Notes by a Sysadmin
The first idéa I had with this part IV, was to add Restic to the Rclone Backup server. But, due to higher complexity (It should be easy to backup and recover) and not least that it seems like Restic would need to be implemented on the host with Rclone (multiple instances). I skipped the idéa.
So, for now.... Read more
Now, here two years after is set up the backup server. I need to do it all again, the other Pi was erased and used as part of a cluster and I kind of lost data since and was confirmed in the reason to have backup of your data.
Part I:
As time goes by, you may forget small features and settings you apply to your servers to make them fit you need. There is a tendency not to document every thing you do when you try out different solutions and suddenly everything works and you forget about the documentation. That's where Ansible comes into play.
Small... Read more
Though this package manager is also available for Linux, the chances are that you've mostly heard of it in relation to Apple's macOS. Why install such a tool on your macOS, does'nt it increase voulnerbillity of a generally secure operating system with all of Apple's validation... Read more
If you have a desent firewall, having some dedicated interfaces with VPN from the firewall out may be a great idea because it can help with.
There is a lot of different hypervisors and virtual machine managers out there. After using a commercial Type-2 hypervisor for many years, I have started to use KVM whenever possible.
KVM is native to all linux systems today, it works directly on the kernel level and is considered as a Type-1... Read more
There may be occations where some tasks, that usually requires root privileges, would be more handy to run without the need to provide a password.
In this example it is an automation for update, upgrade and reboot. Ofcause it is not advisable to run all sudo commands without providing passwords, in particular not on a... Read more
There are two popular tools for working with screens/sessions in the terminal; Screen and Tmux. Screen is probably to consider the most native and simple of the two. But, this post will be about the Tmux application.
It does not come as native in contrary to Screen, so you have to install it:
By default one could use the Pi's internal SD-card for storage. But, for many reasons - as stabillity and speed - external storage like an USB 3.x stick on a Pi 4 would be preferable.
Find the node you would like to hold your storage device, and SSH in to the node. And locate the... Read more
Install the Pi Imager tool from Raspberry Pi's homepage: https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/
Insert your SD-card in your PC, and select OS (choose an 64-bit version if you are running Rpi 3 < ) and SD-card and continue..
If you have never generated a key on your system, or if you want a separate key. Do the following:
ssh-keygenAnd following the instructions. Just press enter all way thru, if you do this for the first... Read more
Resently I experienced that my pi's with an ubuntu install did'nt resolve in my routers DNS server. The following mDNS install on the pi will solve that problem.
sudo hostnamectl set-hostname [your-pi-name]followed by:
sudo apt... Read more
Mail sending from a Raspberry Pi
February 12, 2021 |
Stack
Mail notifications
The reason you might want mail sending (smtp) capabillity on a Pi, is notifications. This is a nice feature, if some thing goes wrong as Pi's are often setup headless for a specific task.
Start by setting up mailutils and postfix:
sudo apt install... Read more
Rclone backup continued - Part 2
February 8, 2021 |
Stack
This is a continuation of "rclone setup..", so the configuration and setting up a of rclone and "Remotes" can be found there..
Operating with rclone you have two options, a GUI called Read more
Rclone setup on Raspberry Pi - Part 1
January 22, 2021 |
Stack
There are a lot of backup tools available out there and depending on what the goal is, one should consider what meets the needs. Basically there are different kinds of backup setups:
- Client-side backup solutions (applications on your devices), few devices
- Server/agent (central server and a script on the... Read more
Geo-blocking with iptables
January 16, 2021 |
Stack
OS: Ubuntu 20.04
Firewall: UFW
Unfortunately there is no easy solution or "out of the box" features, implemented in most UNIX-like system, for blocking connections by country. But, in a lot of real life cases it would make a lot of sense to implement. Say; you have a website written in Swedish and only expected people... Read more
New server setup (debian)
January 12, 2021 |
Stack
Setting up a new server can be a repetitve task. The following is a LAMP stack setup (Linux, Apache(2), MySQL (could be MariaDB), PHP).
First spin up an instance/VPS/PS of your OS. If you are not very familiar with the UNIX-like world, choose a Debian based OS (such as Debian or Ubuntu) with long term support (LTS). By... Read more
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About
I'm a Sysadmin, network manager and cyber security entusiast. The main purpose of this public "notebook" is for referencing repetitive tasks, but it might as well come in handy to others. Windows can not be supported! But all other OS compliant with the POSIX-standard can (with minor adjustments) apply the configs on the site. It is Mac OSX, RHEL and all the Fedora based distros and Debian based (several 100's of OS's), all the BSD distros, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX.