Using proxy pac with Chrome (and derivatives) and Linux

As many people know, Chrome (and other browser based on Chromium, at least Brave and Edge) still rely on the desktop’s proxy settings on Linux (I remember writing about this back in 2011). Under normal circumstances, it is as easy as running the program with --proxy-pac-url commandline switch, like so: $ brave --proxy-pac-url="https://example.com/proxy.pac" But what if you want to use a local file? At some point (around Chrome 77 it seems), Chrome stopped accepting file:// URLs for --proxy-pac-url....

February 7, 2021 · 1 min · alj

Implementing SRS with Mailcow

Preface Mailcow is an awesome self-hosted, container-based email solution. SRS (Sender Rewriting Framework) (from Wikipedia): For a mail transfer agent (MTA), the Sender Rewriting Scheme (SRS) is a scheme for rewriting the envelope sender address of an email message, in view of remailing it. In this context, remailing is a kind of email forwarding. SRS was devised in order to forward email without breaking the Sender Policy Framework (SPF), in 2003....

December 30, 2020 · 4 min · alj

Installing Pulse Secure client in Ubuntu 16.04+

Update 2021-01-03: I haven’t used Pulse VPN on Linux since August 2018, so I don’t know if these instructions still work or are needed. First off, you need to obtain the Pulse Secure client as a deb file from your network administrator. I have version 8.2R5. For some reason the client does not list any dependencies when installing so you must install the needed (32 bit) libraries by hand (PulseClient.sh does not work without changes):...

October 31, 2017 · 1 min · alj

Change the default terminal emulator in GNOME 3

After using Linux Mint with Cinnamon for a long time I am now back with Ubuntu with GNOME (reluctantly, I may add). One thing I have noticed is there does not seem to be an option in the settings to change your preferred terminal emulator. Luckily it can be changed in several other ways, The generic fix in a terminal, write $ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.default-applications.terminal exec tilix In this case I have changed to the Tilixterminal emulator....

October 29, 2017 · 1 min · alj

Installing Linux Mint/Ubuntu desktop edition with full-disk encryption and LVM

(This guide applies to any Debian/Ubuntu based distribution) For some reason (complexity perhaps) it is not possible to configure full-disk encryption and LVM from the graphical installer in the desktop edition. It is possible to select full-disk encryption but this only creates one filesystem (root). I want to use LVM to allow me to have more than one filesystem without having to enter more than one password during boot-up. It is not impossible to install Ubuntu desktop (or Linux Mint as in this guide) with encryption and LVM but it does require a little more work....

January 7, 2017 · 3 min · alj

Moving virtual machines from KVM to ESXi 6.0

I’vve been running KVM for quite a while on my lab server. It’s been running without issue but with the release of vSphere/ESXi 6.0 I felt it was time to move back to VMware. I wanted to preserve the virtual machines already running so I set out to move these to ESXi. I ran into some issues which I’m not sure is a generic problem or specific to ESXi 6.0 but I’ll describe what I have done....

March 15, 2015 · 2 min · alj

Random desktop background from command line

As mentioned in my previous post I synchronize my wallpaper folder between my desktop computers. While the are various ways of setting a random desktop background (XFCE - which I use - has this built in), I’ve had to conclude it’s just easier from the command line. In XFCE it is not possible to do this from cron it seems, so I made a script which is run at start-up:...

February 25, 2014 · 2 min · alj

Wake on WAN using OpenWRT 12.09

If you have the need to wake up machines on your local LAN from the outside, there are a few steps you need to take to get it working with OpenWRT (12.09) Select an unused IP address (which you are certain will never, ever be used). I will be using 192.168.1.254 in the following Log into OpenWRT and go to System → Startup → Local Startup (the text input at the bottom of the page) and add this line above exit 0: ip neigh add 192....

August 12, 2013 · 1 min · alj