Advanced watchdog daemon for Linux

April 30, 2021 - 1 min read

watchdogd(8) is an advanced system and process supervisor primarily intended for embedded Linux and server systems. It supports “kicking” multiple watchdog timer (WDT) devices and can also monitor critical system resources, supervise the heartbeat of processes1 and record process deadline transgressions. Read more about Built-in Monitors in the extended documentation. The configuration determines how the daemon acts on monitored resources and supervised processes. See watchdogd.conf(5) for how to set up watermarks and trigger external scripts to suit your particular setup.

It's Here! ♥

April 27, 2021 - 1 min read

Finit v4 was finally released the other day! \o/

It represents the culmination of many years of hard work and careful thought put in by many people. There’s so much to tell, hardly know where to begin … the plan anyway is to use this blog for a series of posts detailing different aspects and important features.

The impatient reader can either scroll down to the video below, or move on to the project home page: https://troglobit.com/finit.html

Alpine Linux with Finit

February 12, 2021 - 3 mins read

Alpine Linux is an amazing little operating system. It’s small, boots quick, and easy to use. The size alone makes it very attractive to container builders.

This blog post details how to set Alpine up with the Finit init system, replacing the default OpenRC.

Backtrace in C

November 15, 2020 - 1 min read

Reminder to self: remember CFLAGS=-g -Og -rdynamic to allow backtrace_symbols() to actually pretty print function names in stack traces.

Weird Screen Artifacts on X200

August 23, 2020 - 1 min read

I blogged earlier about the awesome little ThinkPad X200 I found and its blinking WiFi LED. Briefly I mentioned an odd issue with X/Wayland on LMDE 4. This turned out to be a HW bug that can only be worked around by disabling hardware acceleration for virtualization: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Windows-8-1-8-7-Vista-and-XP-Discussions/Bizarre-screen-artifacts-on-R400-Integrated-Graphics-running-Win-7-RTM/m-p/153980?page=1#199768 The post says it should be sufficient to “Disable Virtualization Technology for Directed-IO (VT-d)”, but that didn’t work for me, and I wanted to keep the 8 GiB of RAM I managed to fit into it.

HowTo use NetBSD pre-built packages

August 22, 2020 - 1 min read

Reminder to self: you need to set up the PKG_PATH to the correct FTP URI. Also, use the correct ARCH, otherwise the installer complains. Do not use amd64, but rather x86_64. Here it is, you’d think this be something the installer could set up a default for … PKG_PATH=http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/amd64/6.1.5/All/ or if you use the latest on an old ThinkPad T42: PKG_PATH=http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/i386/9.0/All/ The simply pkg_add -v git Or so you might think!

Wireguard and DNS Timeout

Joachim Wiberg - July 17, 2020 - 2 mins read

For a while now my Wireguard VPN provider has been handing out a bad DNS server. So whenever I do a DNS lookup it takes five (5!) seconds timing out, which is quite annoying.

This blog post is about how you can fix this with openresolv in Ubuntu.

HowTo: Set up Merecat with Let's Encrypt certificate

July 15, 2020 - 8 mins read

merecat

This is a HowTo for setting up Merecat httpd with Let’s Encrypt HTTPS certificates.

The upcoming v2.32 release of Merecat supports HTTPS as well as serving more than one Internet port. This is highly useful for those who want to serve both HTTPS and HTTP content.

Update: now with support for --webroot and HTTP-01 renewal!

Fixing file sharing in Debian/Ubuntu/Mint

July 13, 2020 - 1 min read

Mounting my ReadyNAS from Nautilus stopped working after upgrading to Ubuntu 20.04. Turns out there was a change in behavior in Sambva v4.11 that disabled SMB1 protocol by default. It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out in the rest of the Linux community … fortunately there’s a workaround!

Update: same on Debian 11 (bullseye) and Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana)

Open Source Releases

June 9, 2020 - 1 min read

The last couple of months have been crazy. The downturn in the economy due to Covid-19, mass layoffs, social distancing and quarantine. Not to mention the unrest in US and Europe in the wake of George Floyd’s uneccessary death.