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).

Docker Isolation, and non-Isolation

Posted on September 5, 2019 by mark

Docker is not KVM, there are major security trade-offs with a container, The key ones are shown below. Processes are not isolated The processes that are run by containers run for all intents and purposes as processes on the Docker … Continue reading →

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Using Bacula to backup your Fedora/CentOS Linux servers

Posted on August 7, 2019 by mark

This post was written to acknowledge bacula has saved my ass again. My main desktop machine failed, a new replacement was purchased and swapped in, new OS installed with same hostname and ip-address. Then installed puppet and let the puppet … Continue reading →

Posted in Automation, Unix | Comments Off on Using Bacula to backup your Fedora/CentOS Linux servers

Installing the OpenStack Stein release from the RDO repositories

Posted on July 23, 2019 by mark

As you are I am sure all aware the OpenStack Stein release is available and documented on the RDO site now. While the “stein” release has been available for a while this post took a long time to prepare as … Continue reading →

Posted in OpenStack, Unix | Comments Off on Installing the OpenStack Stein release from the RDO repositories

Looks like Google is breaking the rules

Posted on June 17, 2019 by mark

It would appear I am blocking Google from indexing my site, at least until they fix their robot indexers to perform as documented. The documentation at http://www.google.com/bot.html, url thoughtfully provided in the user agent string, clearly says Googlebot and all … Continue reading →

Posted in Home Life | Comments Off on Looks like Google is breaking the rules

Logcheck on Fedora, for my use

Posted on June 12, 2019 by mark

Logcheck on fedora, by default when installed, runs every hour. For my use this generates so much email traffic (as it runs on all my servers) that it becomes garbage, and I ended up just deleting all the emails rather … Continue reading →

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Suppressing audit messages to /var/log/messages on Fedora 29 and 30

Posted on May 20, 2019 by mark

One of my machines has started rebooting for no reason that I can find, possibly power surges as my UPS seems have now have a dead battery. One difficulty in finding the issue is that the messages file if full … Continue reading →

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Using the certbot package on Fedora 30 to get LetsEncrypt certificates

Posted on May 17, 2019 by mark

There was a post on the fedora forums stating that the certbot apache plugin does not work on fedora, so I had a look. The post was correct, the apache plugin for certbot wants to use the “apachectl -v” command … Continue reading →

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Interesting issues with grub2 and Fedora 30

Posted on May 12, 2019 by mark

While the resolution was found in the Fedora forums as RedHat is built from successfull pilots of new code in Fedora in may exist in RedHat systems as well. I had major issues upgrading my KVM F29 instances to F30. … Continue reading →

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BasKet notes appear to be no more, switched to CherryTree

Posted on April 20, 2019 by mark

I used to rely on BasKet notes on both Fedora and Redhat After rebuilding a Desktop I discovered it was no longer available in the Fedora repositories. This may not be a new thing as I discovered I had also … Continue reading →

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Mirroring up two spare internal disks under Fedora29

Posted on April 20, 2019 by mark

Having had to rebuild another machine, After it was up and running I had a server with the OS installed on the boot disk and two spare internal disks that used to be in a raid array. While the machine … Continue reading →

Posted in Unix | Comments Off on Mirroring up two spare internal disks under Fedora29