ubuntu 20.04/22.04
Icinga2 is a powerful free and open-source monitoring tool that keeps an eye on your network resources and sends alerts or notifications in case of failure or outages. It also collects metrics from network resources that can help you generate performance data and create reports.
Icinga2 is scalable and it can monitor small to large and complex networks across various locations. In this guide, you will learn how to install the Icinga2 monitoring tool on Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 22.04.
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Bash Alias: How It Works and Why You Need One
The bash shell incorporates some of the best features of the C and Korn shells, such as job control, directory manipulation, and aliases.
Aliases are very helpful to users who often type long commands or search their bash histories for a command they typed earlier.
{
# statements
}
{
# statements
}
{
mkdir $1
cd $1
exampleFunction(){
mkdir $1
cd $1
t=531
echo “The value of t is $t”
echo ‘The value of t is $t’