Setup Nagios Alerts to Monitor SSL Certificate Expiry in Java Key Store

May 14, 2022

The background Nagios is a monitoring tool1 for systems, networks, and infrastructure. The expected outcome was to add a Nagios alert for SSL Certificates stored in a Java Key Store file. Since the Nagios server was already set up and functioning, we’ll cover only for setting up the alert. The procedure Considering security and efficiency, it was decided to set up a cron triggered script to read the certificate expiry dates, write them to a location accessible by the Nagios Remote Plugin Executer (NRPE)2 agent.…

Updating VirtualBox on Ubuntu

Dec 01, 2021

How was it installed? The official apt repositories are known to have old (read thoroughly tested and stable) versions for some software packages. In that light, VirtualBox was installed through the latest stable .deb installer downloaded from the official website, with the version number at the time being 6.1.28-147628. When the new stable version 6.1.30-148432 became available, following are the steps that were followed to set it up. The Process First, we need to obtain a copy of the .…

Installing Gnome Shell Extensions Manually on Ubuntu

Nov 30, 2021

The Background The usual method to install Gnome extensions on Ubuntu is using a browser with the relevant browser extension installed among other requirements. However, as in almost all things involving Linux, this method is not necessarily the only way toward accomplishing the same. What follows are the steps that may be followed to manually download and install the extensions without browser integration. The Procedure We can get started by navigating to the Gnome Extensions webpage1, finding the extension we need installed, and downloading the extension package matching our Gnome shell version2.…

Setting Up an OpenVPN Server on CentOS

Nov 26, 2021

The Background Recently I’ve set up an OpenVPN (Community Edition 2.4.11) server on a CentOS 7 box. While there were multiple1 resources2 that3 helped4 immensely in getting the task done, below is the process that was actually followed. Configuring EasyRSA and Generating the Server Keys Once we have a CentOS 7 box up and running, we can start by enabling the EPEL repository and optional extras. yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm subscription-manager repos --enable "rhel--optional-rpms" --enable "rhel--extras-rpms" --enable "rhel-ha-for-rhel-*-server-rpms" Then, we can install openvpn and easy-rsa5 as below.…

Adding a Program to Gnome Dock in Ubuntu

Nov 14, 2021

The backgroud I recently installed Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on a machine where I needed a solid and friendly OS1. I also wanted to install a couple programs including Lite XL2 and VS Code3 among others, and decided to use the pre-built binaries and setup them in a portable manner. For VS code, extracting the gzipped tar and creating an empty ‘data’ directory inside the extracted directory is the way to go.…

Updating Instance Properties of an existing Google Compute Engine Virtual Machine

Oct 31, 2021

The background When IP forwarding is disabled (default) for a virtual machine instance in the Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud performs strict source and destination checking for packets so that VM instances can only send packets whose sources are set to match an internal IP address of its interface in the network. Also, packets are only delivered to an instance if their destination match the IP address of the instance’s interface in the network.…

Annoyance by Ignorance

Jun 30, 2021

Today morning I installed KDE Neon to a VirtualBox VM. I’ve used both Kubuntu and Neon previously as the primary OS at different points in my time at uni. Tinkering with the desktop visuals until you’ve done that for the better part of a week only to do the same in the next as well is the sign of having a good aesthetic1 taste ;) This time, it was mainly for the solid Linux experience that I set up the VM.…

Uploading Artifacts in a Github Actions Workflow

Jun 27, 2021

While I initially thought figuring this out would be a time consuming task, it turned out to be pretty straighforward thanks to the helpful documentation with examples avaialable on the topic. The use case for me was to upload a gzipped tar of a SQLite database file (few KBs) from a workflow that is scheduled to run once everyday. Following workflow is geard toward the task. # This workflow saves the db.…

Automating Deployment of a Django site with GitHub Actions

May 30, 2021

The background Recently after I finished buiding an appointment scheduler in PHP1 without a framework (result: assignment-grade product), I’ve decided to learn Django for many reasons, being an SRE intern one of them. Going through a brilliant module on MDN2 gave me an awesome head start toward that end. Then I though of building an appointment scheduler again, but this time with Django in Python. While the experience so far has been great, in this post let’s only discuss about what’s in the title : )…

Automating Deployment of a Hugo Site to GitHub Pages with GitHub Actions

May 26, 2021

GitHub, GitHub, What? Well, I’m not affiliated, by the way ;P GitHub pages is a service freely available for all GH users to host static sites from their repositories. GH actions (also free, as in free lemonade) lets users automate software workflows (think CI/CD). What we’ll be doing is automating the deployment of a Hugo site in a GH repository to GH pages. Setting up the source Once we have a Hugo site set up1, we’ll need to push this to a repo in GH.…