How to Update Packages on Arch Linux

Finally, I got Arch installed on my ThinkPad X220. This also means that I will need to learn how to install and update software from scratch again. But that’s the fun part, isn’t it? :) Like many other distros, before we can update the installed packages, we need to update the software database (i.e. updated list from the repositories): [root@tora ~]# pacman -Syy Note the above command is similar to apt-get update in Debian/Ubuntu....

December 7, 2019 · 1 min · 173 words · kenno

How to Install Ansible on Centos 8

On most Linux distribution, Ansible can be installed either using python3-pip or ansible package. I’m going to show how to get Ansible installed using the second method on CentOS 8. First add the EPEL repository to the CentOS 8 server. # yum localinstall https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm Next, install ansible package: # yum install ansible Last metadata expiration check: 0:00:49 ago on Sun 10 Nov 2019 09:33:22 PM AEDT. Dependencies resolved. ======================================================================================================================= Package Arch Version Repository Size ======================================================================================================================= Installing: ansible noarch 2....

November 9, 2019 · 2 min · 233 words · kenno

How to Label an XFS Filesystem

When I plugged in an external drive to my laptop, the drive was displayed as a string consits random letters and numbers. Here is an example: ❯❯❯ df -Th | grep sdb /dev/sdb1 xfs 481M 26M 456M 6% /run/media/kenno/5428b182-c92e-466b-89d2-b5b31b80ba48 Though the drive worked perfectly fine, I think it’s ugly, and I wanted to properly give it a good name. Let’s call it externo. But how to do this? You may not believe it, I forgot how to do this....

October 27, 2019 · 2 min · 304 words · kenno

Create a User Account with PowerShell

Today I learned how to create a user account on Windows 10 using PowerShell. Let’s create a small exercise to demonstrate how can this be easily done. Task: “Create a local user account named ’localaccount’ with the password BlueHat. This new user should have admin privilege.” First, launch the PowerShell (terminal?), by running as Administrator. The password will be stored in a variable called $Password: $Password = Read-Host -AsSecureString ******* Now we’re ready to create a new local account:...

October 24, 2019 · 1 min · 161 words · kenno

CTDB Not Starting Up on CentOS 7

While preparing for my Red Hat Gluster Storage Administration exam (EX236), I got stuck at a section of configuring IP failover with CTDB Clustered Trivial Database) for Samba. The problem is that I coudldn’t get the ctdb service running on my home lab running CentOS 7 and a newer version of ctdb. This problem occurs on the following platform and package version: CentOS Linux release 7.7.1908 (Core) ctdb 4.9.1-6.el7 # systemctl status ctdb ● ctdb....

October 13, 2019 · 3 min · 513 words · kenno

New BIOS Firmware for ThinkPad P1 1.24

I’ve been relying on Gnome Software Center to let me know when new ThinkPad P1 firmware is available. Up until today, there is no new firmware available since the last update back in August 2019. However, I stumbled on a post on reddit r/thinkpad, someone mentioned the BIOS 1.26 had been released for X1 Extreme/P1 Gen 2. This made me wonder if there was also new version of BIOS for the P1 Gen 1 that I have....

October 7, 2019 · 3 min · 593 words · kenno

grub2-editenv: error environment block too small

As the title says when I tried to generate grub on a machine running Fedora 31 using UEFI, I was presented with this error: # grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg Generating grub configuration file ... grub2-editenv: error: environment block too small. ... I didn’t know what had caused it. However, it seemed like an easy fix was to remove the grubenv file. # rm /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grubenv # grub-editenv /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grubenv create # grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub....

September 10, 2019 · 1 min · 142 words · kenno

feh WARNING: abc.png - No Imlib2 loader for that file format

As the title says, I cannot use feh to open a PNG image. feh on this machine can’t open a JPG image either. Let’s see what’s wrong. I should notice that this problem occured on a machine running Gentoo. :D First, let’s check if feh is installed using my favorite tool called eix: ~ ❯❯❯ eix feh [I] media-gfx/feh Available versions: 3.1.1 ~3.1.3 ~3.2 ~3.2.1^t {curl debug exif test xinerama} Installed versions: 3....

September 1, 2019 · 2 min · 237 words · kenno

Configure Encrypted Storage With LUKS

I’m currently preparing for the Red Hat Certified Specialist in Security: Linux exam (EX415). One of the exam objectives is about storage encryption using LUKS. Here’s my note learning about LUKS. It’s not meant to be a guide which you should copy and paste and run it on your production system. Suppose I have a new disk (/dev/vdb) attached to my server and I’d like to use it as an encrypted storage using LUKS....

August 29, 2019 · 3 min · 436 words · kenno

How I Update Hugo on My Machine

I run hugo hot off the development branch. Periodically I need to checkout the code and re-build it. I find myself having to google to do this almost all the time. So today, I’m gonna document this here so I can quickly look it up next time I want to update hugo. The hugo code has already be cloned to the following location in my desktop: mkdir -p $HOME/dev/go cd $HOME/dev/go git clone https://github....

August 25, 2019 · 1 min · 119 words · kenno