fail2ban sqlite database prune

On servers where fail2ban has been working for a long time, you might notice the size of its database eating up your disk space. I just found one that had ballooned to over 2Gb over the course of a year. You'll find it hiding in /var/lib/fail2ban/ If its causing you anguish, then you can easily … Read more

systemctl journals filling up your disk

Quick one … your system probably uses logrotate to keep a fixed number of logs, and which stops your disk filling up. Trouble is, that systemctl doesn't write logs in the normal way so you can't rely on logrotate any more. Check out your current systemctl log usage with journalctl –disk-usage Wait, whaaaat? Its using … Read more

Opera for Linux ffmpeg codec hell

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 …]

Read more

Gimp 2.8 Resynthesizer Plugin Ubuntu 18.

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