Mounting NFS from Host machine inside VM on Fedora

For the past few weeks I’ve been trying to solve few particular set of problems which I won’t go into detail here, perhaps in another post. One of the challenges I’ve faced is how to export NFS from my ZFS pool on Fedora host machine and mount it within Ubuntu based VM. The whole process is quite simple and straight forward so here we go. In order to be able to use NFS at all we first need to install required components on the host machine:...

November 19, 2019 · 2 min · Ivan Tomica

Firefox Widevine CDM crashing on Fedora

I had this problem with playing Netflix videos in Firefox on Fedora where even at video preview-s I would constantly get yellow bar with the message that Widevine Content Decryption Module, required for playing DRM content Netflix serves, has in fact crashed. Videos worked fine in Chrome, but I’d like to use Firefox. After some digging through, mainly by following Journal logs and triggering error in parallel I’ve came across following error...

November 18, 2019 · 2 min · Ivan Tomica

Self-Hosted Email server

More than 3 years ago I’ve written an article about self-hosting email. Throughout the years that setup was adjusted, migrated and changed in various ways. I’ve used it on the FreeBSD, Debian, Ubuntu since the original article which was based on CentOS. Now, I’m trying to set it up again on the CentOS, this time on the CentOS 8 and components to achieve the whole flow are changed a bit, and there are even some new ones....

October 31, 2019 · 13 min · Ivan Tomica

Configuring aws-vault with password-store

There is this nice utility which helps you with managing AWS credentials called aws-vault. It is quite nice to use it as it allows ad-hoc login as a specific profile via web browser, without the need for entering your credentials or performing 3 step process to log in, just: aws-vault login profile Where “profile” is specific AWS profile, and voila, you’re in. Besides that, it also keeps your credentials safe in one of the supported backends....

October 26, 2019 · 1 min · Ivan Tomica

Using Sanoid for snapshotting ZFS on Fedora

ZFS is really nice filesystem and I use it wherever I can. I could write essays on the topic of ZFS and how awesome it is, and that is just what might happen some time in the future, but for now I’ll just show you how snapshots are managed on my machines. Why snapshots? There are 10 types of people: Those who do backups And those who will I’m not sure about you, but I’ve definitely deleted things I shouldn’t have only to realize few minutes (,or 3 days, or a month) later that I need the data that’s now gone....

September 8, 2019 · 3 min · Ivan Tomica

Wildcard LetsEncrypt SSL/TLS certificate with Bind

Having wildcard SSL certificate can sometimes really help with streamlining vhost creation, where you don’t need to step extra step for issuing new SSL/TLS certificate. Although I attempt to automate every bit of the infrastructure I manage, and also have certificate issuance automated with my current configuration management system of choice - Ansible, it is still nice to have only one certificate to worry about as it streamlines the whole process of reloading the services after renewal and so on....

September 7, 2019 · 3 min · Ivan Tomica

Migrating to Miniflux

Until recently I solely used TinyTinyRSS for staying on top of the various news, following application releases/updates and so on. But, few weeks ago I started to looking at different feed aggregation applications. From the technical standpoint TTRSS was really on top of it. It worked quite fine. The fact that it is written in PHP and supports SQLite, PgSQL and MySQL meant that it was easy and cheap to host anywhere....

August 13, 2019 · 3 min · Ivan Tomica

mu4e on Fedora

Since recently I’m an Emacs user, and as such I like to have my Emacs everywhere. Including on the laptop which runs Fedora 30 at this moment. One of the most crucial things for me is email, which is being handled by mu/mu4e. And since I was unable to google things properly I was going through hassle of downloading and building mu from the source code, which then provided me with mu4e....

July 7, 2019 · 1 min · Ivan Tomica

My Vim configuration

Although recently I’ve switched most of my workflow into the Emacs ? I still edit things here and there in Vim. Vim doesn’t have many nice and fancy features enabled by default, but that’s OK, I like it light. But not so light… soo… this post will show configuration options I have stacked throughout the years by using Vim and explanation of some. Recently to have NerdTree enabled I’ve added Pathogen which is loaded by...

June 9, 2019 · 3 min · Ivan Tomica

Zathura as default PDF client in Ubuntu

Since I’m using AwesomeWM as my WM of choice and I try to keep my app list to minimal, I don’t really have graphical PDF client such as Evince. Instead, for my PDF reading requirements Zathura is a perfect fit. This all works fine when I’m specifying zathura FILENAME either from AwesomeWM Run menu or from command line, but when clicking on PDF file in some XDG respecting app such as Telegram desktop, that meant that PDF would open in GIMP ?...

June 9, 2019 · 1 min · Ivan Tomica