today's howtos
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HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install Apache Solr on an Ubuntu 24.04 Server
Apache Solr is an open-source search platform built on Apache Lucene, designed to create powerful application search and indexing capabilities. It provides advanced full-text search, faceted search, real-time indexing, and distributed searching, making it a popular choice for building search engines and data retrieval systems.
Solr is highly scalable and optimized for large volumes of data, often used in enterprise environments for tasks such as website search, e-commerce, and big data analytics. Its REST-like API allows for easy integration with other systems, and it supports features like highlighting query suggestions, and geospatial search. Solr's flexibility, performance, and community support have made it a leading solution for organizations needing robust search functionality.
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Tedium ☛ Phone Book Fonts: Why Bell Centennial Beat Out Bell Gothic
This is where Carter was brought in. Around AT&T’s 100-year anniversary, he was asked to give a second glance to Bell Gothic that updated the style for the era and technical needs. What he came up with was Bell Centennial, which is noted for its narrow creases. These features, called ink traps, essentially work with the printing process to ensure that, as small smudges happen in tiny typography, the letter fills out. The result is that, in practice, the “traps” are not visible—and that ink is less likely to smudge the letterform into something unreadable.
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Manuel Matuzović ☛ Maybe don't use custom properties in shorthand properties - Manuel Matuzovic
I've already written about how the fact that the initial value of a custom property is a guaranteed-invalid value can lead to unexpected results. Today, I realized how that can be problematic when you use custom properties in shorthand properties.
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University of Toronto ☛ What SimpleSAMLphp's core:AttributeAlter does with creating new attributes
SimpleSAMLphp is a SAML identity provider (and other stuff). It's of deep interest to us because it's about the only SAML or OIDC IdP I can find that will authenticate users and passwords against LDAP and has a plugin that will do additional full MFA authentication against the university's chosen MFA provider (although you need to use a feature branch). In the process of doing this MFA authentication, we need to extract the university identifier to use for MFA authentication from our local LDAP data. Conveniently, SimpleSAMLphp has a module called core:AttributeAlter (a part of authentication processing filters) that is intended to do this sort of thing. You can give it a source, a pattern, a replacement that includes regular expression group matches, and a target attribute. In the syntax of its examples, this looks like the following: [...]
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University of Toronto ☛ A Prometheus gotcha with alerts based on counting things
Suppose, not entirely hypothetically, that you have some backup servers that use swappable HDDs as their backup media and expose that 'media' as mounted filesystems. Because you keep swapping media around, you don't automatically mount these filesystems and when you do manually try to mount them, it's possible to have some missing (if, for example, a HDD didn't get fully inserted and engaged with the hot-swap bay). To deal with this, you'd like to write a Prometheus alert for 'not all of our backup disks are mounted'. At first this looks simple: [...]
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idroot
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ID Root ☛ How To Install Samba on Fedora 41
In today’s diverse computing environments, sharing resources like files and printers across different operating systems is a common requirement. Samba, a free software re-implementation of the SMB/CIFS networking protocol, bridges this gap by providing seamless file and printer sharing capabilities.
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ID Root ☛ What is DNF Package Manager
The DNF package manager, short for Dandified Yum, is a powerful tool designed to manage RPM packages in GNU/Linux distributions. It serves as the next-generation version of YUM, offering improved performance and features that enhance the overall package management experience.
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ID Root ☛ How To Install Gradle on Debian 12
Gradle is a powerful, open-source build automation tool designed for multi-language software development, supporting languages like Java, Kotlin, Groovy, Scala, and C++. It is widely used for compiling, testing, and deploying applications efficiently. Running Gradle on Debian 12 offers a stable and secure environment, making it ideal for both individual developers and enterprise teams.
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ID Root ☛ How To Install Morphosis on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
Morphosis is a powerful yet user-friendly document conversion tool that has gained popularity among GNU/Linux users for its ability to transform documents between multiple formats through an intuitive graphical interface. This comprehensive guide walks you through the complete installation process on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat), the latest long-term support release from Canonical.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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LWN ☛ FerretDB 2.0 released
Version 2.0.0 of FerretDB has been released. FerretDB is an open-source alternative to MongoDB, which switched to a non-open license in 2018, built on top of PostgreSQL. This release utilizes the DocumentDB PostgreSQL extension for better performance, adds vector search, and replication.
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ID Root ☛ How To Install FerretDB on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
FerretDB is a truly open-source alternative to MongoDB that allows you to run MongoDB commands and queries using PostgreSQL or SQLite as the backend. As Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) is now available, many developers are looking to deploy FerretDB on this latest Ubuntu version.
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