• I encountered persistent issues with my container image build pipeline. The pipeline is run by my local GitLab CI instance. After struggling for a considerable period, I decided to address the problem by transitioning from a build setup relying on “docker” to a new setup built on “podman/buildah”. This required a complete overhaul of the build process. Unfortunately, this change broke the deployment of my website using GitLab CI.

  • I ran a rather decent monitoring system for my servers at home based on prometheus. My monitoring service sends an alert, if some file systems start filling up. Unfortunately, in most cases, I don’t know, what file(s) cause this mess. I use ncdu to find the largest files in the alerted filesystem. This short article shows how to install and use this small helper.

  • I have been used to have a server running under my desk for years now. It serves “Nextcloud” for internal data sharing and “GitLab CE” for hosting my internal “git” repositories. Unfortunately this year was quite a hot one in terms of temperature. I was forced to shutdown the server multiple times due to the heat in my home office. As a result I started a research in order to find a solution about how to setup a much smaller system which does not heat up the room that much. This article describes my search to get it up and running with “Alpine Linux” in “diskless mode”.

  • … or why you should care about “OOMScoreAdjust” in your systemd-enabled docker-images Recently I put together a docker image with “PostgreSQL 9.4” installed from the project’s software repository on “CentOS 7.1” to back a rails application. Unfortunately I was not abled to run the “PostgreSQL”-server in a container based on that image. It failed with exit code 206/OOM_ADJUST. In this article I’m going to describe the reason for the failure using a minimal failing example.

  • If you need to share files from your local system with others, you’ve got plenty of options. For some of them you need a client installed locally and an account at a remote website. Fortunately there are easier options available as most programming languages come with an HTTP server. In most cases it’s able to serve files from a local directory and is sufficient for a lot use cases. In this article I am going to show you, how I solved the problem by “writing” a local web server in Go running on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.

  • Having a suite testing a lot of features is a good thing. But if your project supports a lot of different Rubies – MRI-Ruby, JRuby etc. – you might face platform dependent bugs. Read on, if you like to know how we worked around some platform dependent bugs in aruba to keep the build status “green” on all support Rubies.