Yet another software engineer. I write about technologies and its ecosystem. I love open-source and talk about stuff I want to share with the world. I hope somebody can enjoy it.
If you keep your GPG keys on a smartcard (like a Yubikey as I do), you can use them on a remote host over SSH without ever copying a private key off the card. The signing and decryption happen on your local computer, driven by the remote; and the keys never leave the hardware. This is GPG agent forwarding, and it’s very useful for signing commits or decrypting files on a remote computer.
Every time I opened Firefox, there was an awkward 8-to-10-second wait before anything appeared on screen. No splash, no window, just a spinning cursor and blind faith that something was happening. It was consistent, reproducible with a brand-new profile, and annoying enough to be worth investigating properly.
Sometimes you need a systemd service to wait for a specific hardware device to be available before starting. For instance, when starting an X11 session as a service, you want to ensure the GPU is ready.
What started as a simple network card upgrade on my home server turned into quite the troubleshooting adventure. I thought I’d share this experience since it taught me some valuable lessons about PCI-E passthrough in virtualized environments, and might save someone else a few hours of debugging.
Frequently you’ll find that tmpfs is the most convenient one. Alternatively there’s also ramfs and ramdisk.
Sometimes you might need to use different Git repositories on your computer, but authenticating to separate users, such as your personal and your work user.
You use a minimalist tiling window manager, yet you want to be able to tinker with your desktop more easily and implement features like the ones available in full blown desktop environments?
Using systemd to manage user-level services is great. There’s a few caveats though, and one of them is that there’s no easy way to depend on system level units.
Tradionally, *nix users are familiar (or maybe not so much) with cron syntax, whereas you define applications to be run at specific schedules.
By default, Debian uses /etc/network/interfaces file to manage your network interfaces by means of ifup and ifdown commands.