Blogs

As an long delayed experiment, I installed Windows 10 on my machine and forced myself to use it and go through initial hurtles in order to give it fair chance, see where it stands today as opposed to few years ago when I’ve last tried it and in order to learn few things among everything else. I’ve been using Linux exclusively on my private machines for years, and for work I’ve used Linux and MacOS. Last time I was forced to use Windows for work was also the time where I was constantly connected to some remote Linux machine and was basically using it only as a gateway to some remote server. ...

Just like Bash on Linux, PowerShell on Windows has it’s PATH-like variable from which modules are being automatically loaded. To find out array of your paths you can use: PS C:\Users\ivant> $env:PSModulePath D:\Ivan\Documents\PowerShell\Modules;C:\Program Files\PowerShell\Modules;c:\program files\powershell\7\Modules;C:\Progra m Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules;C:\Windows\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Modules Now, I have already experimented a bit with PowerShell but I’ve used Windows PowerShell (different version than Core) and I’ve written a module for it which I’d very much like to continue using in PowerShell Core as well. ...

Setting up Wireguard based VPN is quite easy. Depending on your distribution you install kernel headers (as Wireguard is loaded kernel module), install Wireguard and configure it and you’re off to the races. With Linux kernel 5.6 Wireguard will be built in so this process will be even simpler. Installation Currently on my Ubuntu (18.04) based server, I had to do the following: apt-get update apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) add-apt-repository ppa:wireguard/wireguard apt-get install wireguard Since that automatically built kernel module, loading it with: ...

Seems to me that this my little trip to the Windows land might actually trigger me to learn a thing or two about that OS. Naturally, I’m also planning to jot those things down here. So while installing Windows to spare NVMe drive it decided to place its bootloader to existing EFI partition where up until then only Fedora had its EFI image. This behavior doesn’t suits me as I can’t offline drive while in windows and then pass it through to the Hyper-V machine (long story…). ...

I’ve since evolved this script a bit and have published it on GitHub: https://github.com/ivantomica/AWSVault To log in into AWS I prefer to use small function which calls aws-vault utility and gets URL to login to specific AWS account and then opens that AWS account in its own container tab in Firefox. Reason for this is that my natural habitat is terminal, or textual interface in general, so invoking thing from there instead of doing 20 clicks through interface somehow feels better to me. ...

For most of my private email needs I prefer to use Mu4e within Emacs. It is a module of Emacs which basically searches through Mu index file. Naturally, to be able to index something, you first need to fetch it. In this case “it” are email messages from the server, or, my mailbox if you wish. For this particular purpose OfflineIMAP utility has served me well over the time, and to be honest, my needs are quite simple: ...

I have been previously installing Ubuntu on ZFS (root-on-zfs) and since then I’ve transitioned to Fedora, on ext4+lvm, to avoid much complication and hassle. It is also not necessary for me to have all those nice ZFS features on root. When I was installing Fedora I have reformatted existing drive. Unfortunately although new GPT should’ve been created it seems like I’ve missed something and root of my device was identified as ZFS member: ...

Obviously, I’ve decided to revert this decision on new articles again. There has been this thought in my head about completely disabling comments on this website for some time now. Sure, it is nice to get nice feedback for the articles I’ve written in the past or comments that correct some of outdated or otherwise incorrect information in articles but I think that those comments can be easily posted by contacting me directly. ...

In order to expand ZFS pool first step is to resize underlying disk. Once that’s done, by default on Linux, partition 9 of size 8MB is created at the end of the disk. Reasoning for this partition is not completely clear for me, but according to some random discussions on the internet, it would seem that it comes from Solaris, but no clear explanation why it exists in the first place. ...

Prompted by the excellent article at RedHat’s blog on the topic of “What my family thinks I do all day?” I decided to do the same research on my own, just to see where I stand and how much understanding I get from the family about the work that I do. It is quite hard to explain things that sysadmins do in plain English, especially when the audience is not very technical. For many years I’ve been going around telling people “I work in IT” but I feel that’s very vague and usually gets me in trouble when someone I’m talking to requests IT help from me, which I then need to politely decline. You can see my struggle here. Also as a side-note I wanted to explain to myself what it actually that thing I do everyday and have concise answer for the rest of the world. ...