linux

I’m back on Ubuntu with the Gnome 3 desktop environment and here are a few customsations to make it more productive and make moving between Gnome 3 & Windows simple. ...

I want to keep an eye on my Internet service provider after a series of prolonged outages, to that end I setup a Grafana dashboard to monitor my connectivity to various online services. ...

Everyone has their own preferences when it comes to writing Bash scripts, I prefer very high safety & syntax consistency. A good example of both is variables, ${USER} can be shortened to $USER, but any following characters could be interpreted as part of the variable name. The longer syntax is also more powerful, enabling small conditional checks, which means we’ll likely end up using the longer syntax somewhere in our script, so why not keep it consistent and use it everywhere!...

Diverse users running across a diverse set of architectures, it seems Spack was built just for this! I want to share my experiences with Spack, here my focus is on CP2K. My build environment is a Cray XC50 running Thunder X2 Arm CPUs. Spack is a source-based package manager and build system, all builds take place in self-contained environments. Every installed package is defined by a spec, the spec is a string that represents the enabled features, compiler, etc....

In a cost-saving exercise I wanted to try host my personal website on a free platform, since the code repository is hosted on GitHub, I decided to look into GitHub pages. ...

This is my .vimrc, I find it benefitial to use this where I do development to normalise my editor across different operating systems, and to enable some useful untapped features to make Vim feel a bit less prehistoric. ...

The following command connects to our server and forwards a specific port on our local machine to the server. In this case we forward port 5432 which belongs to PostgreSQL, so when we connect to localhost:5432 on the desktop, the connection is forwarded through the secure tunnel to the server. ...

A smattering of useful commands for dealing with package managers! ...

SCP suffered from weak input validation for decades until CVE-2019-6111 , the maintainers recommended using SFTP until patched versions can be deployed. I, like many others, were reminded SFTP existed! ...

The Lustre community supports recent point-releases of RHEL/CentOS but those patches don’t seem to come back into existing Lustre releases, since those releases don’t officially support later kernels. I installed client 2.10 thinking it had the best chance of working but encountered huge numbers of errors when compiling! ...