On my desktop I've been running Linux Mint for the last few years, and have always done the distro upgrade-in-place. This time I tried it and there were too many errors — the upgrade tool wanted to remove around 50 apps, disable all my repos, and generally mess around with my system in too many ways, so I opted to go the "wipe and install fresh" route. My reasoning was also that after 6 years of upgrades, there were probably a few extra files on there, that I didn't need ( a mysterious 3 Gb in the flatpak directory for eg), and I'd messed around with the system config a few times over the time — pipewire, different DNS resolvers etc — so a fresh install would be a good thing. And it was, but for one nightmare: my RTL8188 adapter.
admin
Digital Ocean spaces vs restic
Very easy answer to a problem that's probably had you cursing for ages. When you set up a DO Spaces instance, you get a URL like https://myspace.eur3.digitaloceanspaces.com/, where eur3 is the datacenter you're in and myspace is the space name you supplied. So you just take that and append s3: to it in your restic … Read more
Using swatchdog for monitoring new firewall logs
Always interested in trying out a new tool, so I decided to use this when I wanted to monitor a new rule I put in my firewall, to see what it was doing. The rule was an ipset rule to match against a bunch of addresses and blacklist them. I dumped out a copy of … Read more
Node Package Manager install surprise. 387 extra packages!
I've got a server running Ubuntu 20, and wanted to try out something on it with nodejs. I checked on the server and apparently nodejs was already installed. I guess some previous dependency had put it on there a long time ago. node –version v10.19.0apt-cache policy nodejs nodejs: Installed: 10.19.0~dfsg-3ubuntu1 Candidate: 10.19.0~dfsg-3ubuntu1 OK, so the … Read more
Formatting mysqladmin variables output sensibly
OK, so if you're here, you've probably been searching for a variable in mysqladmin and have watched twenty screens of spaces and pipes scroll past. Me too, so I'm just leaving this little snatch of formatting to remind myself how to tame it down to something readable. So if you're searching for 'buffer' related variables, … Read more