Shrinking a VirtualBox disk
Can you shrink VirtualBox disk images? It turns out you can, with the right setup. A recent cleanup operation led me to one way to get this particular set ...
DevOps
Become-ing a user securely in Ansible
Using become_user in Ansible requires the acl package to be installed on the remote host. This is a note to my future self, reminding me of the error, the r...
Unnecessary upload evasion with lftp mirrors
I’ve been using lftp’s reverse mirror feature for years to upload files to this blog. I’d never worked out how to avoid repeated file uploads. Until now.
Adventures in collating text in Linux, Docker and Postgres
It’s interesting how bugs can lead to a deeper understanding of how computer systems work. It’s also amazing how nuanced some technical topics can be. For i...
Migrating project management software from Redmine to GitLab
Migrating tickets, comments, roadmaps and wiki pages from Redmine to GitLab is a lot of work if you do it by hand. Fortunately, one can automate this proces...
Tunneling through a gateway server via SSH
Some of the servers I manage are hidden behind a corporate firewall and hence not accessible from the open internet. In order to access them from my office ...
Headless Cordova Android builds on Jenkins
This is a fairly old story, nevertheless I still think it’s worthwhile telling, just in case someone else wants to build Android APKs from Cordova within the...
Setting up Jenkins email sender configuration correctly
To set up the configuration for sending email on Jenkins correctly, it’s necessary to set options in two quite separate locations within the main Jenkins con...