Automating Ejabberd upgrade procedure with Ansible

CentOS repos (both official and EPEL) does not provide an up to date version of Ejabberd, installing from source is the only way if one want or need a version from this century. Problem is that doing things manually is a never ever a good idea, luckily Ansible and a bit of Python love come to rescue. Supposing Ejabberd is already installed and configured (I wrote a post on the subject a couple of years ago: https://uwot. …

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TWRP with FS encryption and CM13 support for OPO

Android ROM scene is cluster fuck of inhumane proportion; the complete lack of documentation, decent how-to, decent guides and the retarded works for me attitude the whole community has really amazes me. TWRP project is a good example of a really useful tool used by [millions] of people all over the world, one would assume that it has to be maintained in a professional way but this is as far from the reality as something can get. …

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mdadm RAID on Linux

Every time I have to setup a software RAID in Linux using mdadm I forget something, this time I am writing it down once and for all (or at least I hope so). For the sake of simplicity I will use the creation of a RAID1 as example but this very same procedure can be applied for any other kind of RAID. RAID array creation 1. Partition the drives This step must be repeated for each drive of the array (/dev/sdb and /dev/sdc in my case). …

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Defragment XFS file system

XFS just like EXT4 (I wrote a post about it last year) supports online defragmentation, to manage those volumes on CentOS and Fedora xfsprogs package is needed. Fragmentation level of XFS volumes can be checked with the command: [root@CentOS ~]$ xfs_db -c frag -r /dev/sdb1 actual 4491, ideal 4006, fragmentation factor 10.80% To perform online defragmentation of XFS volumes run the following command: [root@CentOS ~]$ xfs_fsr -v /dev/sdb1 /mnt/data1 start inode=0 ino=205 ino=205: file busy ino=201 ino=201 already fully defragmented. …

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QEMU+KVM, reclaim disk space

After some time qcow2 images tend -especially after taking snapshots- to grow bigger and bigger, even bigger than the maximum size specified at creation time. QEMU provides a tool called virt-sparsify (install libguestfs-tools package in CentOS 7) that can effectively make a virtual machine disk thin provisioned (space is not preallocated, only the actual space needed is used). virt-sparsify has a nice number of options, the most interesting one is --in-place, it tells QEMU to shrink the volume in place without requiring any addition space. …

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CentOS, DNSCrypt and pdnsd

DNSCrypt installation process is pretty simple since it is present in the repository, pdnsd on the other hand is missing, luckily compiling from source is not that hard. For the sake of completeness I will also cover the procedure to install DNSCrypt from source, alternatively yum install dnscrypt-proxy. Install the required dependencies and get the source code: [root@CentOS ~]# yum install gcc libsodium-devel libtool-ltdl-dev git wget [root@CentOS ~]# git clone https://github. …

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Setting up Vim on Fedora

Since every time I am about to install Vim I forgot how to set it up, set it as default system wide text editor and so on I figure I’ll write it down once and for all. First of all let’s install Vim, specifically the so called enhanced version which is capable of loading plugins and colorschemes: [user@Fedora ~]# sudo dnf install vim ### powerline plugin [user@Fedora ~]# sudo dnf install vim-plugin-powerline I personally really like molokay colorscheme from tomasr; putting it in the default colorscheme directory does the trick if we want to use it for every user. …

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ejabberd and fail2ban

Fail2ban is a useful tool capable of mitigating brute force attacks performed against a multitude of services (ejabberd in our case). Configuration is split between a multitude of files: jail.conf defines which filters are active while the filters scripts are placed in ./filter.d directory. [root@CentOS ~]# vi /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf --- bantime = 1200 findtime = 1200 maxretry = 10 backend = auto [ejabberd-auth] enabled = true port = 5222,5280,7777 action = iptables-multiport[name=ejabberd, port="5222,5269,5280,777", protocol=tcp] logpath = /var/log/ejabberd/ejabberd. …

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