today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 19, 2026

• TecMint ☛ at Command: Schedule One-Time Linux Tasks Without Cron

  The problem is that it’s easy to forget. Production issues happen, priorities change, and before you know it, that temporary firewall rule is still sitting there long after it should have been removed.

• Alex Haydock ☛ Static IPv6 config with cloud-init on Raspberry Pi OS

  I recently had some issues with quirks relating to my IPv6-only network when trying to set up an AirPlay sink on Raspberry Pi OS. I struggled to find info relating to the IPv6-only bit specifically, so I’ve tried to collate some of the issues I had here in the hope they’re helpful.

  All of the below was done using Raspberry Pi OS Lite Trixie (Debian 13).

• David Mead ☛ SSH port knocking with OpenBSD 7.9

  Port knocking is mostly a bad idea. But people keep wanting to do it, for some false sense of security. If you don't consider it a security control but a way to keep garbage out of your logs, it might be valid. In my case I'm using an old USG Pro 4 running OpenBSD as my firewall and I'd prefer to avoid writing stuff to the logs, as I'd prefer the flash not to wear out sooner than needed, definitely not thanks to background radiation on the internet.

• Dan Langille ☛ VictoriaLogs: Adding syslog-ng to a host and ingesting nginx log from jails

  This post is more self-documentation than anything else. The links in this post might be useful than the content.

  Today I’ll start pulling production FreshPorts nginx logs into VictoriaLogs. Over the past few days, I’ve configured a proof-of-concept and now I’m ready to try this in prod.

• University of Toronto ☛ How to correctly not wait for network carrier in Netplan

  Yesterday I wrote an entry about why servers running Ubuntu can stall on boot for two minutes; the short version is that in 26.04, a network interface that either has no carrier or that has nothing else on it will cause systemd-networkd-wait-online to wait for two minutes in the hopes that this changes and the interface becomes healthy. My core diagnosis of the trigger for the problem was correct, but I had the wrong fix because in my testing, I made a classic mistake that's only really possible with virtual networking for virtual machines. There's an often invisible difference between an isolated virtual network interface and one that has no carrier, and I tested with an isolated interface, which stalls under some circumstances and fixed by some things, but not a virtual machine network interface with no carrier. The latter requires a more thorough fix.

• idroot

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Mastodon on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

    Social media platforms come and go, but your data always ends up in someone else’s hands. Mastodon changes that.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install PhotoFlare on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

    Are you looking for a lightweight, open-source image editor that works perfectly on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS?

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install MySQL on Fedora 44

    Installing a database server can feel intimidating when you are new to Linux. You might worry about breaking your system or setting weak security.

• linuxcapable

  • Linux Capable ☛ cut Command in Linux: Extract Fields, Characters, and Bytes

    Practice the cut command with tab, comma, colon, character, byte, and NUL-separated examples, then troubleshoot delimiters, empty fields, field order, CSV limits, and byte-vs-character behavior.

  • Linux Capable ☛ blkid Command in Linux: Find UUIDs, Labels, and Filesystem Types

    When device names shift after reboot or hotplug, blkid helps confirm stable UUIDs, labels, types, and partition tags before fstab edits, mounts, recovery work, or disk cleanup.

  • Linux Capable ☛ cp Command in Linux: Copy Files and Directories Safely

    Copy files more safely with GNU/Linux cp examples that cover destinations, recursive directories, hidden files, overwrite controls, archive mode, symlinks, sparse files, and troubleshooting.

  • Linux Capable ☛ date Command in Linux: Format, Parse, and Convert Timestamps

    Build reliable GNU/Linux timestamps for logs, filenames, scripts, and timezone conversions with date examples that show UTC output, epoch math, file times, parser debugging, and cleanup.

• Linuxize ☛ How to Install and Use Ollama on Ubuntu: Run LLMs Locally

  Install Ollama on Ubuntu, run large language models locally, manage downloaded models, use GPU acceleration, and send prompts through the local API.