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Ran into a frustrating issue recently where a custom environment variable kept resetting itself every time a system rebooted. I wasn’t sure what was causing this I was notified that the team had changed all necassary items to correct this but it kept occurring. After some digging it turns out it was being overwritten by a GPO startup script. How did I find it? PowerShell, of course: Get-ChildItem -Path "\\domain.name\SYSVOL\domain.name\Scripts" -Recurse -File | Select-String -Pattern "MY_ENV_VAR" I searched the SYSVOL scripts directory on the domain controller, and sure enough, one of the logon scripts was setting the variable back to a default value. Read more...

Generating a 32-byte key for AES encryption from a password using only built-in Python modules. To do this we’ll use the hashlib library. For this approach we’ll use the PBKDF2 (Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2) via hashlib.pbkdf2_hmac. This ensures that the key is securely derived from the password. Here’s some example code: import os import hashlib def generate_aes_key(password: str, salt: bytes = None, iterations: int = 100_000) -> bytes: """ Generate a 32-byte AES key from a password using PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256. Read more...

Learn how to setup a robust source control system with CI/CD to deploy your applications on Ubuntu. This post will guide you through the process of installing Docker, Gitea, Gitea Act Runner, and Nginx on Ubuntu, empowering you to streamline your deployment workflow and enhance your server capabilities. Installing Docker on Ubuntu Docker provides a powerful platform for containerizing applications and simplifying deployment across different environments. To install Docker on Ubuntu, follow these steps: Read more...

TL;DR: The full code is available at the bottom of this post. Let’s walk through building the whole page starting with the HTML. HTML Structure: First we’ll create a text input field that will be used to accept input to search on. We’ll also give it an id attribute set to "myInput", which is used to identify it in JavaScript later on. <input type="text" id="myInput"> Next let’s add a table and add an id attribute set to "myTable", which will also be used to identify it in JavaScript later. Read more...

A ConfigMap is provided as a way to inject configuration data into a pod/pods. It can be included as files or be used as environment variables. Below are a couple of examples of mounting a configmap using both methods. Use as File In this first example I’ll show how to create a configmap and mount it using the key(s) as filenames and the data as the file content. It will then be used in an Nginx container as the index page. Read more...

A quick demo using virt-install and Kickstart to provision a new CentOS 9 virtual machine. This uses KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) and libvirt to manage the VM. And uses Kickstart to setup and install the new system within the virtual machine. Creating kickstart file I’m going to post my Kickstart file on GitHub as a reference. It installs a headless server with some system admin tools, sets up networking, SELinux, and uses autopart to partition the disk with LVM support. Read more...

If you’ve ever tried to run an ansible playbook and recieved Please add this host's fingerprint to your known_hosts file to manage this host you’re not alone. Here’s a couple of ways to fix it. Turn off host key checking This would not be the preferred method but turning off host key checking will enable ansible to continue on with the playbook. Either modify the /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg or create an ansible.cfg file in the project directory and add the following lines to it: Read more...

I wanted to document these steps after downloading embedded Python recently. I extracted it, set the environment path and started the interpreter. Everything seemed to be going smoothly until I tried to exit exit() and it reported back ’exit not found’ or something like that. What!? How can this be? I ended up import sys and using sys.exit() but this sent me on an adventure to determine how to use embedded Python as a regular install. Read more...

The webp command line tool from Google makes it quite simple to convert images to the webp format from the command line. It can convert JPG, PNG, and TIFF images to WebP. Not sure what webp is? Read more about webp on Wikipedia. If you don’t have Docker installed on your system already, go ahead and install it now. Spin up a Debian Bookworm docker container and mount the directory with your images to the container. Read more...

A quick reference for OpenWRT Installation Prepare Debian bootable USB Connect your Debian USB and boot Download OpenWRT image onto the Debian USB Flash the SSD drive with the OpenWRT image Resize the OpenWRT partition Create an additional partition Upgrade Prepare a bootable Debian USB You can use another distro if you’d like. I use Debian as a personal perference and also because it’s relatively quick to create a live USB. Read more...