The instructions for the WhatsApp plugin for Pidgin are a bit lacking when it comes to installation on Fedora. This isn’t a criticism of the author as it takes time and effort to produce these plugins. That’s why I’m contributing some easy instructions for Fedora.

Credit

Before I continue, credit needs to be given to the author of the plugin: David G. F, (davidgfnet at github and https://davidgf.net)

Fortunately the plugin is easy to compile for those familiar with Makefiles. For those that aren’t, here’s some easy instructions.

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Sometimes you may need to verify the fingerprint of your SSH key. This is useful for out-of-band verification of keys (such as over the phone). Using multiple channels (for example SSH copy and fingerprint verification over the phone) makes Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks much more difficult to execute.

For example, you might need to verify your SSH key in gitlab:

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Google Chrome allows you to use your kerberos tickets to authenticate to webservers that support kerberos authentication. To do this, we need to tell Chrome about the domains you wish to authenticate against. This will be unique to your organisation (if you’re doing it right) and it can usually be determined by the portion after the @ sign in your ticket.

For example, my personal kerberos setup uses the domain MKNOWLES.COM.AU (no big secret). You can see that on the output below (keep in mind that I’ve already run kinit):

$ klist
Ticket cache: FILE:/tmp/krb5cc_1000
Default principal: redacted@MKNOWLES.COM.AU

Valid starting     Expires            Service principal
02/11/17 16:31:30  03/11/17 02:31:25  krbtgt/MKNOWLES.COM.AU@MKNOWLES.COM.AU
02/11/17 16:41:50  03/11/17 02:31:25  HTTP/redacted.mknowles.com.au@MKNOWLES.COM.AU
$ 

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This was actually surprisingly easy, once I figured out how everything was put together. First of all, make sure you have a compatible Macbook. I’ve only tried this on a Macbook that reports as Macbook 10,1 (a Macbook 12" bought in 2017):

dmidecode | grep -i macbook

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It’s really easy to boot from an ISO file in a libvirt virtual machine. I do this quite often and I have to go looking for the details every time I have to set it up, so I’m documenting it here for quick and easy access.

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I’ve run my own mail server for about 20 years now. I always took pride in the fact that I had complete control over my email and that none of it sat in the “cloud”. Well, I relented, kind of. The amount of spam coming through my email server well exceeds that of genuine email. Originally the problem was mainly contained to my email account; probably because I’ve had it for so long; but then my wife’s email account started to cop it as well.

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I recently started a new job where IRC is used internally. I installed irssi and configured it to “beep” when my nick is mentioned, but nothing would come out of the speakers. Even the beep command would fail. I have a theory that it’s due to the Macbook I use not having a “PC speaker”, but I’m not 100% sure as I managed to fix things pretty quicky using this train of thought. Here are the commands that fixed it.

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The Macbook Pro 13″ (otherwise known by the codename MacbookPro12,1), has pretty good Linux support for a Macbook. The hardware is beautiful and everything works now that the camera is supported. Here are the steps needed to make it work.

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Today I came across the following issue after an upgrade of libvirtd:

[root@karma ~]# service libvirtd start

Oct 19 17:48:43 karma kernel: libvirtd[4469]: segfault at 0 ip 00007f38f342ccf7 sp 00007f38efb5cf88 error 4 in libvirt_driver_qemu.so[7f38f33c3000+133000]
Oct 19 17:48:43 karma systemd: libvirtd.service: main process exited, code=killed, status=11/SEGV
Oct 19 17:48:43 karma systemd: Unit libvirtd.service entered failed state.
Oct 19 17:48:43 karma systemd: libvirtd.service failed.
Oct 19 17:48:43 karma systemd: libvirtd.service holdoff time over, scheduling restart.
Oct 19 17:48:43 karma systemd: start request repeated too quickly for libvirtd.service
Oct 19 17:48:43 karma systemd: Failed to start Virtualization daemon.
Oct 19 17:48:43 karma systemd: Unit libvirtd.service entered failed state.
Oct 19 17:48:43 karma systemd: libvirtd.service failed.

It looks like libvirtd is segfaulting immediately, leading to systemd restarting it over and over, eventually failing due to it failing so quickly.
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I ran into a problem with the GitLab installation instructions on SL6. I’m a CentOS person, but they were extremely late in publishing CentOS 6. While I waited, I used SL as a stop-gap. Unfortunately I still have many SL machines I need to take care of. Here’s an explanation of the problem and what to do about it.
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