Category Archives: sysadmin

Using Signal Desktop on Fedora with Flatpak

Posted on March 16, 2018 by

In the 2018 race to re-invent AOL instant messenger Signal comes out on top of the competition for end-to-end encryption and a focus on privacy and security.  Signal desktop was recently released for Windows, Mac and only Debian-based Linux distributions … Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Block Advertising on your Network with Pi-hole and Raspberry Pi

Posted on February 27, 2018 by

I recently setup Pi-hole on an existing Raspberry Pi running CentOS on my home network to serve as my DNS server and block advertising and unwanted domains for all internet-connected devices.  I’m still using an ASUS router with Shibby Tomato … Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 52 Comments

Automate RPM Builds from Git Sources using COPR

Posted on September 3, 2017 by

The Fedora project COPR service builds/hosts free RPM package repositories and provides useful automation hooks for your Devopsing.  You can combine COPR and any standard Git source (Github, Gitlab, etc) with webhooks for automated package builds when your source repository … Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Backup and Restore using SpiderOak on Linux

Posted on August 20, 2017 by

Recently the SSD Operating System disk on my primary work desktop failed without warning and no manner of arcane xfsrepair or xfsdump/xfsrestore chicanery would bring it back.  Luckily I had SpiderOak backups as my employer offers this as a service … Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Using Offlineimap with the Gmail IMAP API

Posted on July 17, 2017 by

In a previous guide I documented my mutt + offlineimap + notmuch setup.  If you’re using Gmail with IMAP enabled you can still utilize the superpower of this trio but you’ll need to do some things differently.  I’ll show you … Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Distributed Remote Backups with Git and Etckeeper

Posted on July 15, 2017 by

Git is a powerful tool for lots of tasks, it makes a wonderful VCS that can drive easy utility and automation.  Recently I used git and remote repositories to deploy code & data fanned out to multiple locations.  Here are … Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Shell One-liners and Quick and Dirty Loops

Posted on March 23, 2017 by

Sometimes you just need to get stuff done quickly and there’s nary a replacement better than a quick shell one-liner.  Recently I’ve needed to feed some large, multi-variable commands into an external program for processing.  Here’s some simple shell one-liners … Continue reading →

Posted in open source, sysadmin | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments