Awhile back I found a stack of audio CDs I wished to digitize. It’s a bit of work to do the following steps quickly and while doing other more cerebral work: Open the disc tray Insert the disc Wait a few seconds for the disc to be detected by the OS Kick off abcde to rip the CD. Repeat ad infinitum. The solution is to streamline the workflow:
GitLab has recently locked down the accessibility to free CI/CD minutes. You now need to provide a Credit Card to prove you’re a human. Apparently cryptofriends were using the CI/CD minutes to mine for cryptocurrencies. Huh… if I had lesser ethics I’d probably do the same thing! Kind of brilliant to be honest. Anyway, the end result is if you want users to contribute to your project they need to either provide a CC or better yet, you can set up private GitLab runners.
The goal of this post is to demonstrate the usefulness of IPMI even in hobbyist or personal use. Anything that means less touching physical machines to power cycle them, or fix network misconfigurations, can save a lot of time. I had broken my NAS’s networking by adding a bridge and attaching the existing ethernet device to it. I forgot to configure the ethernet device to not try to fetch an IP address (via DHCP), but instead only fetch an IP address on the bridge itself.
A fantastic “feature” of Linux, BSD, and even Windows 10 is you don’t really need to reinstall to migrate an installation to a new computer. A common misunderstanding is if you get a new PC, you must use the new OS install, or install a new copy of your OS. If you’re intending on replacing an existing PC (and disposing of or re-purposing the old one), there is probably no need to reinstall your OS and deal with user data migration.
I seem to have a lot of suggestions to share with friends about managing disks on a linux livecd. Here are some of the tips I’d like to share. See the table of contents above for a breakdown of the topics discussed. Some disk related topics are out of scope for this article, as they deserve their own blog post. The topics not covered include partitioning, setting up a boot loader, using LVM2 or ZFS, that sort of thing.
You want to use sudo -i or su - to log into root. sudo su anything is superfluous, because you probably should be using sudo -i or sudo -s, which are roughly equivalent, depending if you want to simulate a login (su - or sudo -i) or not (su or sudo -s).1 When to use su -? You want to log into root using the root password. Typically you must be in the wheel group (check your PAM configuration).
Sometimes I find myself setting up servers on networks with less than ideal network configuration. Most home internets use dynamic IP addresses, which requires extra work to ensure I know the IP address to use when logging into the network from the internet. Another concern is how unreliable home networking gear can be, especially with users tweaking settings without fully appreciating what they’re doing. As a result, I’ve devised an alternate solution to ensure I can always log into boxes hosted on home internet connections.