General IT

Opera for Linux ffmpeg codec hell

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I really don't understand what the full issue is with opera and video codecs, but every few weeks, it will stop playing videos on facebook, twitter and sometimes even youtube. People will surge into the forums to complain and largely be ignored. Here's what I've been able to piece together. 

The problem

The short reason for the problem is that Opera is based on a slightly time delayed version of Chromium. If the version of Chromium that Opera is using and the version of the libffmpeg.so library don't match, then problems ensue. [The bit I can't figure out is why Opera can't match these up. But moving on …]

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Git pull stopped working

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So this is a weird one. I'd previously grabbed some code from a git repository. But recently when I went to update it, I got an error fatal: unable to connect to github.com:github.com[0: 140.82.118.4]: errno=Connection refusedgithub.com[1: 140.82.118.3]: errno=Connection refused Uh-oh. Thinking it might be a transient error, I left it for a while. But then … Read more

Gimp 2.8 Resynthesizer Plugin Ubuntu 18.

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Seems like this plugin changes the rules ever so often. This is what worked for me today.  Remove old plugins from ~/.gimp2.8/plug-ins/ Get the latest code from https://github.com/bootchk/resynthesizer.git git clone https://github.com/bootchk/resynthesizer.git Install dependencies and compile code. ./configure doesn't work as suggested, so I just ran the .autogen script, which did.  sudo apt install libglib2.0-dev libgimp2.0-dev automake intltool./autogen.sh makesudo … Read more

Upgrading vnstat to 2.0 on Ubuntu

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I discovered that vnstat had had a major release when I was trying to run some commands listed in the online man page, and they weren't working. Turns out version 2 came out last month, and I was still on the old Ubuntu version 1.14 from erm … 3 years ago. The new version uses … Read more

Letsencrypt Wildcard Certificates, with acme.sh client

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Took me a bit of time to figure this out, so I thought I'd make it public. Letsencrypt announced their new wildcard certs, and because I have to add the SSL cert to a load balancer covering many subdomains, I needed to make use of it.

First thing to note is that not all clients support the new v2 API which is required for wildcard certs. I looked at the list of v2 supporting clients on the Letsencrypt site, and chose the acme.sh bash script. Not sure if I'm going to stick with it at this point but it got me going.

First thing you need to do is to run it with the –issue flag. You'll need to run it with DNS authentication, as that's the supported method for wildcard certs. You'll also need to run it with both the root domain AND the wildcard.

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