Handy admin and dev guides from my myriad of tinkering| JWillikers
When it comes to build systems and package management, there really is no silver bullet. Everything would be so much easier if there were. Bazel has been gaining popularity for a while now, and for good reason. It’s very fast and offers both distributed caching and remote building, and supports multiple programming languages. It’s also more correct than most of the competition. Another sign of its popularity is the number of clones its spawned which includes Buck2, Pants, and Please.[1] O...| JWillikers
Podman can automatically update your containers and hopefully make you’re life easier at the same time. Setting this up for Podman is actually pretty straightforward. Read on to learn how to set this up.| JWillikers
elementary OS 5.1 doesn’t automatically update Flatpak applications. Given the arbitrary appearance of updates, it’s a bit bothersome to be nagged about updates all day. Flatpak doesn’t provide an auto-update mechanism but instead leaves this up to software apps. GNOME Software has had this functionality baked-in since GNOME 3.30, for instance, according to the Phoronix article GNOME Software 3.30 Will Automatically Update Flatpaks By Default. Since I don’t want to have multiple app s...| JWillikers
Suffering from obsessive updating syndrome? Are you making frequent trips to the App Center or terminal to apply updates? Do update notifications haunt you all day long? If your on a Debian-based system, unattended upgrades can help.[1] 1. Side-effects may include sudden, irreversible blue-screen of death, failure to boot, changes in behavior, obscure glitches, and an increase in log messages. Talk to your system administrator before using unattended upgrades, especially for production system...| JWillikers
Podman ships with built-in support for Kubernetes configuration files but not for Docker Compose. As described in Podman Compose, the Podman Compose utility can use Docker Compose files to create Podman containers. However, you might want to migrate to the Kubernetes format, eschewing Podman Compose and Docker Compose entirely. This is what I ended up doing, and I describe the process here.| JWillikers
You probably want to take advantage of the data integrity checking offered by Btrfs. Btrfs calculates checksums for all data written to disk. These checksums are used to verify the data hasn’t been unduly altered. While data is verified every time it is read, what about the data that isn’t read often? How long may bit rot go unnoticed in that case? That’s the crux of this blog post which will explain how to best preserve your data on Btrfs and detect corruption early.| JWillikers
So, you’ve got libvirt installed on your Linux box and your looking for a simple application for running virtual machines. Look no further than Boxes, so far as it meets your needs, of course. What’s that you ask? What do you need to figure out to run on this on a Btrfs filesystem? Well, you’ve come to the right place! This post describes how to install and accommodate Boxes on Btrfs.| JWillikers
If you want to run virtual machines on Linux, chances are you’re going to use libvirt. I make use of it all the time, especially for testing these blog posts in a clean environment. libvirt provides a common interface around various underlying tools for virtual machine management. It not only offers features for guest management but for networking and storage management as well. It’s standard XML schema also makes for a powerful and versatile configuration format. On Linux, libvirt is typ...| JWillikers
Ever wanted to run a container, or pod, as a systemd service on Linux? This allows the container to be started automatically and even restarted on failure. I’m got a container running like this right now thanks to Podman which makes this incredibly easy and a bit more secure. If managing your containers as services is something you’re interested in, then this tutorial is for you.| JWillikers
Podman supports the Kubernetes YAML format for configuring pods. Unfortunately, I’m coming to the Podman scene from Docker where the Docker Compose format is common. The Docker Compose format isn’t supported by Podman. I don’t really want to invest the time in learning a new configuration file format right now, so what should I do? Use Podman Compose!| JWillikers