One of my servers had a failure over the weekend and caused some corruption of the boot loader. This is the first time I have experienced this with a setup built on LVM and LUKS, which provided a little extra complexity to solve the problem.

This time, the Ubuntu Boot …

newgrp is a convienient command I ran across today. You can run this command after you add your user to a group. This allows you to continue without having to logout and log back in for the group changes to take effect.

Here is the man page:

 Manual page newgrp …

Pythonic - an idiom used for the python programming language that encourages code readability while striving for an optimal solution to a problem.

This idiom drove a lot of decisions when building conveyor.dev

To try to make a simple solution that works for most applications.

No container orchestration, no docker …

Resizing a virtualbox disk only works for VDI/VHD and only for dynamic drives

If you have a fixed size drive you need to first clone the drive with the following command (Do this anyway for a backup): VBoxManage clonehd /path/to/ubuntu-vm.vdi ubuntu-vm-clone.vdi

Resize the cloned disk …

See Creating a custom lockscreen with i3lock to setup the lockscreen script

Add a service file to run the script when the computer sleeps or suspends

Create a file /etc/systemd/system/[email protected] with the following contents. (Change the username to be your local user account name)

[Unit]
Description …

Instead of the default i3 lockscreen (which is just a plain white screen), you can show an image as the background. You can create a script to show a blurred image of the content on your screen to get the following effect.

Create the script

The short script below will …

Configuration overview

The last setup of this machine was an UNRAID install with virtual machines using PCI passthrough. For this setup I am going to run Arch Linux with a root install on ZFS. The root install will allow snapshots of the entire operating system.

Array hardware

• Boot Drive        - 32 …

Adding ZFS to the iso can save you some time when you are experimenting with the setup as you will not have to add the repository and install each time you restart the machine this way.

Download archiso

# switch to root
$ sudo -i or su root

# Install archiso
$ pacman -S …