Avatar (Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog

MACCHIATObin boot on serial port

March 6, 2023

I bought a MACCHIATObin Single Shot a few months ago with the idea of creating a NAS out of it. The results have been very good and, to begin in an easy way, I decided to install Fedora 37 Server Edition. Now that I’ve decided exactly what I want out of it, I reinstalled Fedora and started from scratch with exactly what I wanted. I decided to install Fedora 37 IoT, which is an rpm-ostree based release.

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Red Hat Certified Specialist in Containers

February 27, 2023

Last week, I completed the Red Hat EX188 exam, which allowed me to become Red Hat Certified Specialist in Containers. I think that Red Hat has been able to improve the quality of its exams over time. Newer exams tend to have better explanations of the required tasks. It could also be that this feeling is partially due to my increasing familiarity with those kinds of exercises. This exam is very new; in fact, I believe it was released at the beginning of the year, and this is by far the more user-friendly Red Hat exam I’ve ever done.

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Podman ports and firewalld

February 24, 2023

A few weeks ago, I was doing a security check on one of my machines to ensure that everything was secure when I noticed that there were some ports open that I was surprised to find out. The way I discovered those ports was by checking some ports with netcat (nc -zv IP_ADDRESS PORT). I was expecting those ports to be closed, and I got surprised when netcat claimed to be able to connect to them.

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Fedora Sway artifacts approved by FESCo

January 4, 2023

Back in August, I asked for suggestions for a name for an os-tree-based Fedora version with Sway. Although I’ve not posted anything more on the topic, the work went forward. We have asked Fedora Council to approve the naming, to FESCo for the approval for the change to Fedora, and to RelEng support to merge our work in the Fedora workstream. A couple of weeks ago, the Fedora Council approved the request to create a “traditional” spin called “Fedora Sway spin” as well as an os-tree spin called “Fedora Sericea”.

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LaTeX spreadtab cells reference

December 28, 2022

When I create LaTeX files containing complex tables with many correlated numbers, I use spreadtab. Overall, I like the package, but it often needs better documentation, not because features are not documented but because it’s hard to find what you are looking for. Cells references are an example of this, but it is a critical topic for this package, so those are the ways I’ve discovered to sum a column of values.

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Gopass 1.15 in Fedora 37

December 21, 2022

Back in April, I announced the availability of gopass in the Fedora repositories. In the last few months, though, gopass had multiple releases, many of which arrived in Fedora 38 but not Fedora 37. Since Fedora 38 will be released in a few months, most users are not using it, and therefore those releases are not directly benefitting those users. The reason for the delayed update for Fedora 37 is that the dependencies of gopass changed in the course of those updates, and the Fedora process makes updating packages with many dependencies changes more painful than it could be.

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Use SSH to proxy web traffic

November 28, 2022

As discusse in a previous post, I use nebula to create a VPN connection between the various machines I use. Usually what I really care about this setup is the ability of consuming services those machine expose on my nebula network. When I travel, I prefer to proxy my data through my nebula network. This allows me to not have to care about the limitations imposed in those networks, as long as I’m able to open my tunnel.

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Red Hat EX374 exam

November 16, 2022

Yesterday I did the Red Hat EX374 exam, which allows becoming Red Hat Certified Specialist in Developing Automation with Ansible Automation Platform. This exam is my sixth Ansible exam/certification, so the question is always, how is this similar or different from the others? This exam is one of the furthest ones from the others since it focuses on Ansible Automation Platform 2 instead of Ansible Core or Ansible Tower. This change was welcomed since AAP has many more moving parts and features compared to previous products.

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AWS SSA-C03 exam

October 30, 2022

Three years passed from the last AWS exam I took, and my AWS certifications were due a renewal. The first thing I checked was what was the exam code and which one I had taken three years ago. It turns out that the last time I took SAA-C01, this time, the only available version for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam was SAA-C03. SAA-C03 is still very new since it got released last month, so not much third-party material is available.

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Product vs. Technology

October 10, 2022

Every so often, I have a conversation with someone, and we end up in a sub-conversation around the differences between products and technologies. This phenomenon frequently happens to me because I consider a product and a technology two completely different things. At the same time, many people use them interchangeably when discussing IT products and technologies. I think this distinction’s value is clearly distinguishing the solutions that are resilient to a single entity failure and those that are not.

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