today's howtos
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LinuxBuz ☛ How to Use Tags in Ansible Playbooks with Examples
Playbooks often include many tasks, some of which may not be necessary every time you run the playbook. Ansible tags provide a powerful way to manage which tasks run and …
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University of Toronto ☛ IMAP clients can vary in their reactions to IMAP errors
For reasons outside of the scope of this entry, we recently modified our IMAP server so that it would only return 20,000 results from an IMAP LIST command (technically 20,001 results). In our environment, an IMAP LIST operation that generates this many results is because one of the people who can hit this have run into our IMAP server backward compatibility problem. When we made this change, we had a choice for what would happen when the limit was hit, and specifically we had a choice of whether to claim that the IMAP LIST operation had succeeded or had failed. In the end we decided it was better to report that the IMAP LIST operation had failed, which also allowed us to include a text message explaining what had happened (in IMAP these are relatively free form).
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Tom's Hardware ☛ How to rip your audio CDs to MP3 from the Linux terminal with abcde
Ripping CDs was a popular activity around 15 to 20 years ago. Heck, I remember ripping audio CDs to MP2 (not a typo!) on an AMD K6-2 333. It took plenty of computing power back then, but now even a Raspberry Pi can rip an audio CD and convert the output to MP3 without breaking a sweat.
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Daniel Estévez ☛ Tianwen-1 second apoapsis raise
Some weeks ago I reported about an apoapsis raise manoeuvre done by Tianwen-1, the Chinese Mars orbiter. This has now happened again. Using state vectors from the telemetry decoded with the 20 m antenna in Bochum observatory by AMSAT-DL, we have detected an apoapsis raise manoeuvre done on 2025-01-08. This new apoapsis raise is much larger than the previous one. I have done the same kind of calculations as in the previous post, and also corrected a bug in my Keplerian elements plots (the periapsis and apoapsis passings were being paired incorrectly, which caused the SMA and eccentricity not to change in the plots I did in the previous post).
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University of Toronto ☛ The problem with combining DNS CNAME records and anything else
A famous issue when setting up DNS records for domains is that you can't combine a CNAME record with any other type, such as a MX record or a SOA (which is required at the top level of a domain). One modern reason that you would want such a CNAME record is that you're hosting your domain's web site at some provider and the provider wants to be able to change what IP addresses it uses for this, so from the provider's perspective they want you to CNAME your 'web site' name to 'something.provider.com'.
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Medium ☛ Automating Users Creation and Configuration Alerts on Amazon Linux via EC2 by using python script
This project automates the creation of new users on an Amazon Linux server, restricting execution to administrators only. It offers customizable options, such as specifying the username, group, and home directory for the new user. After creating the user, the script sends an email to the administrator via Postfix, a widely used mail transfer agent. The email includes details about the new user’s configuration.