Tim Bishop

Using artifacts with gitlab-runner’s SSH executor

GitLab’s runner is used by the CI/CD system to run jobs on remote machines. It has various executors to run the jobs through, with the most common probably being Docker. However, in some situations you can’t run gitlab-runner directly on the machine, so you need to use the SSH executor to allow it to log in remotely. As an aside, …

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Understanding partman-auto/expert_recipe

TL;DR – Subtract the minimum size from the priority and compare this to other partitions to work out how much of the free space will be assigned to a partition. I’ve been trying to create a simple recipe for partitioning disks on new machines when using the Debian/Ubuntu automated installer. This looks like it should be fairly straightforward, but the …

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New OpenPGP Key

I’ve had my old OpenPGP key for around 13 years. That’s a long time, and it’s a tough decision to just throw it away and replace it and the signatures I’ve gained during that time. But it’s no longer doing the job required of it — at 1024-bit it’s possible that with a feasible amount of computing power you could …

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Using FreeBSD’s Tinderbox as a package builder

Tinderbox setup The machine I’m using is currently being used to test port updates. It has a bunch of jails for the -STABLE branches and a copy of the ports tree that I make changes to when testing port updates. I decided to use this machine for my package builder but this meant keeping things separated. So for package building …

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Maildirarc – a Maildir archiving tool

I keep my email in Maildir folders. It works well on the whole for every-day email, but it doesn’t work so well for large email archives (mainly because Unix systems don’t tend to cope well with folders containing a very large number of files). My system of archiving had been to simply copy messages older than a given number of …

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Increasing our storage provision

During the summer we started getting tight on storage availability. It seems that usage on our home directory areas constantly increases – people never delete stuff (me included!). We were running most of our stuff through our Veritas Cluster from a pair of Sun 3511 arrays and a single 3510 array. Between them (taking mirroring in to account) we had …

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Getting the indexes right for OpenLDAP when using NSS

I recently deployed a Linux system which used the libnss-ldap module to get its passwd and group information. This all worked fine except group lookups (in particular when logging in) which were extremely slow. We have about 600 groups in our directory, which isn’t massive, but is more than the average system. Clearly this wasn’t right. Initially I tried nscd, …

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