today's howtos and technical posts
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Network World ☛ Getting started with scripting on Linux, Part 1
Developing scripts to handle your more complicated tasks can make your efforts on the Linux command line considerably easier and more reliable - at least once the scripts are written and tested. Scripts, after all, provide a way for you to turn a complicated series of commands into something you can invoke by typing only the name of the script. In this post, we'll take a look at the syntax and commands that are used in bash scripts and provide some many examples and suggestions.
This post is intended to help new Linux users get comfortable with scripting and learn some ways to ensure their scripts are both reliable and easily maintained. This post also offers some suggestions on formatting scripts to improve readability.
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University of Toronto ☛ We've switched (back) to using Bind for our local DNS resolvers
As part of our local network environment, we have some local DNS resolvers that people here use (or at least are supposed to use). These resolvers handle multiple jobs; they resolve our own normal DNS names (or some of them), our internal only DNS names, and handle all of the recursion for lookups for external names. Originally we ran these resolvers using Bind on OpenBSD. When OpenBSD stopped supporting Bind, we switched to a setup using Unbound and NSD. We needed NSD as well as Unbound because we wanted our resolvers to have a full copy of our local zones, so they wouldn't need our master DNS server to be up to answer those names. The local NSD was the authoritative secondary for our DNS zones, and the local Unbound knew to query it for them.
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University of Toronto ☛ Seeing how fast people will probe you after you get a new TLS certificate
For reasons outside the scope of this entry I spent some time today setting up a new Apache-based web server. More specifically, I spent some time setting up a new virtual host on a web server I'd set up last Friday. Of course this virtual host had a TLS certificate, or at least was going to once I had Let's Encrypt issue me one. Some of the time I'm a little ad-hoc with the process of setting up a HTTPS site; I'll start out by writing the HTTP site configuration, get a TLS certificate issued, edit the configuration to add in the HTTPS version, and so on. This can make it take a visible amount of time between the TLS certificate being issued, and thus appearing in Certificate Transparency logs, and there being any HTTPS website that will respond if you ask for it.
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University of Toronto ☛ Some notes on using the logcli program to query Grafana Loki
One of the pieces of Grafana Loki, sometimes misleadingly described as 'Prometheus for logs', is logcli, an all purpose command line program for querying Loki in various ways. Some of what it can do is mostly of interest to Loki administrators, but it has two major sub-commands for making LogQL queries for either logs or metrics. I recently wrote a script that dealt with logcli and in the process I learned some things I want to write down for future use, although by the time I use them Loki may have changed some of them.
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DT ☛ Unclutter Your Home Directory
Manual cleanup is often required after removing software, but how can we get directories out of the way even for software that's in use?
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James G ☛ Moments of Joy: Technical Solutions
I have a static website. This means that whenever I make a change to the site I need to "rebuild" each page. This involves taking the content of the page -- for example, a blog post -- and turning it into a full page, ready to be served to a reader. I built a custom tool to generate my site as an engineering challenge. I had -- and have -- a lot of fun tinkering with my site, even though the underlying source code is not as elegant as it could be.
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Manuel Matuzović ☛ HTML: The Bad Parts
You've probably heard statements along the lines of "HTML is already accessible by default" or "You don't need to reinvent this perfectly fine HTML control". I consider these to be more of general claims rather than universal truths. It's extremely important for web developers to recognize gaps in the platform. To that end, I've decided to collect a few instances where HTML falls short, through accessibility issues or usability issues.
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Manuel Matuzović ☛ Test-driven HTML and accessibility
When I started writing unit tests and following a test-driven development (TDD) workflow, I was stoked with the immediate feedback and confidence I gained in every line of JavaScript I wrote.
TDD improved my software design with simpler, more predictable code. It saved me countless hours of manual debugging by reporting errors directly in failing tests. And with solid test coverage, it allowed me to add new logic and functionality while keeping everything in an always-working state.
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TuMFatig ☛ SMB shares using OmniOS, zones and ZFS
OmniOS / Illumos provides a native way to expose data stored on ZFS using the SMB / CIFS protocol. Furthemore, using zones limits the attack surface of a server ; or a least, the impact of a compromised service.
Long story short: I replaced my UFS+Samba shares with ZFS+Solarish.
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APNIC ☛ The use of UTRS in combating DDoS attacks
The Unwanted Traffic Removal Service (UTRS), developed and deployed by Team Cymru about 10 years ago, offers a global, free and easy-to-join and operate RTBH implementation. Considering this exceptional value proposition and almost a decade of operation, we explore how this service is used nowadays to mitigate DDoS attacks.
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Red Hat Official ☛ Environment-as-a-Service, part 1: Provisioning namespaces
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Ubuntubuzz ☛ What To Do After Installing Trisquel 11 Aramo
This tutorial will help you with our practical suggestions about what to do after installing Trisquel 11 on your computer and laptop. This is intended mainly for beginner users especially those new in GNU/Linux world. Lastly, we wish easy computing for you with software freedom. Now let's practice.