Tech @ languidnights

Tmux + SSH

2024-08-30T00:00:00-04:00

Problem Statement
V and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Solution
SO's good solution
Why write this post?

Problem Statement

I like ssh (I have servers I do not physically sit at, and I pay for their usages, so I'd rather not uselessly invoke a rdp/vnc server). I like tmux, because terminal multiplexing is right and proper. I pretty much always do tmux attach -t admin || tmux new -t admin upon logging in. Automation is good, generally.

V and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Solution

You /can/ do the following in your .bashrc. You shouldn't, for a varienty of reasons, but you can...

tmux attach -t admin || tmux new -t admin

What? You don't ever use scp? or git? or pelican's make ssh_upload? I like all three, so this is a dirty nasty hack for me.

SO's good solution

StackOverflow not Significant Other (though as a hobbyist dev/sysadmin, may as well be the same) had the correct answer. Use 'new' ssh and tmux! Inside "$HOME"/.ssh/config:

Host <host>+tmux
  Hostname <host>.<tld>
  User <user>
  RequestTTY yes
  RemoteCommand tmux new -A -s admin

Tells ssh to execute tmux new with the '-A' flag, with tells it to attempt to attach to the admin session, then create it if the session doesn't exist.

Why write this post?

I predict this site will disappear before SO, but my memory is fickle and bad, and this site is kinda like a notebook of important info for me.

cgit+gitolite+nginx

2024-01-21T00:00:00-05:00

Our Goal

The Easy Part

Nginx is fun, and I've used it before with fastcgi. Let's do the easy parts. I've already set gitolite3's UMASK to be a bit less righteous for interoperability with git-daemon+xinited, so we'll move on to the new configuration.

apt-get install fcgiwrap
systemctl enable fcgiwrap
chmod -R go-rwx /var/lib/gitolite3
chmod -R g+rx /var/lib/gitolite3
adduser www-data gitolite3

server {
       server_name projects.languidnights.com;
       listen 443 ssl;
       list [::]:443 ssl;

       gzip off;

       location /cgit/ {
           root /usr/lib/cgit/;
           include fastcgi_params;
           fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /usr/lib/cgit/cgit.cgi;
           fastcgi_pass  unix:/run/fcgiwrap.socket
           fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $args;
           fastcgi_param HTTP_HOST $server_name;
       }

       location /cgit-css/ {
           root /usr/share/cgit/;
       }
}

Problem Numero Uno

What do you mean I can't see the stylesheets and images? Oh, you want it to be an alias, not a directory. I got it

/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/projects

--- a        2024-01-21 05:54:37.553311062 +0000
+++ b        2024-01-21 05:54:54.113321210 +0000
@@ -48,6 +48,6 @@
       }

       location /cgit-css/ {
-            root /usr/share/cgit/;
+            alias /usr/share/cgit/;
       }
}

Let's configure cgit

It's got a pretty good man page man 5 cgitrc and I did this in the before times with gitolite2, so let's go.

css=/cgit-css/cgit.css
logo=/cgit-css/cgit.png
favicon=/cgit-css/favicon.ico

root-title=LanguidNights' Git Repositories
root-desc=various and sundry
enable-index-links=1
enable-git-config=1
remove-suffix=1

project-list=/var/lib/gitolite3/projects.list
scan-path=/var/lib/gitolite3/repositories

So Far

It works beautifully. That is, if you happen to be sitting on the server and part of the www-data group.

sudo -u www-data /usr/lib/cgit/cgit.cgi

If, like me, you want your website for your git repos to be viewable on the web, still no joy. It just says 'no repositories found'. I know that's a lie, cgit! Give me your secrets, I'm going mad and it's past midnight! Nothing in my error logs, nothings in my access logs, nothing in my syslog. What is going on?

ls -l /var/lib/gitolite3
cat /var/lib/gitolite3/projects.list
systemctl restart fcgiwrap.socket fcgiwrap.service nginx.service

And no joy! You're lucky I'm bald, or I'd have thrown handfuls of my own hair at you!

The Final Pieces

Courtesy of The Arch Linux BBS I finally got the last piece, which I missed in all the relevant documentation. It consisted of two parts

/etc/cgitrc

--- a        2024-01-21 05:42:37.240863180 +0000
+++ b        2024-01-21 05:42:28.244857393 +0000
@@ -6,6 +6,7 @@
logo=/cgit-css/cgit.png
favicon=/cgit-css/favicon.ico

+virtual-root=/cgit/
root-title=LanguidNight's Git Repositories
root-desc=various and sundry
enable-index-links=1

/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/projects

--- a        2024-01-21 05:32:23.356460060 +0000
+++ b        2024-01-21 05:32:12.704453273 +0000
@@ -43,6 +43,8 @@
       fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /usr/lib/cgit/cgit.cgi;
       fastcgi_pass  unix:/run/fcgiwrap.socket;

+    fastcgi_split_path_info         ^(/cgit/?)(.+)$;
+    fastcgi_param   PATH_INFO       $fastcgi_path_info;
       fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING    $args;
       fastcgi_param HTTP_HOST       $server_name;
}

And, we have joy. My life is now better than it was a 3:00pm at least, and I can finally go to bed. Well, just as soon as I write this up for posterity.

Neovim and Sundry

2022-09-01T00:00:00-04:00

[1]

Table of Contents

What is Neovim
LuaJit with arm64 and Debian

What is Neovim

Neovim is the new vim! (Okay, not exactly but sort of?). It's vim, but specialized for more modern systems and not as dependent on maintaining compatibility. It's also ehanced with lua scripting, lsp integration, and treesitter integration.

or, as the website oh so helpfully calls is: "hyperextensible Vim-based text editor"

LuaJit with arm64 and Debian

Debian ships a version of neovim for the arm64 platform. This, you might say, is great! And it is, so long as you don't need to use any of the luajit integration points, either of your editor or of your plugins. Let's fix this. I'll show you the easy (and best!) way first, then the hard way.

dpkg --add-architecture armhf
apt-get install neovim:armhf

Yup. That's all that you really need to do. It's all I should have done. But, I didn't, and we'll be going into what I've done next. First, things that didn't work quite so well...

flatpak: it doesn't have access to your path and all your lovely lsp servers
appimage: it's built for an x86_64 machine (nvim is trying to support

the future, but I happen to think the future is arm and not amd64)
building from source directly: it'll work just fine, but it'll be a bear to maintain in the long run.

So, what should I do? Build myself a deb package with luajit instead of base lua. We'll start by installing pbuilder and creating an environment.

apt-get install pbuilder
pbuilder create

Then, we'll download the source code for the debian package, as well as its build dependencies.

apt-get build-dep neovim
apt-get source neovim

and update the build files for arm64's compiler and the use of luajit (one test ails on ARM architectures, so patch that out too. ideally, I'd fix it but it also fails on armhf, so I'm not going to spend too much time digging today)

--- debian/control.old      2022-09-01 17:06:48.797215829 -0400
+++ debian/control  2022-09-01 17:05:48.843040845 -0400
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
  less <!nocheck>,
  libacl1-dev,
  libkvm-dev [kfreebsd-any],
- libluajit-5.1-dev [amd64 armel armhf hurd-i386 i386] | liblua5.1-dev,
+ libluajit-5.1-dev [amd64 arm64 armel armhf hurd-i386 i386] | liblua5.1-dev,
  libmsgpack-dev (>= 1.0.0),
  libnss-wrapper <!nocheck>,
  libtermkey-dev,
@@ -27,7 +27,7 @@
  lua-lpeg,
  lua-luv-dev (>= 1.43.0),
  lua-nvim (>= 0.0.1-26-1~) [!hurd-i386] <!nocheck>,
- luajit [amd64 armel armhf hurd-i386 i386],
+ luajit [amd64 arm64 armel armhf hurd-i386 i386],
  lua5.1,
  ninja-build,
  pkg-config,

--- a/debian/rules
+++ b/debian/rules
@@ -37,6 +37,9 @@ FUNCTEST_FILTER_OUT=
 ifneq (,$(filter armhf,$(DEB_HOST_ARCH)))
   FUNCTEST_FILTER_OUT='memory usage releases memory when closing windows when folds exist'
 endif
+ifneq (,$(filter arm64,$(DEB_HOST_ARCH)))
+  FUNCTEST_FILTER_OUT='memory usage releases memory when closing windows when folds exist'
+endif

 export USERNAME = team+vim
 export HOSTNAME = tracker.debian.org

--- a/test/unit/helpers.lua
+++ b/test/unit/helpers.lua
@@ -135,6 +135,8 @@ local function filter_complex_blocks(body)
     if not (string.find(line, "(^)", 1, true) ~= nil
             or string.find(line, "_ISwupper", 1, true)
             or string.find(line, "_Float")
+            or string.find(line, "_Float128")
+            or string.find(line, "__uint128")
             or string.find(line, "msgpack_zone_push_finalizer")
             or string.find(line, "msgpack_unpacker_reserve_buffer")
             or string.find(line, "UUID_NULL")  -- static const uuid_t UUID_NULL = {...}

and finally, build

pdebuild
dpkg -i /var/cache/pbuilder/result/neovim_0.7.2-3_arm64.deb
dpkg -i /var/cache/pbuilder/result/neovim-runtime_0.7.2-3_all.deb

top

[1]	logo released under CC-BY-3.0 by Jason Long

KDE Applications under Sway

2022-07-11T00:00:00-04:00

Table of Contents

Problem Statement
What doesn't work
What does work

Problem Statement

I'm using Sway as my "window manager" in my daily workflow. I happen to like Wayland and am used to tiling window managers, so it's a good fit. I also think the KDE project makes excellent software, which I like using in my day-to-day computing. There, however, is not a well-documented way to make qt or KDE applications use their KDE style outside of KDE itself.

What doesn't work

qt5ct (or qt6ct). Don't get me wrong, they both do what they advertise, but they don't really let you use your beautiful breeze(-dark) theme in non-KDE environments.
LXQT. My favorite desktop environment has its own styling/themeing support which is not the same as KDE's. It allows you to create quite beautiful qt setups, but if I want dolphin or okular to follow breeze(-dark), I'm out of luck. This is what I used for a long time to work around my lack of KDE style.
XDG_DESKTOP_ENVIRONMENT=kde. Ooo, now we're getting close! This technically does what I asked it to do, but it has unfortunate side effects. Various things start to break as xdg-desktop-portals get confused as to which variants they should be using. As I'm using Sway, this needs to be XDG_DESKTOP_ENVIRONMENT=wlr since the compositor and portal base is not kwin but rather wlroots.

What does work

I can not find this referenced anywhere with my meagre ddg-foo, so I'm setting it here for future wanderers to find. After exhausting what I could find online, I went back to the qt5ct setup. I wondered, is it possible to set QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME to something else sensible? Yes! It just so happens you can. I discovered, by trial-and-erroring my way though it (breeze, Breeze, Fusion, and plasma all fail), that you can set it to kde, allowing your qt and KDE apps to follow the themeing you set up in ksytemsettings. Lovely good time!

While it wasn't my answer, I couldn't have found it without qt5ct and the reddit community's guides.

Here's hoping someone else can pull out a little less of their hair than did I. I didn't have enough to start with ;-)

libvirt lessons

2022-03-19T00:00:00-04:00

Contents

Background
Automagic Configs
- networking
- qemu command line
Storage
Video Acceleration
FreeDOS Specific

Background

On my powerhouse machine, I use virtual machines to contain experiments and code I don't trust into little self-contained sandboxes. I also separate some concerns into their own machines. Here, we'll go over things I've learned in the course of my setups.

First off, I'm using linux, so my base layer is qemu + kvm. The perfect tool to manage your virtualization is libvirt. For my graphical management, I'm using the absolutely amazing virt-manager.

Automagic Configs

There are a few things that, if you use libvirt and virt-manager, you no longer have to worry about configuring. Advancements is the tooling and automation have come far since most tutorials.

networking

A lot of documentation asks you to create a bridge interface and add it to your /etc/network/interfaces or create a systemd service for it. This is no longer necessary. Simply right-click your qemu+kvm connection details, navigate to the Virtual Networks tab, and click the run button at the bottom. Boom! Network setup. For the individual users, this is all you'll have cause to user; you're not an enterprise sysadmin, you don't need to learn networking managements details for a simple project.

qemu command line

I don't know about you, but I never could type the qemu command line properly, so I ended up writing a script and triple checking where I'd modified an example to do the setup, and still get it wrong one time out of three. This is messy and error-prone, and kind of silly to still be doing manually. Luckily, if you use virt-manager, it'll write out a pretty standard startup and connection string for you, as well as the libvirt xml to match it. I'm a software engineer by training, not an enterprise sysadmin, I'm really grateful that I don't have to anymore.

Storage

Almost any virtual machine needs a backing store. The default way for virt-manager is to use a qcow2 file in /var/lib/libvirt/images/. I am already using lvm (see here) for managing my host system, so may well use it for virtual systems too. This is a fairly easy setup if you've already set up your volume group. In the 'add storage' dialog, the left pane in your storage pools. Click the add button on the lower left. Then, under the Type dropdown, select logical: LVM Volume Group. Your volume groups should be populated in the Volgroup Name: dropdown. Select the proper volume group, and you can then create a new logical volume using default settings (no need to call lvcreate --size xx --name volume_name volume_group_name yourself).

Video Acceleration

In the before times, to get gpu acceleration in a virtual machine you had to pass through an unused phsycial graphics card. For Windows VMs, you probably still have to. These days, if your host and guest graphics stack uses Mesa, you have the ability to use the hosts gpu acceleration on the guest's window. I originally had to build various bits myself, but after I came across Ryan Himmelwright's blog I discovered the stuff was already built in. Just set the graphics type to virtio, tick the 3d Acceleration box, and set your Display to Spice and tick OpenGL. Yes, these two settings will complain until they match. That's fine, just match them :-)

FreeDOS Specific

I installed a working FreeDOS install. Everything worked out of the box, except for the audio device. I manually changed the audio setting to sb16 by manually editing the xml snippet to sb16.

I then had to add a soundblaster driver in FreeDOS itself. I got the Win3.11.zip archive from this URL from this YouTube video (warning, possible audio issues). I pulled the soundblaster directory and passed it through to FreeDOS, then ran the executable and it set up autoexec.bat and everything else for me. (Don't be surprised if that link goes away, the video author owns it, and it appears to be a personal website). The oemdrivers site may be a good backup. Now I can hear that glorious (?) crunchy sound of Doomguy shooting his pistol.

Home Directory in Git

2022-03-18T00:00:00-04:00

Keeping my $HOME in git.

Table of Contents

Living in Git, or Why are we Here?
Other Implementations
Conceptual Design
Implementation
I want it!

Living in Git, or Why are we Here?

Over time I've accumulated a massive amount of built-up configurations and other cruft in my home directory, and whenever I need to bring a new computer online I have to copy my desktop configuration to it, like a game of software config telephone. (this happens to me more often that you'd think, as I have a number of Raspberry Pi boards I use as desktops until I have a need for it in an embedded solution). I figured there had to be a better way, using the tools I picked up as a developer. Turns out there is :-)

I remembered A Long Time Ago™ reading about Joey Hess writing etckeeper to keep the configuration files in /etc/ under, ahem, control. I also remember vaguely seeing similar software for home directories, but those software projects are lost to years of imperfect memory, and so I couldn't find them. Hence, my writing a new one.

Other Implementations

There are probably many, many, many implementations to keeping your home directory in git. Most of them would probably even work for my personal setup, but NIH and all. So I wrote my own! I'm actually kind of proud of it, but if the gods are kind it stays pretty much the way it is for the foreseeable future, as I've settled somewhat in my 'config' churn and am running Debian Stable anyway so my software shouldn't be changing its config syntax weekly.

Conceptual Design

My requirements are the following:

the configuration files should be in version control
the configuration files must be able to be kept separate from the live config files
the script must be able to be executed on any system I might call home (this means POSIX compliant shells, such as DASH, or perl)
ideally, allows symlinking so as to make changes easily pushed upstream

Implementation

To achieve this, I went with git for version control. This allows me to utilize the git setup framework I already had installed for my software projects (it's here if you're interested). It's also quite well documented and recipes exist for almost every scenario on either Server Fault or reddit. I initialized a new git repository on my server for this to live in, calling it l-homedir after a bit of self-serving names :-)

In my shiny new git repo copy, I moved (as in mv) the interesting and non-private configurations into it. I maintained the directory structure you would find in my home directory (for example, my .zshrc file is in $REPO_ROOT and my nvim config lives in $REPO_ROOT/.config/nvim). This allows me to separate the files I care about from those that I do not care if get lost, or those that contain private information (ssh private keys and such).

To accomplish the copying/linking files (linking in this case) I wrote a mildly complicated shell file, and a corresponding config file. linked_files contains a list of files I want to maintain here---in case something accidentally ends up in the repo. make_links is the shell script. The script follows this basic flow

iterate over each line in linked_files
if it is blank or starts with a hash (#) ignore it
check if the file already exists?
if the file already exists, is it running in destructive mode?
if in destructive mode, rm the original file, otherwise skip it
if skipped, return to Loop Top
ln -s the file in the repository to the home directory
Return to Loop Top

I wrote a README and brought in a license file to top it off, and I have a shiny new home-in-git solution :-D

I want it!

Assuming you're not trolling me, get it right here

Mail Server Setup

2022-03-18T00:00:00-04:00

I've taken great pains to get my mail server set up both the way I want it and correctly. I'm now sharing that knowledge with the internet as a whole, as well as myself when I need to figure out wtf I did.

Table of Contents

NOTE
Setting up virtual mail users and authentication through Dovecot
Setting up Postfix to authenticate through Dovecot
Amavis: Spamassassin and ClamAV
Thanks

NOTE

This article should be considered archived as of 2023-02-09. I have abandoned the maintenance of my own email solution for ProtonMail.

Setting up virtual mail users and authentication through Dovecot

My goal here was to use LDAP for authentication and creation of mailboxes for "virtual users" (ie, they don't exist in /etc/password and have home directory). I set it up this way so that I could set up mailboxes for application accounts and get their mail delivered to a predictable place and be able to access it through IMAP without having to have it clutter my actual mailbox.

The bulk of the 'fun stuff' is in /etc/dovecot/dovecot-ldap.conf.ext - it's well commented, so I'm just going to list the settings I changed. For purposes of cleanliness, I'm going to use 'example.com' and 'not the real password' where appropriate :-) I'm using a fairly standard simple bind.

hosts = localhost
dn = cn=admin,dc=example,dc=com
dnpass = not the real password
auth_bind_userdn = uid=%u,ou=People,dc=example,dc=com

Here's I'm checking the users and passwords against the mail attribute on the LDAP account. I'm then ignoring interesting parts of the results to store all mail under a 'vmail' user with uid and gid of 5000 and a subdirectory named after the real users. Dovecot finds this location both when delivering and serving, so no further setup here needed.

base = dc=example,dc=com
user_attrs = 5000=uid,5000=gid,home=/var/vmail/%u
user_filter = (&objectClass=posixAccount)(mail=%n@example.com)
pass_attrs = uid=user,userPassword=password,homeDirectory=/var/vmail/%u
pass_filter = (&objectClass=posixAccount)(mail=%n@example.com)

After this, I just have to wire it up in conf.d/auth-ldap.conf.ext to use ldap for password lookups and semi-hardcoded user lookups---don't validate the user and assume they get mail to /var/vmail/{username}

passdb {
      driver = ldap
      args = /etc/dovecot/dovecot-ldap.conf.ext
}
userdb {
      driver = static
      args = uid=vmail gid=vmail home=/var/vmail/%u
}

Setting up Postfix to authenticate through Dovecot

Because I spent so much time getting authentication working for Dovecot, let's just re-use it for postfix because the same users are trying to send mail as are receiving it.

In /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-master.conf

# Setup the socket for postfix to authentical against
service auth {
      unix-listener /var/spool/postfix/private/auth {
              mode = 0666
      }
}

In /etc/postfix/main.cf for authentication

# SASL authentication
smtpd_sasl_type = dovecot
smtpd_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_sasl_authenticated,permit_mynetworks,reject_unauth_destination
smtpd_sasl_path = private/auth

In /etc/postfix/main.cf for mail delivery

# Postfix MDA
mailbox_transport = dovecot
mailbox_commant = /usr/lib/dovecot/dovecot-lda -a "$RECIPIENT"
virtual_transport = dovecot
dovecot_destination_recipient_limit = 1

In /etc/postfix/master.cf before the non-posix services

dovecot   unix  -       n       n       -       -       pipe
  flags=DRhu user=vmail:vmail argv=/usr/lib/dovecot/dovecot-lda -f ${sender} -d ${user} -a ${recipient}

Amavis: Spamassassin and ClamAV

Install but do not enable spamassassin. Amavis will take care of launching a scanner as it scans emails. When I enabled the spamassassin daemon, I ended up with all cpu cores fully utilized.

Install and do enable clamav-daemon. Amavis can use the daemon for a bit of a computational advantage.

Install Amavis and configure it to use spamassassin and clamav. As I'm using Debian, I updated the 15-content_filter_mode to uncomment the virus_checks and spam_checks lines

use strict;

# You can modify this file to re-enable SPAM checking through spamassassin
# and to re-enable antivirus checking.

# Default antivirus checking mode
# Please note, that anti-virus checking is DISABLED by
# default.
# If you wish to enable it, please uncomment the following line:

@bypass_virus_checks_maps = (
  %bypass_virus_checks, @bypass_virus_checks_acl,
  $bypass_virus_checks_re);

# Default SPAM checking mode
# Please note, that anti-spam checking is DISABLED by
# default.
# If You wish to enable it, please uncomment the following lines:
@bypass_spam_checks_maps = (
  %bypass_spam_checks, @bypass_spam_checks_acl,
  $bypass_spam_checks_re);

1;  # ensure a defined return

At the end of the postfix master.cf file, I added the following lines to shunt the email to Amavis.

smtp-amavis  unix       -      -       -       -       2       smtp
  -o smtp_data_done_timeout=1200
  -o smtp_send_xforward_command=yes
  -o disable_dns_lookups=yes
  -o max_use=20

127.0.0.1:10025 inet    n      -       -       -       -       smtpd
     -o content_filter=
     -o smtpd_delay_reject=no
     -o smtpd_client_restrictions=permit_mynetworks,reject
     -o smtpd_helo_restrictions=
     -o smtpd_sender_restrictions=
     -o smtpd_recipient_restrictions=permit_mynetworks,reject
     -o smtpd_data_restrictions=reject_unauth_pipelining
     -o smtpd_end_of_data_restrictions=
     -o smtpd_restriction_classes=
     -o mynetworks=127.0.0.0/8
     -o smtpd_error_sleep_time=0
     -o smtpd_soft_error_limit=1001
     -o smtpd_hard_error_limit=1000
     -o smtpd_client_connection_count_limit=0
     -o smtpd_client_connection_rate_limit=0
     -o receive_override_options=no_header_body_checks,no_unknown_recipient_checks,no_milters
     -o local_header_rewrite_clients=

Thanks

These fine projects have been used as my tools of choice in serving mail.

(open)LDAP lessons

2022-03-18T00:00:00-04:00

I've set up LDAP a couple times in a personal capacity, and I'm sharing this if anyone's interested, or if I need to come back to it.

Table of Contents

Adding a search index field
Add A User
Thanks to

Adding a search index field

I've had slapd running for a long time without any functional errors, but the daemon would often tell me that the mail field wasn't indexed and it could be. Now, I'm not the sort of target that would be worth denial-of-service attacks against my LDAP database, but it's still worthwhile to clean it up (if for no other reason that to tidy syslog!).

slapd[pid]: <= mdb_equality_candidates: (mail) not indexed

To fix this, I set about scouring the internet. Most of the results I found were how to fix the issue in the 1995-era technical reference or discussions about modifying "slapd.conf" and running slaptest. I didn't use a semi-modern version of openldap just to resurrect the old config format, use it, then throw it back away! There had to be a better option. And there is! I found hints on Debian's wiki which led me to my ultimate solution to this annoyance. Debian used a heredoc but I'm nowhere near confident in either my typing nor my copy-pasting to use one, so I created a file with the interesting index.

dn: olcDatabase={1}mdb,cn=config
changetype: modify
add: olcDbIndex
olcDbIndex: mail pres,sub,eq

Then, I used ldapmodify to update add the index to the LDAP directory.

sudo ldapmodify -Y EXTERNAL -H ldapi:/// -f add_index.ldif

All good now, nice clean logfiles and an LDAP doesn't have to struggle so much!

Add A User

Create an adduser.ldif file with the following info (for my mail and user setup, yours may vary). Substite the values in ${ .. } with pertinent details of your site. Then execute the ldapmodify command. This will ask for your password on the command line.

ldapmodify -x -D "${admin LDAP path}" -W -H ldapi:/// -f adduser.ldif

Example adduser.ldif

dn: uid=${username},ou=People,dc=${domain},dc=${tld}
changetype: add
objectClass: inetOrgPerson
objectClass: person
objectClass: posixAccount
ou: People
uid: ${username}
cn: ${user given name}
sn: ${user family name}
givenName: ${user given name}
displayName: ${user display name}
initials: ${user initials}
uidNumber: ${user numeric uid}
gidNumber: ${user numeric gid}
homeDirectory: ${full path to user home directory}
loginShell: ${full path to user login shell}
mail: ${user email address}

Thanks to

I'd like to thanks openLDAP for the relatively simple directory servers/clients and Debian's wiki for the information I needed to make sense of the configuration.

ReST in Jekyll

2022-03-18T00:00:00-04:00

Contents

NOTE
A Story of Markup
A Story of Dependencies
A Story of Gems
A Story of Reference
A Story of the Future
TL;DR

NOTE

This article should be considered archived. No further updates are expected. For ReST-flavoured blogging, please see Pelican.

A Story of Markup

Jekyll, by default, does not support writing your static page/blog in Restructured Text, or ReST. I came at my personal projects from the Python world, where ReST is commonly used. I, therefore, am much more comfortable in the ReST world than am I in the Markdown or Textile. Naturally, I went looking for a Jekyll RST plugin. There was only one I could find, and it was sufficiently old as to no longer work with modern docutils setups, so, rather than tie myself down to an ancient docutils, I decided to modernize it.

A Story of Dependencies

The github repository I found listed as dependencies Pygmentize and Docutils. It turns out, however, that the important parts of both projects were included in the repository itself. Seeing this as a waste, I first remove Pygmentize, discovering to my joy that the docutils converter I was using would do that for me! I then set about removing the glue that tied that Pygmentize to the rst2html in the repository. Simple, and it Just Worked™. Now that I was here, with a bog-standard rst2html, I tested things. Nope, UTF-8 conversions weren't handled automatically in this wrapper class. No problem, let's just bring in the modern one. Wait, what? If I'm directly including the modern one, and also listing it as a dependency, it would be much cleaner to just use the version brought in, no? So it went away, leaving just the ruby=>python bridge. Much cleaner, if a bit of a trivial product now.

A Story of Gems

Ouch! There was a ticket on the original project I forked asking for it to be made available as a gem. I'm a sucker for interesting projects, so I set about to make it so. Create a branch, switch to it, and get on with the gem creation! Except, no. There's multiple different educational resources each containing the correct instructions for the version of gem and bundle that were current when they went live. None of these versions were anything resembling current, so I'd have to go deeper. I'd have to go to the source of truth about these topics, the official documents at the Bundler itself. This got me bootstrapped with, ironically enough, a bootstrap routine. A few more tweaks of configuration, and I could build a gem. It was just a shame that it did nothing at all...

A Story of Reference

By gum, somebody had to have done this before me! I checked out the Jekyll site again, and sure enough they released one of their official parser/converters at the Textile github repository! Thanks and praise be to the gods of documentation! Anyway, I adapted their configuration to match the code I already had, using the Ruby underscores naming convention (though this is purely a aesthetic change, as I consider this its own thing and they consider theirs an extension). I also had some Jekyll plumbing to adapt. Luckily their code is MIT license` and so is mine. A few code changes and framework force-fitting and I'm off to the races!

A Story of the Future

Where do we go from here, my dear readers? That's a good question. The inclusion of the plugin is now dead-simple, so we could just let it be. We also could include it in an official Gems repositories, or one of the Jekyll plugin repositories. These decisions await a more permanent answer in the future™.

TL;DR

Go to this repository and get blogging in rst files.