Author Archives: mark

About mark

At work, been working on Tandems for around 30yrs (programming + sysadmin), plus AIX and Solaris sysadmin also thrown in during the last 20yrs; also about 5yrs on MVS (mainly operations and automation but also smp/e work). At home I have been using linux for decades. Programming background is commercially in TAL/COBOL/SCOBOL/C(Tandem); 370 assembler(MVS); C, perl and shell scripting in *nix; and Microsoft Macro Assembler(windows).

Converting a Fedora30 webserver to CentOS7

There are two supported versions of CentOS in the wild now. Note that I exclude CentOS6 as that is pretty much end of support now. So we have only versions 7 and 8 to play with. Version 7 is EOL … Continue reading

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qemu-img shipped with fedora corrupts qcow2 disk images

Up to and including F38 there were no problems with using qemu-img to compress disk images. On both F29 and F30 using qemu-img to compress a qcow2 disk image results in severe virtual disk corruption, visable as virtual machines dying … Continue reading

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Free OpenSource Project Managers for small business and home users running Linux servers, I chose WebCollab

This is by no means a comprehensive post, it only covers three, two I looked at and discarded and the one I finally settled on for home use. OpenProject – discarded, I did not evaluate it First there must be … Continue reading

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Obtaining CherryTree under f31

I, like many people, when Fedora no longer included the essential Desktop note taking app BasketNotes in its repositories migrated to the CherryTree application which was functionally compatible with BasketNotes and could import the BasketNotes data files, so no data … Continue reading

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How to fsck a Linux system at boot time

The old method of creating a file with “touch /forcefsck” should still work on modern systems even though it is a hangover from the old sysvinit days, however it obviously relies on the root partition being mountable in order to … Continue reading

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Fedora31 released, buggy as always

In the upgrade from f29 to f30 I lost ownCloud, which is not supported with the version of php shipped with f30. While a pain I could live with that. However in the upgrade from f30 to f31, while it … Continue reading

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Using apache rewrite to automatically add iptables drop rules

In these days of firewalld not many people still use native iptables rules, but they certainly still have their place. I still use them on my main webserver simply because of the ease with which new drop rules can be … Continue reading

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Docker and issues with using minimal Fedora base images

It is recomended when creating docker images that minimal images be used. In the case of Fedora it is recomended that for smallest images the minimal image should be used and “microdnf” be used instead of the full blown “dnf” … Continue reading

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Installing a F30 network install and recovery server

In these days of cloud images being launched at the push of a button, and customised via heat patterns or user configuration scripts, network install via pxe boot seems to have dropped out of the news. As most home users … Continue reading

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Docker container network isolation can be a pain.

I have been embarking on an exercise to migrate some of the smaller applications I use into Docker containers. This is the reverse of my prior more secure approach where I wanted 3rd part apps that may be insecure but … Continue reading

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