Programming the MFB Tanzbar Lite

Note: If you have not used the Tanzbar Lite for a time, be sure to press the buttons firmly. They seem to not work well when left unused. After a session of use (and firm presses) they should to start working normally again. Like most MFB products, the Tanbar light is a mix of great …

Modifying and rebuilding an RPM from source

This is a topic covered over and over on the internet and yet I can never find the quick guide I need. Here for my notes are how to modify and rebuild an RPM from source. First, download the SRPM and install it: You may see some errors about groups, you can ignore these. You …

Finding an expired certificate

I had a strange issue today regarding a particular expired certificate on a webserver. The problem was that the server in question was an nginx reverse proxy that proxied many domains and contained many hundreds of certificates. For various, um, “technical reasons”, I could not locate the exact cert that was bad. I only knew …

Creating a simple, quick Borg backup

Here is how to create a simple borg backup. Something more along the lines of a zip file than a careful backup system. I’m using this method for long term storage. The primary benefits are de-duplication and compression. Again, to clarify – these are not backups meant to be updated each day/week/month. These are simply …

Using a private key file with sftp over lftp

I ran into a few issues trying to use a non-default private key file with lftp. Here is how I got it to work: inside ~/.lftprc put The important items are what is passed to the -i option – this should be the private key you want to use. In my example I’m also using …

Slow login and su on Centos 7 (not an ssh or dns problem)

I had a particular Centos 8 box that had very slow logins but over ssh but also using su. The issue was not with dns and ssh. I finally found the problem – or at least the fix (related to systemd, sigh): The server was running inside of openvz so perhaps there were resource issues …