I have a hardware malfunction with my secondary hard drive. Every once in the while it locks itself into read-only mode and corrupts a log file that crashes my system. My solution is to reboot Fn + Alt + Sysrq + ‘b’ and periodically delete the log files that exacerbate the issue. I need to replace the drive but that requires money and a backup solution, neither of which i currently have. It’s been an ongoing issue for at least 4 years now.

Side of the case fell off.

Youtube doesn’t seem to inhibit idle for me for some reason, so my screen would always turn off with swayidle while watching youtube videos. So I made my lockscreen script (which is called by swayidle)

if [ "$(playerctl status)" = "Playing" ]; then
    exit 0
else
    exec "/path/to/lockscreen/script"
fi

(lockscreen script was just swaylock called with a bunch of arguments)

Not super crazy compared to some of the things people are saying in the comments, but also definitely not how you’re meant to handle idle inhibition when media is playing lol

I got an Orange Pi 5 Plus to play with smallish AIs (because it has an NPU) and I normally access it remotely, so I have to know its IP address to do it.

In order to easilly know the IP address of it, I’ve wired a little 128x64 monochrome OLED screen to it (Orange PIs, like Raspberry PIs have a pin connector giving access to GPIO and interfaces like I2C, Serial and SPI) which talks via I2C.

Turns out those interfactes aren’t active in Linux by default (I.e. no /dev/i2c-x), so I figured out that I had to add a kernel overlay to activate that specific interface (unlike with the Raspberry PI whose Linux version has a neat program for doing it, in the Orange Pi you have to know how the low level details of activating those things), which I did.

To actually render characters on that screen I went with an ARM Linux port of a graphics library for those screens I used before with Arduino, called u8g2)

Then I made a program in C that just scans all network interfaces and prints their names and IP addresses on that screen, and installed it as a Cron job running once a minute.

Now, as it turns out when you shutdown your Linux on that board, if you don’t disconnect it from power there is actually still power flowing through the pin connector to any devices you wire there, so after shutdown my screen would remain ON and showing the last thing I had put there, but because the OS was down it would naturally not get updated.

So the last thing I did was another small C program which just sends to that screen the command for it to go into power saving mode, shutting it down. This program was then installed as a Systemd Service to run when Linux is shutting down.

The result is now that there is a little screen hanging from the box were I put this board with Linux which lists its IP addresses and the info is updated if it connects other interfaces or reconnects and gets a new IP address. Curiously I’ve actually been using that feature because it’s genuinely useful, not just a funny little project.

I had to upgrade some OL6 VMs to OL7 VMs running Oracle DBs and Apps (on OVMM no less). There was no appetite for buying additional storage, or restoring the environments with RMAN. Luckily, everything had been installed under /u01 which was on its own virtual disk.

So I built a new VM as OL7 (same hostname, etc.), installed the pre-req RPMs for Oracle DB, disconnected the virtual disk from the OL6 and attached it to the new OL7, synced users and home dirs - and it only bloody worked.

I keep a small local knowledge base with common fixes for problems I find recurrently (over and over again in some cases).

It has a bit over 1,300 lines of markdown files split by category of problem. It saves me the trouble of finding that exact solution in stack overflow that fixed this exact problem 5 months ago.

I made a systemd script that fires when going to / waking up from sleep - it checks how long the sleep was and if it was just a few seconds, it puts the computer back to sleep.

In hindsight, I think the thing that made it work was bluetooth was somehow responsible for the initial failed suspend. The second shot at sleep happened before bluetooth came back up, so it succeeded.

Had a Centos VM that kept slipping time. Every week it would loose about 30min. No amount of NTP syncing got the time correct until manual intervention.
Msp couldn’t work it out, couldn’t rebuild the server for infrastructure reasons, and only that server had the issue. The other 3 VMs on that host were fine.

Cron job on one server took it current time, sshed to the dodgy server and configured the correct time.

I ran out of crtcs, but I wanted another monitor. I widened a virtual display, and drew the left portion of it on one monitor, like regular. Then I had a crown job that would copy chunks of it into the frame buffer of a USB to DVI-d adapter. It could do 5 fps redrawing the whole screen, but I chose things to put there where it wouldn’t matter too much. The only painful thing was arranging the windows on that monitor, with the mouse updating very infrequently, and routinely being drawn 2 or more places in the frame buffer.

An old (now decommissioned) notebook of mine had a broken headphone jack. I didn’t have BT headphones then. Audio output worked technically but the detection whether headphones were plugged in or not did no longer work.

I wrote a very short amixer script to force unmute the jack, set the volume to 50 or so percent and set the speaker volume to 0% but not “mute” state. I could then use my wired headphones again.

Mounting a Samba share and moving my LVM pvolumes of / onto a losetup’ed file on it, while running the system. Bass ackwards.

sssd didn’t work well with my company’s AD server, which would cause repeated authentication failures until I restarted sssd. I rigged up a bash script which would restart sssd any time xscreensaver logged an auth fail.

Some years ago, I had a client with a really fucked up set of requirements:

• Must run Gentoo Linux. (No, I don’t know why. But it was written into the project specs and everybody who had to sign off did.)
• Must use LUKS for FDE.
• Login (loosely interpreted as “booting up”) must have MFA.

This was during the days when booting into a LUKS encrypted Gentoo install involved copy-and-pasting a shell script out of the Gentoo wiki and adding it to the initrd. I want to say late 2006 or early 2007.

I remember creating a /boot partition, a tiny little LUKS partition (512 megs, at most) after it, and the rest of the drive was the LUKS encrypted root partition. The encrypted root partition had a randomly generated keyfile as its unlocker; it was symmetrically encrypted using gnupg and a passphrase before being stored in the tiny partition. The tiny partition had a passphrase to unlock it. gnupg was in the initrd. I think the workflow went something like this:

• System boots up.
• Script in the initrd prompted the user for the passphrase for the tiny LUKS partition. (first authentication step)
• User entered passphrase.
• Script in the initrd unlocked the tiny partition and prompted the user for the passphrase to decrypt the root partition’s keyfile stored therein.
• User entered the symmetric passphrase for keyfile. (second authentication step_
• Script used the passphrase to decrypt the keyfile to stdout, piped into an evocation of cryptsetup to unlock the root partition.
• /dev/mapper/root mounted, /boot mounted, boot process continued.
• User logged into the box.

I don’t miss those days.

I have a folder full of scripts tied to aliases that fix various things when they go wonky, and I’ve long since forgotten what any of them do. I just know if xxx app stops working, I type fix_xxx into the terminal and then it does a bunch of stuff and then it works again lol.

Also I have a bunch of aliases tied to common tasks, like e1 = reboot, e2 = shutdown etc. I have no idea where that habit came from.

Edit: ALSO, just the general mish-mash of apps. I won’t have anything to do with Snaps, but the rest of it is an unholy combination of native apps, things from the AUR, flatpaks, Appimages, Docker containers and wine setups, mostly (but not all) in Bottles.

I created an SMS to Email gateway back in 2011 when data was still expensive on phones and I was trying to see if I could turn an iPod Touch into an iPhone. (I was a poor student at the time, was trying to find ways to save money 😅)

Basically I had a 3G modem plugged into a Linux server that could receive the messages, a prepaid SIM card with a long life credit expiry, a domain name set up with unknown email address capturing, and some tools to handle the actual SMS part.

At the time I published the scripts I used online and apparently they’re still online 😅 This is on Whirlpool which is an Australian telecommunications forum.

https://whrl.pl/RcXD5e