Booting an Asus x200ca from USB

Here is the procedure to boot an Asus x200 (x200ca in my case) from USB (ie. to install Linux on it). While booting, press F2 to enter the bios Go to the “Security” tab and disable “secure boot” In the boot tab, enable CMS and Enable PXE boot In the boot tab, disable fast boot …

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 …