Technology Tales

Notes drawn from experiences in consumer and enterprise technology

Collected Snippets

Now that ownCloud has been acquired by Kiteworks, there is some uncertainty about what happens next. So far, there is an offer for ownCloud and Nextcloud users to move to Kiteworks' proprietary platform. Nextcloud itself has been busy making use of the uncertainty to promote their own product line.

The open-source section of the website got a lot of tweaking in the last few weeks. The recipient of the attention was the operating system subsection. That got a full reorganisation, with all the listings seeing new entries too. The desktop software also got a bit of attention, and other areas could get altered yet.

Recently, I have been having trouble with Nvidia drivers following a kernel update in Linux Mint (21.1 is the version that I am using). The kernel version has been rolled back from 5.19.x to 5.15.x, and I installed an old AMD graphics card as well. Things still are not perfect, though, so I will be looking out for a way to make things smoother. For now, all is good enough for the moment.

Here are boilerplate commands for banning and unbanning IP addresses using Fail2ban:

fail2ban-client set <JAIL> banip <IP> fail2ban-client set <JAIL> unbanip <IP>

If you ever need to install Linux kernel headers on an openSUSE instance in order to install VirtualBox Guest Additions, the following command should be executed in order to do the needful:

sudo zypper in kernel-source

Here is a possible way of resetting the CSS definition for an HTML element, class or ID:

#reset-this-parent { all: initial;

  • { all: unset; } }

Browser support for the above may vary, though.

After seeing messages like "The authenticity of host 'hostname' can't be established" during ssh connections, I decided to investigate more and came up with the following solution:

sudo chown -v $USER ~/.ssh/known_hosts

My known_hosts file had gained root ownership so I could not write to it, so changing the ownership to that of my own user account sorted the problem. An alternative could be to change the group assignment using chgrp, and setting permissions using chmod, but what I did sufficed for my needs.

When I ran into trouble with accessing my own websites using my broadband, I found that the solution was to change DNS Lookup Service to what Google offers. This was done on the router side and the IP addresses used were 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.8.4.

Here's a way to convert DNG files to JPEG ones:

find -type f | grep DNG | parallel mogrify -format jpg {}

  • The content, images, and materials on this website are protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, or published in any form without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. All trademarks, logos, and brand names mentioned on this website are the property of their respective owners. Unauthorised use or duplication of these materials may violate copyright, trademark and other applicable laws, and could result in criminal or civil penalties.

  • All comments on this website are moderated and should contribute meaningfully to the discussion. We welcome diverse viewpoints expressed respectfully, but reserve the right to remove any comments containing hate speech, profanity, personal attacks, spam, promotional content or other inappropriate material without notice. Please note that comment moderation may take up to 24 hours, and that repeatedly violating these guidelines may result in being banned from future participation.

  • By submitting a comment, you grant us the right to publish and edit it as needed, whilst retaining your ownership of the content. Your email address will never be published or shared, though it is required for moderation purposes.