Author: Shadow8472

Posted on

Emergency Power Reserves

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I am adding an uninterruptible power supply to ButtonMash instead of actually finishing the Bitwarden job because SSL certificates are very confusing to research. Let’s get started!

Computers 101

Here is the first lesson in computer literacy: power in, stuff happens. But unlike simple light bulbs, computers are essentially endlessly shifting labyrinths of electronic circuits. Complex patterns of information flash back and forth at near light speed both within any given computer. Networked computers form even more complex circuits. Everything is timed on the scale of nanoseconds or tighter. Power a local node off suddenly, and these patterns can be interrupted. That is why it’s important to use proper shutdown procedures.

But power outages are almost always a surprise. Planned maintenance or safety shutoffs can happen, but more often than not, the power company is just as surprised as its customers left in the dark. Backup systems are about as varied as their applications. I’ve heard of an old diesel locomotive engine rigged to jump start power generation for an entire college campus. Combustion-powered generators are popular at many scales. The hardware I’m dealing with today is an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) from CyberPower.

First Impressions

This particular unit is essentially a battery with an inverter and some electronics to monitor everything. Going off just the box and literature it shipped with, it can power a little network device for several hours or a gaming console and TV for half an hour. Just don’t go trying to vacuum with it or run a space heater off it.

The unit has a USB-B connector in back, but little more is said about it than it carries data. I had to do a bunch of background research online to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that my particular model here could communicate a power outage so the system can gracefully shut down. Otherwise, it’s useless for long and unattended outages.

I did not find the CyberPower website helpful. The Linux driver section kept listing RHEL/CentOS 7 and ButtonMash is running a RHEL 8 compatible system. By the time I got around to seeking personal assistance finding the right driver, we had lost the receipt and didn’t know the exact date of purchase, which was the only field labeled required by the help form.

I borrowed a phone and called in. After explaining my situation, retrospect has me believe I was shepherded into the part of the help script pointing me past the one spot where the RHEL driver included version 8, and by then I had forgotten I was still wondering if my specific model could actually use the driver. Assuming it could, it wasn’t clear if the driver could hook into Cockpit or if it would want an open port all to itself.

Open Source Driver: NUT

CyberPower’s official support may be official, but it left a bad impression. When I saw that the driver needed root privileges, I decided to research an open source driver. Not many appear to exist. I reached out to my usual Linux community support channel, but it was quiet all day. I eventually landed on a mention of Network UPS Tools (NUT).

Unfortunately, my research here is incomplete. My impression is that they’ve been around for a while and that I will need to familiarize myself with some less beginner-friendly Linux rituals to operate effectively there. NUT appears to be exclusively distributed as source code signed with GPG. I haven’t mastered either skill. Furthermore, even if I do get the driver working, my specific model isn’t on their known working list. In any case, I will need to reach out to this specific community at some point if I want to see it working.

Side Project

My sister is into a game called Stardew Valley. It recently had a slightly clunky update that broke her modded setup through something known as SMAPI. My father and I took turns working on it. I opted to try a clean install on the virtual machine I’m trying to set up for her, but I ran into a problem when the virtual drive filled up its physical space without dynamically expanding. I had made a copy of the whole VM, so I was able to delete the troubled clone. In the future, I should take snapshots to restore.

Meanwhile, my father worked on the original Windows install. Together, we traced the problem to the wrong specific version the dotnet 5 framework being used when I took the shasum of the install file and compared it against the files available for download. We later identified the problem as a failure to communicate on the part of the download page. The three Windows versions looked like they could be one download each for Windows, Linux, and Mac where the correct version was located in the “column” below the Linux tab’s heading.

Takeaway

It’s safe to say I’m well beyond beginner-friendly Linux territory now. I start doing sysadmin level stunts, I best expect to subside on sysadmin grade assistance. For now, I’m happy knowing ButtonMash can survive a brief power blink and that I have a while to manually shut it down if I notice an outage as it starts.

Final Question

Has quality of help ever chased you away from a particular product?

Posted on

Slow and Steady Builds a Server

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and today I am continuing the grind on my Rocky Linux server running on my ButtonMash workstation. Let’s get started!

Quality of Life

I’ve had a single-focus mindset of getting Bitwarden/Vaultwarden working, but I’ve overlooked an important aspect of running a reliable server. One evening, any new connections to ButtonMash were failing. When I investigated the next day, the system was on and the network was connected, but when I logged in to console and pulled up the address with ip a, I found the router had incremented the IP by 1.

The task of setting up static IP’s is not alien to me. On some systems, I’ve even edited config files by hand. Cockpit has a Networking tab, though. From there, I was able to quickly worm my way into the correct network interface and configure a static IPv4 back to where it belongs. Cockpit tried to reestablish its connection with the new configuration and predictably failed. I had to make the change permanent with a follow up prompt.

Container Isolation

One of the draws of Podman over Docker is rootless containers. In the unlikely event someone hacks into Vaultwarden’s container and breaks out into the host system, he won’t be able to do as much damage if he finds himself in a non-root account – even better is if he finds himself in an account without sudo privileges.

With that, I added a user special for running Vaultwarden with sudo useradd vaultwardenUsr and I locked it with sudo usermod -L vaultwardenUsr to block any normal login attempts. sudo su vaultwardenUsr will still let me Substitute User into the account. And of course I find the tools to do all that under Cockpit tab Accounts.

From within my dedicated Vaultwarden container user, I looked for the two containers listed by the plugin. But I found nothing. From my background research I should have put together, containers are owned by users like any normal file. The two images the plugin listing their owner as “system” were actually owned and operated by root, as clarified by a test where I stepped back from Administrative access to download a new container image. Novel as it is, the plugin won’t be of much help for my use case unless Cockpit lets me access it without a password.

Bringing Vaultwarden Online

podman run -d --name vaultwarden -v /home/vaultwardenUsr/vw-data/:/data/:Z -p 44300:443 vaultwarden/server:latest

This is a long, complex command that took me while to puzzle into working order.

podman run

This is the base command. I used it to go from a container image to container.

-d

“Detach” runs containers in the background.

--name vaultwarden

By default, containers are given random pronounceable names. You can just spin up multiple copies of the same image without needing to give it much thought. Here, it’s best to have something descriptive.

-v /home/[username]/vw-data/:/data/:Z

“Volume” mounts a directory from the host into a directory in the container. This part deviates from most Vaultwarden guides the farthest. First of all, Docker installation assumes you’ll be mounting directory /vw-data/ directly from the root of your file system. However, that directory is off limits without elevated privileges, so it needs a place in the user’s home directory and a full path to that directory.

The other solved issue involves the :Z at the end. At one point, I seemingly had everything else sorted, but when ran **podman ps** to list running containers, it kept coming back empty. My online searches for Podman and Vaultwarden kept sending me back to last week’s progress-report of a post, but I eventually located a discussion on Vaultwarden’s GitHub. I didn’t do much follow up research after I got it working, but it appears to be related to SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux), a kernel level security module.

-p 44300:443

“Port” forwards ports from the host machine to individual containers: host on the left and container on the right. Recommended behavior (with Docker in mind) is to forward port 80 (HTTP), but I’d rather use HTTPS on port 443. Additionally: ports 0-1023 are reserved for system use, so I added a couple zeros on the host end.

vaultwarden/server:latest

With all the flags out of the way, this is the container image being copied into an operable format.

With the container running, all I had to do was punch a hole in the firewall and I can now have Firefox laugh at me for a failed secure connection. During assembly, I was able to make a non-secure HTTP connection with -p 8000:80 and bring up a Bitwarden login.

The next step is to obtain a security certificate, but that’s a topic for another week…

Side Project

When I walked my father through installing Debian/LXDE on his computer, he was left with a few specialty keys on the keyboard going unresponsive – particularly the volume up, down, and mute keys. The system is usable without them, but it would be nice if these keys worked. Originally, I assumed the problem would be somewhere with Debian itself, but when I tried a search targeting LXDE instead, I knew from the search results that I had today’s side project.

As we researched, I started building a system flow chart from key press to volume adjustment. The Keyboard transmits its key events to a USB receiver. The receiver communicates with some sort of keyboard driver be it discrete or compiled into the Linux kernel. The kernel then passes key events to the Xorg server. From here, we used xev (X EVent) to confirm that volume key events were all making it thus far.

At some point, PuleseAudio takes over and tells the Linux kernel what to push to the speakers and how loud to play it. While testing, we cut off a song with pulseaudio –stop / –start and had to refresh the webpage to get it back.

I personally think we’ll find the problem either within Xorg or between on a direct link between Xorg and Pulseaudio. In the meantime, the search continues.

Takeaway

For both these projects: ready-made solutions out there we could just copy, paste, and wish for luck but we’re trying to learn the innards of Linux, so it’s okay to take extra time.

Final Question

Have you ever had to program your keyboard events by hand?

Posted on

I’m Learning Vaultwarden and Podman!

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today –with a heap of luck– I’ll be putting a Bitwarden server on ButtonMash (or getting so close I can’t help but finish next week). Let’s get started.

Vaultwarden

I’ve already talked about the importance of password strength before. Longer is better, but a unique password per login is more important in case one gets compromised. But who has the attention span to remembering fifty passwords across every obscure site, app, or game he’s ever interacted with? A good password manager solves this by organizing your passwords so you can easily access them from a client, but anyone without your key can’t.

I started researching for this project by revisiting the first time I switched to using Bitwarden and I decided to self-host a server from a Raspberry Pi [1] following a straightforward tutorial by censiCLICK [2]. My SD card corrupted one day, and I’ve been out a password server ever since, despite efforts to repair it. I’ve been covering my exploration of Rocky Linux, a RHEL family OS, on my ButtonMash server/workstation, and now I’m ready to start putting it to work.

The tutorial by censiCLICK was well presented. It takes you from Raspberry Pi 3B+ and layers on Raspberry Pi OS, Docker, and finally Bitwarden_RS all while giving basic introductions to skills you’ll need along the way like SSH and security certificates. It is unfortunately out of date. Around six weeks after I started using it, the project leader announced that there was some confusion over trademark[3] so he was renaming it to Vaultwarden…

Odd… Looking through my posts shortly after the name change, I was already having issues with my Bitwarden server. It could still have been card corruption or me trying to play with Git. I guess I’ll never know…

…In any case, ButtonMash is ready for the next step.

Docker or Something Else?

Docker is a technology I still haven’t fully visualized. While researching instructions to install it on Red Hat systems, I stumbled across a mention of Podman. Online hosting solution Liquid Web provided a decently clear explanation [4]: containerization essentially makes single-purpose VM’s without the overhead of full operating systems. Docker has a master process that runs Docker containers. Podman runs containers separately, doesn’t require root, but requires a separate piece of software called Buildah to create containers to run and doesn’t have available professional support.

Further research confirms that RHEL now endorses Podman over Docker, so Podman I will use. Even so, I had to install it separately along with a Cockpit plugin to manage it. From there, I made just a few well-researched clicks to download Vaultwarden. The Docker-Podman plugin had a lot of fields I didn’t recognize, so I installed the Docker HelloWorld container to play with. I had to run it from terminal, but it appeared to work. I expect running a Vaultwarden container will be my side project next week.

Side Project

Last week for my side project, I set up a Wi-Fi gaming router to hopefully reduce downtime on my Wi-Fi catcher Pi. This week, I made the two get along. First, I thought it might be Wi-Fi drivers, so I updated, getting myself into a tedious cycle of incomplete updates failing when the file system flipped to read-only against the background of Wi-Fi dropouts. I had to flip the power switch because the reboot command broke and reconfigure packages to clean things out before continuing.

My real problem was the static IP landing outside the router’s 192.168.X.X range. Attempts to manually change IP kept failing, so I backed up a known good config file on top of the file I actually needed to go back to dynamic IP and spent many hours piecing it back together. In the end, I was finally able to connect.

Takeaway

PPolished computer tutorials are great for catapulting students of tech over barriers of entry, but they’re each anchored to a fixed point in time: lessons of the recent past compiled for the near future. As much of an accomplishment making a definitive guide to subject X might be, it will only be but a single focus point for future users to look back on when compiling their own procedures.

Final Question

Have you ever gone back to old project notes for insights for follow up projects?

Works Cited

[1] Shadow_8472, “BitWarden: My New Password Manager,” Let’s Build Robotics With Shadow8472, March 15, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://letsbuildroboticswithshadow8472.com/index.php/2021/03/15/bitwarden-my-new-password-manager/ [Accessed Nov. 22, 2021].

[2] censiCLICK, “Full Guide to Self-hosting Password Manager Bitwarden on Raspberry Pi,” on YouTube,Nov 15, 2020. [Online video]. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCJA1F72izc [Accessed Nov. 22, 2021].

[3] d. garcia, “1.21.0 release and project rename to vaultwarden #1642” on GitHub, Apr. 19, 2021. [Online forum]. Available: https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden/discussions/1642 [Accessed Nov. 22, 2021].

[4] Liquid Web, “Podman vs Docker: A Comparison,” Liquid Web, Sept. 10, 2021.[Online]. Available: https://www.liquidweb.com/kb/podman-vs-docker/ [Accessed Nov. 22, 2021].

Posted on

Building A Fake Computer to Split

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and today, I am building a Linux virtual machine for my mother and sister to split. Let’s get started.

Machines Within Machines

Switching operating systems is like moving to a new house. It’s intimidating. Things are arranged in different spots. The pattern of your daily life will shift and there will be an uncomfortable adjustment period.

But at least with computers, anyone with a semi-recent CPU and enough other system resources can host a “guest” operating system for evaluation. While I previously have no experience with this method, for others, it serves as a sandbox where they can try things with Linux without the pressure of learning everything at once or else risk being out a computer if a problem commands a chunk of research time.

VirtualBox

I’ve done my share of research on Virtual Machines (VM’s) in the past. VirtualBox is a well-respected name, and I can see why. Once I installed it on my sister’s Windows machine, I didn’t have to research anything about it specifically until I was looking at a desktop and my sister wanted the VM to use both screens. Otherwise, the experience was intuitive.

PopOS is quickly becoming my go-to easy mode for Linux. Their downloads come with shasum verification hashes, which I made use of. In one way, it was even easier to install because I could just install straight from the disk image without any physical install media. I did have one problem during installation where the installer window rendered larger than the screen resolution. Instead of brute forcing a virtual screen size from VirtualBox, I just used Super (Window key)+click&drag as I learned to do while working with GIMP on a boxy tube monitor with a similarly nostalgic resolution.

Dual screens had me stumped on their instruction set. From what I can tell, I had to insert a virtual CD that came with VirtualBox and install it into PopOS’s virtual disk drive. A bit of computer wizardry happened that involved some sudo password prompts that crashed and duplicates thereof happened and I seemingly needlessly rebooted the VM several times before I unlocked the necessary options to enable dual screen. I will want to pay more attention next time.

The default desktop environment for PopOS was based on GNOME 3, but it’s not for us. System76, the makers of PopOS provided an awesome command by command guide for installing a large selection of alternate desktop environments, so I loaded a few my mother and sister should feel most comfortable with. KDE is my favorite, but Cinnamon and MATE are other names I recognize.

Speaking of KDE, If Linux is the OS of customization and decision fatigue, KDE compliments it perfectly. I spent more of my blog project time this week trying to chase down the color settings than I would have liked. I was hoping for some sort of base color picker that would then populate the rest of the theme with different shades, but I found some options to pick each shade individually. Unfortunately, you’d have to be an artist to make something that looks decent. I was able to find a user-submitted theme with an acceptable color palate.

Side Project

My Manjaro workstation has been getting its Internet through a Raspberry Pi for a while now, but lately I’ve been getting periods of having the Pi’s Wi-Fi connection drop randomly. My father picked up a special gaming Wi-Fi router and I set it up today after months of other projects constantly taking priority. Long story short: I was easily able to use my laptop to connect and arrange default configurations on the router, but I have yet to get it to agree with the Pi 4. I’ve tried looking into possible inherit compatibility issues, but all the guides for finding information on Wi-Fi from Linux assume the presence of tools that aren’t present in Raspian. I thought this was small enough for a side project, but it appears I was wrong.

Takeaway

Setting up a new computer and getting it tweaked properly takes a while and a VM is no exception. One point I didn’t go into was how our NFS drive didn’t admit the VM on account of its IP address. I also learned that one of the intended host machines sits a little too heavy on its existing RAM, so it will need an upgrade for comfortable VM operation. I expect a follow up to this project at a later date.

Final Question

Do you have any tips for working with virtual machines?

Posted on

ButtonMash’s Solid Foundation on Rocky Linux

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I am still working on my Rocky Linux server. Let’s get started!

Project Selection

One would think it shouldn’t take a month to set up a server, but the vast bulk of that is research. What all do I want the server to do? What services do I need to set up to include it? When I know more than one way to do something, which way do I want to do it? The questions don’t end until work has progressed beyond the point of answering differently.

My goal for today is to get a few things running: I want to mount the GoldenOakLibry NFS server. I want to update-grub so I can properly dual boot with Debian. I want to install BitWarden. These three things are probably the most important end-goal tasks remaining for configuring ButtonMash’s Rocky install.

Package Managers

Before I can really work on my target goals, I need to know some of the basic specifics. Every major branch has its own compatible package managers. Debian has DPKG and Apt (Snap for the Ubuntu sub-family) while Arch has Pacman and AUR. Wrappers and cross-compatibility tools exist as a zoo of possibilities that will not be fully sorted out here, today.

My first impression as I research the Red Hat branch’s solution are the striking parallels to Debian, though it is also experiencing a stir. RPM (Redhat Package Manager) is like DPKG in that it is used for directly interfacing with the repository. YUM (Yellow dog Updater, Modified) was the package manager the likes of Apt I’ve been hearing about associated with the branch. It is now replaced by DNF (DaNdiFied YUM) for installing Package X and everything Package X needs to run (called “resolving dependencies”). Both YUM and DNF are present on my install, though.

Cockpit

I’ve had a chance to look over this web interface that came with Rocky Linux. By default, there doesn’t appear to be much to it after logging in beyond information readouts, an interactive firewall, and most importantly: an in-browser terminal. There appears to be a whole ecosystem to learn about, but it’s beyond me for now. I will want to look deeper into this subject when I move in to disable password authentication over the network.

Note about the terminal: it’s a little quirky from sharing its inputs with the browser. Nano’s save command also tells FireFox to “Open” and copy-paste commands don’t always work the same.

NFS Mount

From experience, I know that NFS is a royal pain to learn how to set up. On top of that, I know of at least two ways to automount network drives: during boot with fstab, and dynamically with systemd. Mounting it with fstab is annoying on my laptop because it halts boot for a minute and a half before giving up if GoldenOak is unreachable. More annoying is that this appears to be the more well documented method between the two. For an always-on server, though, it may not be a concern.

Not helping systemd’s case is/are the additional way/ways I’m discovering to set its automount functionality up. I don’t even know the proper name for the method I’ve used before – just that I didn’t mess with /etc/fstab whereas another systemd method does. It is a great challenge finding a source that compares more than a single mounting method. The good news is that aside from installation, I should be able to disregard what distro the tutorial was intended for.

While researching this section, I rediscovered autofs, and saw mention of still other automount methods. I’m avoiding autofs because because the more I read about it, the move complex it appears. In this instance, it would behoove me to just leave a line in /etc/fstab because I don’t expect to be booting this server outside the context of the GoldenOak NAS, but as this is more or less the centerpiece of my home’s network, I’m going with systemd mount files, as per the blog by Ray Lyon I referenced last February when I first learned about it. I’ll leave a link to his post in my Works Cited[1].

NFS Automount is tricky stuff, but each time I study it, I retain a little more. I can barely remember how to mount a share manually – let alone configure systemd automounts. It took me several days to find a copy of the files I needed, even after looking back at my above mentioned post from February[2]. My best guess is that I got lost in my own filesystem. I’m taking notes and organizing them in my home directory on this new install.

Update-Grub

When I installed Rocky Linux, I was all nice and safe by not letting it see any drives it wasn’t installing over, but the host machine still has a job to do on the photo trunk project; I need it to dual boot. I read up on a command called update-grub I could just run once everything was installed and physically reconnected. First of all, update-grub is a script, and second of all, it’s notoriously absent.

A variety of help topics exist on what command to run on RHEL instead of update-grub. From what I can tell, it’s pretty universally present on Debian-based systems and when I checked Manjaro (Arch family) just now, it was there too.

Update-grub itself is pretty simple. It’s three lines long, and serves as an easy-to-remember proxy command to actually update your Grub boot loader. The exact command may differ between computers depending on if they’re using BIOS or a newer, less common equivalent called UEFI. I assume it is generally generated during package installation.

Once I had my bearings, it was fairly easy to update grub on my own. I found my configuration file at /boot/grub2/grub.cfg because I am using BIOS. An effectively empty directory stump existed for the UEFI branch, cluing me in that this operation is one you should understand before using copy-paste into terminal. This StackExchange forum has several individual explanations, including reference to what I take to be a catch-all I am not using. Link[3]

So… I go to verify everything is working, and it’s not. A simple reboot loaded Rocky’s GRUB, but the Debian kernel refused to load over the USB 3 PCI card. So much for that idea. I moved the Debian drive to a motherboard USB port and BIOS found it and loaded Debian’s GRUB, which doesn’t know about Rocky Linux. I tried running update-grub in Debian and… it didn’t work. I wasn’t looking to spend even more time on this part of the project, so after confirming that Rocky’s GRUB could boot Debian, I got into BIOS and told them to prefer the internal Rocky drive over anything on USB.

BitWarden False Alarm

I’m super-excited about putting my self-hosted BitWarden server back up. I’ve already started researching, but the topic still feels like it’s expanding when I need to be getting ready for publishing this already lengthy post full of amazing progress. BitWarden will need to wait until I can better teach myself how to properly take care of it.

Takeaway

The Red Hat branch of Linux is in a notable state of flux. Key fundamentals elements of the family like CentOS and YUM are everywhere in old tutorials, and that is bound to make for a frustrating time trying to learn Red Hat for a while to come – especially if you’re new to Linux. Here, more than anywhere else, learning the history of the branch is vital to teaching yourself how to sysadmin.

Side Project

A while ago, I thought Derpy’s RAM was failing because Kerbal Space Program kept crashing the whole system. I’ve been running the three 4 gigabyte sticks on my Manjaro workstation for a month or two, and they appear fine. In the meantime, my father ordered up a pair of 8gb sticks. This week, I installed them, displacing one of the 4gb sticks. Passive testing will now commence.

Final Question

Have you ever had a project take a discouragingly large amount of research time then suddenly come into focus in a single day?

Works Cited

[1] R. Lyon, “On-Demand NFS and Samba Connections in Linux with Systemd Automount,” Ray Against the Machine, Oct. 7, 2020. (Edited Aug. 8, 2021). [Online]. Available: https://rayagainstthemachine.net/linux%20administration/systemd-automount/. [Accessed Nov. 7, 2021].

[2] Shadow_8472, “Stabilizing Derpy Chips at Last,” Let’s Build Robotics With Shadow8472, Feb. 22, 2021. [Online]. Available:https://letsbuildroboticswithshadow8472.com/index.php/2021/02/22/stabilizing-derpy-chips-at-last/. [Accessed Nov. 7, 2021].

[3] “Equivalent of update-grub for RHEL/Fedora/CentOS systems,”StackExchange, Aug. 26, 2014-Oct. 10, 2021 [Online]. Available:https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/152222/equivalent-of-update-grub-for-rhel-fedora-centos-systems. [Accessed Nov. 7, 2021].

Posted on

Rocky Linux: Looking Around

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am installing Rocky Linux on ButtonMash. There’s a lot to learn and a bit more to do, so let’s get started!

Checklists and Notepads

A home server is useful. However, if you ask me what one is good for, and I’ll struggle to come up with an answer before the conversation stalls. I’ll come across as simply begging for another expensive toy, and you’re even less interested in one than before.

To remedy the stress of the moment, I opened a text buffer and slapped in a few uses I had in mind. Over the next several days, I added some more for a total of seven or eight so far. None of them were new per se, but it was the first time I had them all in the same place at once.

On the topic of brainstorming, I’m considering developing my own checklist for installing Linux no matter the distro. Watch for it in a future topic once I’m half-satisfied with it.

I left a document open for several days to add ideas for running on server

I am developing a personal Linux Install checklist

Installation

As stated in my last post, I already flashed a thumb drive with Rocky Linux. I was considering using optical media this time because of the expected long term support for this install, but even the minimal option I ended up downloading was too large for CD and we’re seemingly out of blank DVD’s. When I did make my download, I accepted Firefox’s offer to open it with Popsicle, a USB flasher utility that came with either PopOS or KDE (I have reasons to think either is likely). I overwrote the Debian install media from my Laptop.

Slated for overwriting was a previous ButtonMash SSD (Solid State Drive) with MineOS on it. I had already cleared stuff out from it, but after working on the family’s Minecraft server on Apex, I started having second thoughts. I sought out and found an even older and smaller MineOS SSD originally from DerpyChips. My father and I connected it up and booted to the install media.

By this point, I knew this Linux installation will be provisional at best – to my relief. Without the pressure of getting a “forever server” going, I can further refine my approach until I’m satisfied. In the meantime, I can load up some lightweight services.

The installer was one of the smoothest I’ve ever seen. All the usual elements like time zone, user accounts/passwords, and partitioning were linked from a main menu. My one complaint is the full screen slide animation blasting my eyes whenever I clicked on something. It’s not worth my time to recompile the installer, though.

There were a couple unfamiliar panels from the installer menu. One appeared to be some sort of privacy policy configuration screen. I had no idea what most of the options were about, but I could still recognize the value in it. The other screen had options for a selection of software to install. We read through each option, deciding weather or not I wanted each piece. Stuff like networking tools for SSH or NFS were included. Stuff a headless workstation doesn’t need, like GNOME, stayed off. If I didn’t recognize something, I left it alone. Some of the stuff I opted to include with installation were things I knew I’d be installing anyway, so that’s a little time and effort saved.

Configuration

SSH is an easy skill to learn, but difficult to master; I’ve poked at it this week, but I’ll need more time with it before I can consider myself safe using it on an unsecured line. I had a little trouble matching key fingerprints when SSH’ing into ButtonMash from my Manjaro workstation vs having the later SSH into itself with localhost. I quickly realized they were using different hash algorithms, but I had to give up on forcing them into alignment for now. I was able to verify the code on DerpyChips, though.

As soon as I got myself SSH’ed into ButtonMash, I received a prompt to launch a webUI called Cockpit. I don’t know much about it, but I recognized the name from my research last week and the interface feels familiar from some of my previous experiences with server management over browser. The interface came back online after a reboot, so there’s that. I will note that Firefox wasn’t happy about its self-signed security certificate. I have fixed that in the past, but I’m ignoring it for now.

Takeaway

I can feel like I’ve come a long way since when I first started Linux. Each major jump feels like I’m landing in a less unfamiliar place, though there are still surprises. To answer one of my own early “Final Questions:” results are not as important as learning why you got the results in the first place. Though there are plenty of places that make no assumptions about prior skill, general experience will still be of benefit when working with such systems.

Side Note

After I was done with last week’s post, I poked around a bit more at my Manjaro workstation’s spell check for LibreOffice Writer. I was able to get it working by installing a package called hunspell-en_us, as no language libraries were included by default.

Final Question

What would you do with a home server?

Posted on

Picking Out a Red Hat Style

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am reconfiguring ButtonMash to run some Red Hat family distribution. Let’s get started!

My Early Impressions of Linux

When I was taking my first deep dive into the Linux operating system, I was amazed and overwhelmed with the sheer diversity and customization to be found. Between the soup of permissive licenses and modularity of GNU/Linux (pure Linux does not a complete operating system make), Linux isn’t one operating system: it’s thousands. And if that’s not good enough, you can always make a new one.

I quickly found representations of the Linux family tree listing several popular distributions spawned over time as people forked projects, swapped code, and in some cases ceased development. And while there are several names that have stood the test of time so far, I was introduced to three branches each revolving around a particular distribution: Debian, Arch, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Ubuntu is large enough to receive an honorary mention within the Debian family. Most of my computers run Debian or a derivative thereof. My flagship computer runs on Manjaro of the Arch family. I would like some experience on a RHEL family branch.

The Red Hat Family

The modern Red Hat branch feel different compared to Debian and Arch. The titicular distribution, RHEL, is sold on a subscription basis. Red Hat, the company, sponsors a distinct, community supported, upstream distro called Fedora where programs can be tested before being deployed to customers’ production environments where downtime can cost a lot of money. Per the permissive licenses of software going into RHEL, anyone can view, modify, and redistribute their source code – just respect the Red Hat trademark. Do know that actually subscribing comes with technical support.

Historical and editorial note: from what I can tell, Red Hat Linux used to be the branch root, if you will. Red Hat reorganized things in 2003, adopting Fedora while discontinuing Red Hat Linux in favor of Red Hat ENTERPRISE Linux. The way these three terms are used almost interchangeably made this section very frustrating to research, but I will try and use the proper terms: Red Hat is the company, Red Hat Linux was Red Hat’s flagship product sold on store shelves sold from the mid-90’s until 2003, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL for short) is Red Hat’s modern OS users subscribe to.

Looking deeper into different distros based off RHEL source code, you will find that 100% binary compatibility is huge. You can develop something on a RHEL downstream and it should work for a paying RHEL subscriber. If you find a clever use for a bug –it has happened before in the tech world– that bug will be there in RHEL.

CentOS

CentOS has been an important name in Linux for a while. Had I done this week’s research for a Red Hat branch distro a year ago, I have no doubt it would have been my pick for use on a home server.

Despite CentOS’s long history as the go-to RHEL downstream, the CentOS I was looking forward to getting to know has a short future. Just as Red Hat Linux was discontinued in favor of RHEL, CentOS is to be discontinued in a couple months on this coming New Year’s Eve (December 31, 2021) and repurposed. The future CentOS Stream will sit between Fedora and RHEL, making it an unsuitable distro for a server I expect to run for at least the next few years.

The niche CentOS is vacating already has new distros vying to be the de facto replacement. The leading contenders are Alma Linux and Rocky Linux. Alma Linux has the backing of a large company, while Rocky Linux is being done by the guy who originally started CentOS. So far as I can tell, they’re a coin flip away from each other. If they both work out, more power to the end-users.

Even as I write, I’m unsure what I’ll be running a year from now. For no reason in particular, I’m leaning towards Rocky Linux. I’ve already flashed a thumb drive with the install media, but setup will have to wait until next week.

Takeaway

I picked a horrible time to get into free Red Hat distros. One chapter in its history is drawing to a close and the opening of the next is still going through revisions. However, I’m not looking to wait a year for that retrospect. I’ll be re-evaluating as needed.

Final Question

Have you ever started a project during a sub-optimal time?

Posted on

Source Code Bending for Minecraft

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am diving deep into working on a Minecraft server – deeper than I have ever gone before. Let’s get started!

Minecraft: A Game of Memories

My family has maintained a small Minecraft community for a few years now. With DS9 Fireblade’s larger server, Phoenixcraft, going on the lull –the family’s been helping moderate– we’re all waiting for the Minecraft 1.18 update. Our closer group of friends is feeling ready for a new season, but we don’t want to start a whole new one just yet. That leaves us with revamping the current season of Creepers N Cream, our family-run server.

A friend at university got me into Avatar the Last Airbender, a show set in a world where some people have super abilities to manipulate [or bend] one of the classical elements: water, earth, fire, air. I brought it home. I was into its unofficial tie-in plugin for Minecraft even before my whole family had accounts. I credit the bending plugin with getting me into running servers as far back as Minecraft 1.6. On one of my previous servers, there existed an official RPG side-plugin that added world events that strengthen or nerf your bending.

Years have passed and I’ve played the plugin a few times. It’s still around, but it’s called Project Korra now (PK). Time has not been as friendly to the Bending RPG side-plugin, though. The latest full release is a couple months shy of seven years ago.

The Test Server and Compiling From Source

I started a server for testing all the plugins we expect to be using. It was taken over for a family survival world, and I made a second testing world for just bending and bending RPG. The old plugin loaded, to a little surprise from chat on the ProjectKorra Discord when I reached out and told them it made its announcements, but didn’t affect actual gameplay. Someone directed me to the ProjectKorraRPG GitHub, where I could find a more recent, less out of date version of the plugin – specifically the event-concurency branch.

Java is not a favorite language. I’ve tried getting into it no fewer than three times, but the barrier to entry kept getting in my way. Long story short, their development-support channel was quite helpful and I even got in contact with the most recent developer on the PK Discord, Simplicitee. It was a long, involved process –possibly worth a blog post in its own right had I better understood what I was doing– but with help, I managed to provide get the needed .jar files, update a few version numbers, and set up a symbolic link (from memory even) where the compiler expected. Eventually, I got myself a compiled version of Bending RPG and running on the server. Simplicitee even noticed my efforts and started working on it again, starting with updating the GitHub for the first time in two years. I have yet to compile this version yet though, but not for lack of trying.

My sister, Taz, and I test played it, and while the actual RPG mechanics took a little getting used to, they were playable, even if they lack balance – an armor stand defaulted to the same XP as a mob, passive, hostile, or even boss (configurable).

While that all was going on, our whole inspiration for playing the bending plugin again was a video showcasing an earthbending move that looked like a revamped seismic sense for earthbending. It made the move look awesome when no one in the family has really gotten earth as an element yet. We quickly learned it was actually an ability pack called TerraSense by Hiro or Hiro3 (Discord and PK forums, respectfully), and the latest publication was only relevant to plugin versions pertaining to Minecraft 1.17 and not 1.17.1, the version we’re playing on. Hiro was kind enough to provide me with a work in progress 1.17.1 build for my server and I’ve been reporting bugs as they show up.

Bending on our Apex server

Our target world was a 1.17 vanilla world running on Apex. I stipulated that I wold not be doing anything with the server until I had a copy of it running locally. Apex support directed me to one of their videos, and I followed it… and waited for the uncompressed download to progress – Apex has built-in compression in their provided online FTP access client. I wasn’t able to get it on a server, but I did load it up in single player. A viable copy is safely stored on GoldenOakLibry, our network storage.

In theory, switching server jars is as simple as operating a drop-down menu and uploading any plugins. In practice though, our server file space is cluttered. There were some plugins from the last time we were on a Bukkit server or something because they jumped to life when Paper Spigot for 1.17.1 crashed trying to load them and one was incompatible. When we switch to 1.18, I fully intend to compress the whole thing, download it, and wipe everything. I expect there are world files for at least a couple servers in there.

Takeaway

Programming is about more than coding. For this project, I was able to give back to the community by identifying bugs and sharing my findings. As I was writing, I received the news that several of my reported bugs were now patched. One edge case bug involving switching to spectator mode while flying even sparked a conversation where that led to solving a number of seemingly disjoint bugs and it was addressed before I had the chance to follow up with a better description.

Final Question

Have you ever contributed back to a project you enjoy?

Posted on

Squashing All My Computers into One: Part 1

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I am centralizing storage across my several computers. Let’s get started!

Computer Drift

One of my favorite things about Linux is exploring the possibility space of designs for what a computer operating system can look like. But maintaining multiple workstations can and will leave you wondering where that one picture is saved or what ever happened to that document you know you saved under blog drafts. I have no fewer than three computers –four or more if you count my laptop and ButtonMash as separate given their common install and/or my dual booted machines– it’s high time I consolidate my computers’ respective identities to reflect me as a single user given my access to GoldenOakLibry, the family network storage.

Project Overview

One would think the process would be as simple as dumping everything in a central location and spreading everything around be it garbage or not. Alas, subtle differences in installed programs or versions of programs make this approach unsuitable.

My best bet will be to think backwards. Not everything will be shuffled around; directories supporting install-specific programs should stay on their specific computer. Backups for such files are fine, but I can accidentally damage other instances if I’m not careful. I’ll need to tailor a number of Rsync commands and schedule them to run automatically with Cron. As this topic is basically day-of filler while I work on a larger project, the full job is a little out of my scope for today.

My goal for today is to make a backup I can operate manually and later automate. If things go well, I can see what I can do about Rsync, but Cron will need to wait for another day.

GUI File Transfer

The terminal is an important skill to have when managing a Linux ecosystem of multiple computers. However, there are some things, such as managing picture files, that inherently work better over a graphical file manager. While preparing for writing today, I noticed places like my respective Downloads directories are quite messy after a few years of Linux.

I wasn’t the biggest fan of jumping workstations all day, so I searched for a way to have the Dolphin file manager operate over SSH. The first result to catch my attention was called FISH (Files Transferred over SHell protocol). Similarly, SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) appears to fill a similar computing niche. Each would be an interesting research topic, but for my purposes today, they both work equally well as long as SSH is configured to use authentication keys.

Derpy’s Backup

The easiest place to start would be my DerpyChips workstation as that’s the one I’m working from starting off. Documents was fairly easy to clean out. I had some Blog drafts and some other stuff I sorted into proper places on the drive.

The dreaded Downloads directory was relatively tame on Derpy. Nevertheless, I still spotted elements from at least four distinct projects ranging from incomplete to long done or abandoned. I even found an instance of GraalVM I may have been running straight from Downloads. My goal is an empty directory. If it will update before I need it again or I won’t need it ever again, it’s gone. If I’m unsure, I’ll find another home for it. I similarly emptied out any directory intended for file storage. Pictures was simple this time, but I expect I’ll need a more elaborate structure once I start trying to organize additional computers’ worth of memories.

ButtonMash’s Backups (Debian and MineOS)

Things were a little more interesting when I started moving things over from ButtonMash. At first, I set a Dolphin instance up with ButtonMash’s home on the left and its view GoldenOak on the right, but when I got a warning about not being able to undo a delete, I thought twice. I did have a deletion accident last phase and used an undo action, so it’s Derpy’s view of it on the right.

I was right about needing to take pictures slowly on this one. Some pictures fit better in with my blog while mems I felt worth saving went in their own directory within the more general Pictures one. But I don’t need copies of everything everywhere if I can just access the drive. Possibly just my favorite desktop and my avatar, if that. I made a directory for those two and any others I may want to spread around.

File manager over SFTP understandably has limitations. Not all files can be directly accessed –particularly audio files– and some graphical files don’t render shortcuts. When I try to preview an archive, it must first be copied over as a temp file.

I had another accident while moving some old Python projects over. For whatever reason –be it permissions or simple corruption– some files didn’t copy over cleanly. I fished around with it a little more and gave up and deleted both source and destination, as I expect another copy was made when I cloned my laptop to its internal drive.

Thanks to this blunder, though, I was more careful when it came to the family’s Minecraft servers from when we were running MineOS. I encountered an error while copying, so I reverted to rsync directly from ButtonMash. Even then, I had to elevate permissions with sudo to finish the job.

Takeaway

I’d like to say I’m somewhere around half way with my goal for today, but if I am to take this task seriously, I’ll need to go back farther and reintegrate any old backups I may have laying around, and by that count, I at least eight computers to consider – more if I count Raspberry Pi’s and any recursive backups I may find.

In some ways, this project is not unlike my experience with synchronizing Steam games manually, but on a larger scale. I’m having to re-think my structure for what I want backed up where as well as how I’m planning to access it. This is not a simple grab and dump.

Final Question

Have you ever made an comprehensive and accessible backup of all your computers, present and surviving?

Posted on

Linux 101 with Leo_8472: Part 3: Minecraft

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am helping my father get his Debian install to a livable level. Let’s get started!

Reality Checks and Cancellations

My goal with talking my father through a Linux install is to grow my own abilities as well, but our time together is often limited, leaving little room for research during our work sessions.

Debian Testing sounded like a good idea until we started reading about it. I knew there would be warnings, but the booklet worth of information about special care it required was more than a little intimidating. It’s still something I’d like to try some day, just not when back seat computing.

Likewise, setting up a Windows look-alike desktop environment was beyond the scope of our allotted time. The selection I had located were simply themes build upon actual desktop environments. Again: something I’d like to try when I have a machine to do more advance research on.

A lot of our work this week was spent reading on these canceled side projects. We unfortunately had to reduce our scope, but we now understand our limitations better for it.

MultiMC with GraalVM

Overall, my family’s favorite game is Minecraft. I’m trying to move the family away from the default launcher, so we installed MultiMC, a third party launcher that doesn’t confuse your versions.

One download option for MultiMC is a .deb file labeled as if for Ubuntu. I improved a little on the installation when trying to install it locally with aptitude, apt, and finally dpkg. We had to look up how to address dependencies. While it wasn’t painless, it wasn’t memorable either, but it was one example of why straight Debian may not be the best for someone looking to get into Linux without a guide.

Minecraft uses Java. The current version uses the relatively new Java 16, which isn’t a common find on Debian based systems unless purposefully installed. Graal is my preferred open source version of Java, and they have experimental builds for Java 16. With my recent return to the game, I’ve done the following procedure a few times already.

Graal can be downloaded from their GitHub. They provide builds for both amd64 or aarch64 architectures. We didn’t happen to know which one we needed, so we just choose one with a mental note to be prepared in case it wasn’t recognized, which it wasn’t. While Graal will work from anywhere as long as it’s called, the proper place to install it is in /usr/lib/jvm/. On my other installations, the jvm/ directory already existed and was host to other Java installations, but this time we had to make it ourselves. MultiMC recognized Graal shortly after properly installing it properly.

Takeaway

There’s a special feeling when you can reference your own work for solutions to problems you’ve already solved. The standard Java path is something that took me a while to learn, and I still had to look it up on my own system while writing. A week or two ago, I was happy to dump Graal wherever I could find it –one instance was even running it from my Downloads directory– but it’s best to put utilities on a computer where others can expect to find them.

In the meantime, we are practicing terminal with that… hard to read terminal emulator that came with LXDE. My father tried to change the colors, but his settings didn’t stick on restarting the program.

Final Question

Have you ever self-referenced for answers?

Privacy Policy