Systemd

🧂 Salt without the sudo Follow-up from the previous post, today we are going to put our systemd-managed containers to work and use them for some useful tasks. The idea is to set up an environment to learn how the configuration management Salt works, and play/hack around with it, without even needing root or sudo rights. After all, in the infra-world, the Salt must flow! So we will setup two containers, one as a salt server and the other as a salt “minion” (representing the machine that will be configured via salt). ...

🦎 Hi geekos! If you’ve been running containers on your Leap or Tumbleweed machine, you probably started with podman run commands. Maybe you moved to Docker Compose files to manage stacks. Those are great tools, but they have a limitation, as they don’t integrate natively with systemd, your operating system’s init system. When your server reboots, do your containers start back up automatically? If a container crashes, does it restart? How do you view its logs alongside your system journal? ...

🧹 My Messy Linux Box As year passes, my Linux system, over the time, starts to get a little… Messy. My ~/Downloads directory is a digital dumping ground. It’s a collection of ISOs, test scripts, and those huge multi-gigabyte Virtual Machine images I need to test once and then forget about. Add to that ~/Pictures/Screenshots, which is overflowing with thousands of quick snaps I’ll never look at again. Disk space is cheap nowadays, but I like to have things nice and clean. I could go in and manually clean it… But who remembers to do that ? ...

💭 What ? Imagine a web server that only starts when someone actually tries to access it. Or a database that spins up only when a query comes in: this is the magic of socket activation. The concept is not new, as old-school sysadmins may are used to see something like inetd or xinetd for on-demand service activation in the past. As some cool projects like cockpit have already started using this little-known feature, in this blog post we’ll see the basics and try to get familiarity with the tooling. ...