today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 21, 2024

• Peter 'CzP' Czanik ☛ Peter Czanik: Collecting One Identity Cloud PAM Essentials logs using syslog-ng

  One Identity Cloud PAM Essentials is the latest security product by One Identity. It provides asset management as well as secure and monitored remote access for One Identity Cloud users to hosts on their local network. I had a chance to test PAM Essentials while still in development. While there, I also integrated it with syslog-ng.

  From this blog, you can learn what PAM Essentials is, and how you can collect its logs using syslog-ng. My next blog will show you how to work with the collected log messages and create alerts when somebody connects to a host on your local network using PAM Essentials.

• Peter Czanik: Collecting One Identity Cloud PAM Essentials logs using syslog-ng

• CubicleNate ☛ No Sound Output Troubleshooting in openSUSE Linux

  I suddenly had a sound issue on my openSUSE machine. There were no sound output devices available to the system to play anything. My laptop was mute. I had never seen this.

• LinuxInsider ☛ Crafting Advanced DNS Configurations on Linux

  This installment will start by fleshing out how systemd-resolved routes queries. From there, I will outline how to configure DNS on a per-link basis.

• Chiark ☛ Colin Watson: apt install everything?

  On Mastodon, the question came up of how Ubuntu would deal with something like the npm install everything situation. I replied:

  Ubuntu is curated, so it probably wouldn’t get this far. If it did, then the worst case is that it would get in the way of CI allowing other packages to be removed (again from a curated system, so people are used to removal not being self-service); but the release team would have no hesitation in removing a package like this to fix that, and it certainly wouldn’t cause this amount of angst.

• Generate a GIF image from video file

  $ ffmpeg -ss 30 -t 3 -i input.mp4 -vf "fps=10,scale=320:-1:flags=lanczos,split[s0][s1];[s0]palettegen[p];[s1][p]paletteuse" -loop 0 output.gif

  The 30 means start extracting frames from 30 seconds into the video. The 3 means extract the next 3 seconds from that point. The fps can be adjusted based on your preferences. The 320 is the width of the gif, the height will be calculated automatically. ites

• Adam Young: Cleaning a machine

  After you get something working, you find you might have missed a step in documenting how you got that working. You might have installed a package that you didn’t remember. Or maybe you set up a network connection. In my case, I find I have often brute-forced the SSH setup for later provisioning. Since this is done once, and then forgotten, often in the push to “just get work done” I have had to go back and redo this (again usually manually) when I get to a new machine.
  
  To avoid this, I am documenting what I can do to get a new machine up and running in a state where SSH connections (and forwarding) can be reliably run. This process should be automatable, but at a minimum, it should be understood.

• How to Use TLDR Pages on GNU/Linux (and Install It’s CLI Tool)

  The default “command --help” section and “man command” page are quite overwhelming and confusing for beginners and also for professionals when they encounter a totally new command.

• Adam Young: When to Ansible? When to Shell?

  Any new technology requires a mental effort to understand. When trying to automate the boring stuff, one decision I have to make is whether to use straight shell scripting or whether to perform that operation using Ansible. What I want to do is look at a simple Ansible playbook I have written, and then compare what the comparable shell script would look like to determine if it would help my team to use Ansible or not in this situation.

• Linux Hint ☛ How to Inspect an Element on a Chromebook Laptop

  Comprehensive tutorial on how to inspect an element on a Chromebook laptop to see a website’s source code, perform debugging, edit the CSS and HTML files, etc.

• Ubuntu Handbook ☛ How to Disable USB System or Certain Ports in Ubuntu 22.04

  This tutorial shows how to disable USB, either the full sub-system or for certain USB ports, in Ubuntu. For server or production machines, disable USB can be useful for data privacy, virus protection, and other security reasons.

• LinuxConfig ☛ How to mount a host directory inside a KVM virtual machine