Recent posts for supakeen's homepage weblog
The Fedora 45 Sausage Factory This is a walkthrough of how Fedora turns source code and packages into the artifacts you download and install. It follows the a package from a packager’s git push to a composed release: ISOs, cloud images, container images, and OSTree deployments. The walkthrough describes how the Fedora ‘sausage’ is created as of Fedora 45, things change all the…
The question on how to use bootable containers on the Raspberry Pi (or other single board computers that have ‘interesting’ boot setups) comes up quite regularly. For a while now it has been possible in image-builder to create a Raspberry Pi compatible partition table. I don’t think this has been written down in long-form anywhere except answers to GitHub issues and Matrix chats.…
pinnwand has existed for about a decade. It started as a separate pastebin to be used by bpython on the bpaste.net domain. Eventually I rewrote it into its current shape which is a Python package based on the Tornado Web Server. It is currently used by a bunch of people (the Python Discord, Rocky Linux, are the first that spring to mind; if you host a public instance I’d love to know about…
With image-builder (and bootc-image-builder) you can turn bootable containers into installers. We currently have two different types of installers though most users are likely only familiar with the first. Let’s go over the two installer types, their differences, their future, and have some examples. In a previous post I went over how to build an interactive installer for a bootable…
When we started working on building images from bootc-containers we created a tool called bootc-image-builder. This is a tool that is shipped as a container to users that can turn bootc-containers into disk images or installers for deployment to virtual machines or bare metal. Having this in a separate executable allowed us to iterate faster without having to integrate (as much) into the libraries…
The ESP32 is a popular microcontroller to use for do-it-yourself home automation, sensors, and a variety of other bits and bobs that you might want to take care of around the house. It’s the successor to the venerable ESP8266 which has found its way into many of our WiFi connected devices (seriously, open up a device and chances are relatively large that you’ll find one). After having…
A question popped up today on the #bootc:fedoraproject.org Matrix channel on how to create an interactive installer for a bootable container. This is a quick write up of how to use some details in bootc-image-builder to generate an interactive Anaconda ISO. You can provide custom kickstarts in bootc-image-builder. The README mentions that: Note that bootc-image-builder will automatically add the…
Varnish is a caching proxy server in quite widespread use. Its common role is to set in between your load balancer and web servers to lessen the requests ending up at the latter. A often recurring situation is that your Varnish instance serves multiple different hostnames. If you want to use some of the older tools such as Webalizer or awstats to process your logs you probably need a log file per…
There’s only two things hard about computers, naming things is one of them. We think for ages and sometimes it might put us off doing something entirely. This is especially annoying if it’s a project name! When I worked at a design agency a very long time ago I noticed that they had a specific way of naming brands. Something I’ve since forgotten the name of but still roughly…
In operating system land things are always changing. You might have heard about image based distributions such as Endless OS, Fedora IoT, RHEL for Edge, Ubuntu Core and others. Perhaps you’ve heard other terms such as Unified Kernel Images (UKI) or Discoverable Disk Images (DDI) and wondered what that’s about. Let’s get into what image based Linux is and what its possible…
The Python programming language comes with “Batteries Included”. A philosophy to ship a comprehensive, immediately-useful standard library. However, since the standard library comes with Python it is hard to refactor for older code depends on it. Because of this the standard library can in many cases lag quite far behind what is available in the ecosystem as a whole. Some of the Python…
You’ve found a reverse shell but it’s not behaving like a proper shell. You can’t run su because it requires a tty and you might not have a prompt. This is my quick summary on my notes on upgrading a reverse shell to something useful. If you want other ways (and this way is included) read the canonical ropnop_ article as well. Let’s start with an easy and vulnerable…
Python provides multiple ways to execute commands on the system it is running on. Some of them inherently unsafe, some of them safe in nature but easy to use in an unsafe way. Here I will set out to document the current ways to execute commands with modules included in Python 3’s standard library. Their pros, and their cons. This article assumes that you are familiar with shells, you…