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OpenSourcerer 🧙 (FOSS) who loves chocolate

They Say Don't Use the AUR

If I had to guess, why people use an Arch-based system, I would guess a big reason would be the AUR — even though it is not officially supported. It is a big part of the community and the appeal of Arch. This is a story how the AUR can break some things and the reason it is not officially supported. It all started with a normal update. In my case I used the AUR helper paru to update all system packages and all AUR packages. Only obs-studio-tytan652 failed when trying to compile, but I rarely use OBS Studio (it will get fixed, eventually). ...

2023-10-08 Â· 6 min

First and Last Buisness Day of the Month With Systemd Timers

I recently was looking for a way to run a systemd service on the last business day of the month, but I could only find an answer for first business day of every month on Stack Overflow which was wrong. So I looked into it. Spoiler: This is not possible with one calendar expression. If you remember only one thing from this blog post, remember systemd-analyse. There are quite a few useful subcommands, e.g. verify. You should check them out, if you do not know them yet with systemd-analyse -h. ...

2023-03-14 Â· 2 min

Killing your Ceph with Autoscaling

I recently was consulted on a Ceph Cluster running into nearfull and backfillfull for the first time. One Ceph OSD was utilized over 85% and another over 90%. The operators were unaware of the meaning and what to do about it, so took a look. Looking at ceph status and ceph df, I noticed something. Try to spot it yourself – I made it easier by removing some stuff around it: ...

2023-01-11 Â· 4 min

Silent Synology

I recently revived my Synology D415+ NAS from silicon death and it looks like it works fine again. When I bought it, I wanted to be able to run any docker image. Which is why I opted for Atom instead of ARM. Which is also why I upgraded RAM to 8GB. The disks basically never spun down which made it quite noisy. Now, I just want it to be silent, if not in use. ...

2022-04-25 Â· 13 min

Starting to Blog

Recently re-inspired to start to blog, I decided to open – same as Jay Faulkner – with a meta post about why, what to expect, and how I (will) do it. Why I Want to Blog If I start to learn a new topic, I feel like a total beginner. But the more I learn about something, the more I can draw from related topics to generate a more complete understanding of how it works. We all go through this. But at which point is it okay to talk about it as if you were knowledgable about the topic? I would say, do it earlier than you think, be honest about your state of understanding, and do not be afraid to be wrong (as long as it does not kill anyone). Writing is understanding. ...

2021-12-17 Â· 3 min