The latest update from Leap 15.3 to 15.4 has been fairly painless on the servers.
Linux / FOSS
Saturday, June 18 2022
Why openSUSE on the raspberry Pi servers? Oh yes, now I remember...
Saturday, June 18 2022. Linux / FOSS
Wednesday, June 8 2022
Letsencrypt cerficates - all change from certbot
Wednesday, June 8 2022. Linux / FOSS
There are times when change is forced on one, but it's possible to take this as a chance to learn new tricks.
Monday, May 16 2022
A little alteration in the Raspberry Pi OS initramfs-tools script to include all Pi hardware
Monday, May 16 2022. Linux / FOSS
Raspberry pi OS does not make it easy to use an initrd for additional boot functionality, especially the ability to run non-ext4 filesystems as root. But the initramfs-tools script can be tweaked to be reasonably reliable.
Saturday, October 9 2021
Squeezing a Raspberry Pi service down a slow Internet link.
Saturday, October 9 2021. Linux / FOSS
Our home Nextcloud installation works well, but when away from home, the heavily constrained bandwidth of abysmal rural broadband makes it close to unusable. Fortunately, there are ways of resolving the problem.
Wednesday, May 26 2021
MONIToring network services
Wednesday, May 26 2021. Linux / FOSS
Simple small-scale service monitoring - Can Monit out-Nagios Nagios?
Saturday, April 10 2021
Lighttpd and Nextcloud 21+
Saturday, April 10 2021. Linux / FOSS
An irritating but apparently harmless notice when updating to Nextcloud 21 needs a slight change to the web server configuration under Lighttpd
Monday, February 22 2021
OpenSUSE as a Raspberry Pi 4 Server
Monday, February 22 2021. Linux / FOSS
A work-in-progress series of notes on a migration to OpenSUSE as a server on a Raspberry Pi 4. These notes are somewhat rambling, as they were written during the development process of the new server, but are left here, warts and all.
Migration project status: The project has been completed successfully. All services are now running under OpenSUSE as of 6th March 2021. I moaned and grumbled my way through this post, adding to it as issues arose or little triumphs were achieved. The reality is that what felt like little hacks, workarounds and customising I had to do, tiny things, really, were probably no more than were helping the stability of the previous system, but time and familiarity had made me forget that's how sysadmins make things work.
This has been an interesting exercise, and I plan to leave these notes here, both for my own reference and possibly as some might be useful to others.
One month later: I remain pleased with the decision to migrate from Raspberry Pi OS to OpenSUSE for this server. In fact, I wish I could easily migrate a hosted Raspberry Pi I have. The most pressing issues I have faced were with regard to various weekly security and performance reports I have written over the years. I am still getting to grips with systemd's timers and logrotate, as some of the reports should run after the logs are rotated, but I am still not clear when these happen. One unexpected bonus is the degree to which btrfs compression works. At the moment, there is a 25% space saving on the disk. The next big test will be with the release of OpenSUSE 15.3. Previous experience on x86 suggests this update will be straight forward, so I am expecting more of the solidity I am currently enjoying.
Saturday, June 6 2020
Automatic initrd/initramfs creation for Raspian/Raspberry Pi OS
Saturday, June 6 2020. Linux / FOSS
A very techie post on my blog, so I don't expect this to be of general interest. Try browsing the categories for something more interesting...
The perennial problem of ensuring your initrd or initramfs file has been correctly generated for the appropriate Pi architecture
USE THESE IDEAS AT YOUR OWN RISK!
Edit:The original script was not smart enough to manage the requirements of the Pi Zero (armv6l), but a helpful perl incantation found on a forum resolves this omission. The script has been in use for some time.
IMPORTANT - Please note that as of April 2021, Raspberry Pi OS has changed the way it generates initrds, so this script no longer works correctly. I will document alterations here if I manage to understand the changes.
Saturday, April 4 2020
Nextcloud Talk and the missing piece of the puzzle
Saturday, April 4 2020. Linux / FOSS
It worked, but wouldn't tell us, because of an obscure issue
Thursday, July 18 2019
USB Scanner - scans a black page - Resolved
Thursday, July 18 2019. Linux / FOSS
Under Linux, this scanner should Just Work, but doesn't. The fix is very simple
Monday, February 25 2019
The Perennial Problem of the new Linux Laptop
Monday, February 25 2019. Linux / FOSS
Choices, choices, choices, some dead-ends, such as being far too expensive, some nice-to-haves, and finally some solutions.
Tuesday, October 16 2018
Revisiting server-based antispam with Bogofilter
Tuesday, October 16 2018. Linux / FOSS
Some simple maintenance makes life interesting, but simplicity saves the day
Tuesday, October 2 2018
Latest update - off-grid Linux IT services
Tuesday, October 2 2018. Linux / FOSS
The latest (October 2018) update on hardware and software choices when your power supply is limited
This is a technical blog post which may not be of general interest, and assumes a certain level of technical understanding
Monday, February 5 2018
Raspberry Pi home server - setting up OpenDKIM with postfix
Monday, February 5 2018. Linux / FOSS
Some vague notes about setting up openDKIM against multiple domains on a single instance, all domains using one key.
Wednesday, August 23 2017
Lightweight anti-spam alternative for small servers
Wednesday, August 23 2017. Linux / FOSS
Spamassassin may be the standard anti-spam utility for servers, but it can't be considered to be either fast or low on resources. Bogofilter may offer some advantages, but unlike spamassassin, tutorials and how-to's are thin on the ground
Warning: this is a technical post, full of jargon and an expectation that it will be read by system administrators, so may not be of interest to all readers.
Integrating postfix, dovecot and bogofilter on a Raspberry Pi.
Edit: Some months have passed since installing bogofilter. It is not as fast as a daemon, but not as slow as spamassassin, either. As expected, it has taken a couple of months to build up accuracy, but the system is excellent, and now reliably marks some spam that always got through spamassassin. This seems a good way forward for lightweight email systems.
Additional Addendum: See the note at the end of the article. Bogofilter remains a good server-based option for dealing with spam.
Sunday, July 16 2017
The Calendar Hokey Cokey
Sunday, July 16 2017. Linux / FOSS
A problem with the Nextcloud calendar can be resolved with a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, thanks to standards
Saturday, October 1 2016
Serving up some Pi
Saturday, October 1 2016. Linux / FOSS
You really can run on a Raspberry Pi
Saturday, April 9 2016
The Silver Darling - When you need a good Linux laptop
Saturday, April 9 2016. Linux / FOSS
The Entroware Apollo laptop is a good option to be sure that new hardware runs well with Linux, and the system itself is good. But the process of buying a Linux laptop could be more straight forward.
Saturday, June 20 2015
Despamming versus assassinating spam
Saturday, June 20 2015. Linux / FOSS
Free software tools for ensuring email security and managing spam are good and self-managing, but they can be difficult to set up. This was proven by a recent prod to investigate options.
Edited, September 2016 - I have reluctantly reverted to other anti-spam systems. Debian have stopped providing dspam, although there is a more recent version than the last packaged version. Worse, the version that is packaged for the Raspberry Pi, which has most to gain from dspam, does not work. This is a great pity, as dspam, for the 15 months I have used it, is accurate (96.20%), lightning fast, and uses very few resources.
Wednesday, February 18 2015
Linux file systems I have known
Wednesday, February 18 2015. Linux / FOSS
Benchmarks are one thing, experience and preference another
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