Author: vince

Categories
FreeBSD Linux Windows

SSH: too many authentication failures

I am not entirely certain what the cause of this error is but it is particularly annoying when it happens on a headless system.

I think that the problem is caused by too many keys to choose from during key negotiation, or no key at all. I found this workaround.

ssh -o PubkeyAuthentication=no vince@host

Once a successful login with a password is possible, logout and copy the authentication key to the host…

ssh-copy-id -o PubkeyAuthentication=no vince@host

Then login with ssh again…

ssh vince@host

And ssh should authenticate without using a password.

Categories
FreeBSD Hardware

1024×768 FreeBSD VT Console

I use of a lot of old kit in my lab. Some of these machines have very poor ACPI implementations and they often complete their boot displaying an 80×25 character console on monitors that can support much higher resolutions. I have put up with staggered ZFS listings for too long and decided to fix this problem on my FreeBSD hosts.

Modern FreeBSD uses the VT console by default. If a video graphics driver has been installed, it will display a console in a higher resolution if configured.

The configuration below was tested on FreeBSD 13.4-RELEASE-p1 and FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE-p5 with onboard intel graphics adapter.

Install the graphics driver:

$ sudo pkg install drm-kmod

Run the following command to load the intel graphics driver on boot:

$ sysrc kld_list+=i915kms

Edit /boot/loader.conf adding the following lines to the file:

# VT console
hw.vga.textmode=1
hw.vga.acpi_ignore_no_vga=1
kern.vty=vt
kern.vt.fb.default_mode="1024x768"

If dmesg reports a good ACPI table, you don’t need to use hw.vga.acpi_ignore_no_vga=1 .

If you are using a screen that cannot display 1024×768, use kern.vt.fb.default_mode=”800×600″ instead.

Reboot the host to see the new console settings are active.

Categories
FreeBSD Hardware

USB Serial Adapter on FreeBSD

To make a USB serial adapter visible to FreeBSD, add the following to /boot/loader.conf

# USB serial adapter
ucom_load="YES"

 

Categories
Microsoft Windows

How to use emojis on Microsoft Windows

This is super easy, just press the ‘Windows’ key (flag) and the ‘Full Stop’ key (.) on your keyboard at the same time to pop-up the emoji selector.

After all these years, I just found this feature! It was mentioned in a VSCode YouTube tutorial that I watched yesterday.

Categories
Containerisation Django Docker Python

Create a Django admin account inside a Docker container

Assuming that your Django container is already running under Docker, find out what it’s ‘Container ID’ is.

$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE ...
fb3aabc8e123 django-web ...

In the above example the Container ID is fb3aabc8e123.

Now you can easily execute commands inside that container.

$ docker exec -it fb3aabc8e123 sh

The ‘-it’ option executes the command in an Interactive Terminal.

The ‘sh’ at the end of the command is the program to run, in this case it the system shell program. You could use ‘bash’ on a Linux machine if that’s your preference.

Now that you have a shell running in the Django container, you can run the command to create the admin user account.

# python ./manage.py createsuperuser

 

Categories
Containerisation Django Docker Podman Python

Django migrations inside a Docker container

The easiest way to have Django run a migration inside a Docker container is to get Docker to run a new container to perform the task.

Using ‘run’ instead of ‘exec’ works if there is a start-up script like entrypoint.sh that prevents the container from starting until the migration has been completed (egg-chicken-egg).

E.g. I have a Django app called ‘web’ defined in docker-compose.yml , my terminal’s current working directory is the Django container folder where manage.py is resident.

$ docker compose run web ./manage.py migrate

This probably works similarly with Podman, I just haven’t tried it yet to verify.

Categories
Alpine Linux FreeBSD Ubuntu

ZFS Trim

I noticed today that the FreeBSD ZFS pool that I created on my laptop SSD was not configured for TRIM. TRIM enables the SSD to recover space from previously written to blocks that have since had files deleted. This can help maintain performance of the SSD as it fills with data.

My pool is called zroot, so the command to check the value of the TRIM setting is:

$ zpool get autotrim zroot

The command to switch on automatic TRIM is:

$ zpool set autotrim=on zroot