An engineer's life around Kyoto

 I built and am running a mail server, using dovecot for IMAP4 server and Power DNS (pdns) for DNS authoritative server, and memcached for back-end service for some mail filter. I also use LXC for staging environment to test my mail server, but running those services is not straight forward. My understanding is that it is because some security features of systemd using Linux kernel namespace function conflict with the use of namespace in LXC container. So, if you want to run memcached, dovecot, and pdns via systemd within LXC container, you have to disable some security features of systemd by configuration. My additional configuration to systemd is as follows: root@myhost:/# cat /etc/systemd/system/memcached.service.d/99-ns.conf [Service] ProtectSystem = no ProtectHome = no PrivateDevices = no PrivateTmp = no cat /etc/systemd/system/dovecot.service.d/99-ns.conf [Service] ProtectSystem = no PrivateDevices = no PrivateTmp = no root@myhost:/# grep -v '#' /etc/systemd/system/pdns.s...

 Back in 1990's, it was common practice to share one home directory between many UNIX servers using NFS. But it is not in these days. But I have become to want to share my home directory between two different Linux machines: One is  a Debian GNU/Linux installed as a primary OS of a dual boot machine,  and the other is a virtualized Linux box within the Virtualbox running under the Windows 10, a secondary OS of the dual-boot. They have different display resolutions and pointing devices. These differences led me to an annoying problem: if you open GNOME desktop environment, display and pointing device setting became broken. Today's GNOME desktop environment stores most of the settings to the files under $HOME/.config directory. But if you share $HOME/.config between two machines, the stored configuration for a particular machine may become incompatible with other machines with different display resolutions and pointing devices. Indeed, my GNOME desktop has become unusable. ...

Figaro's Password Manager 2 was my favorite password management tool. It is GTK2-application to preserve and manage your pairs of ID and password secretly with cipher. To my regret, its Debian package was orphaned many years ago and I thought it was time to switch to another password management tool. But besides finding a good alternative choice, I had a big problem: migration. Figaro's Password Manager 2 does have data export function, but only in special XML format. If you want to move your data to a different application, you have to change the format of the data even if the application can import the data. As my next password management tool is KeePass2 or KeePassXC , I need a XML to CSV data converter. So, I have been developing the conversion tool very slowly and finally, completed. Today, I published it on GitHub , which I named fpm2_csv . The history of the code is quite embarrassing, but very few people in the world would be interested in it, that doesn't matte...

A couple of months ago, I installed Microsoft Teams app in my Debian buster machine for a online meeting. The application worked fine, but it always started up automatically when launching the GNOME desktop environment. The behavior is quite annoying for me, because it take quite long time for the desktop to be ready for my normal use with the machine being rather old and its storage is HDD. But I couldn't find the settings or properties within the gnome-control-center setting items.  Today I find another way to stop automatic launch of the Teams app. Applying the patch below to the ~/.config/autostart/teams.desktop file would work fine: 12c12 < X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=false --- > X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true Thanks to those blogs and articles: Gnome Desktop Entry Format extensions - bootlegged documentation ArchWiki 自動起動

 On December 6, Debian 11 installer alpha 3 has been released. As I wanted to install Debian to my new laptop machine Panasonic CF-SV9, I tried it. The result: fine. Debian 11's Gnome desktop environment is running on my new machine now. I am keeping pre-isntalled Windows 10 pro, and the machine is  Windows and Linux dual booting machine. The installer seems matured, inspite of its version name. But there is one drawback remaining. The circular pad built-in is not working correctly inspite of xorg synaptics input device settings written in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. It may be caused that the graphic is now under control of wayland, in place of  Xorg server in my buster machine. If you want to follow me, please take care of Windows 10's  BitLocker. It will demand recovery key after your installation of Debian. Take some backups of the recovery key before hand.

Just a report of a hardware device usage for reminder.   EPSON EP-977A3 is a multi-functional peripheral for personal use once sold in Japanese market.   It has color printer, color flat-bed scanner, USB memory RW capability with USB and both wired and wireless LAN connectivity.  With the simple-scan software, whose package name is 'simple-scan' in Debian 10, I am able to scan documents from the flat-bed scanner of EPSON EP-977A3 connecting with my Debian box with an USB cable.   But when I tried to start scanning on the control panel of the scanner device, I got error with a message saying "The computer is not ready". I guessed if the scanned package for that purpose and installed it. Still, I got the same error message. Hmm... I need more research.