How to check if a system is virtual

I was improving a playbook in Ansible and wanted to find a way to find if a system was virtual or not to decide about some tunning like setting tuned-adm profile virtual-guest or disable the power off when the lid is closed. After some research and try-except situations I got to this one that seemed to work (I had to tune it as one desktop machine was missing the /sys entry I was using before): ...

May 10, 2021 · 3 min · Pablo Iranzo Gómez

How to run a NYM Validator

As said in the article about mixnodes, NYM is a technology aiming for providing privacy for the communications. Apart of the mixnodes, other key piece in the infrastructure are the validators. As said, the project uses Open Source technology to run, and they have a nice docs with details on how to run a node at https://nymtech.net/docs/, and the one relevant for mixnodes at https://nymtech.net/docs/run-nym-nodes/validators/. In this case, we can follow the instructions for compiling, but I faced some issues (compiling went fine, but initial sync failed), so in this case, we will use the pre-compiled version provided with the 0.10.0 release. ...

May 9, 2021 · 4 min · Pablo Iranzo Gómez

How to run a NYM mixnode

Some time ago I’ve started running a NYM mixnode. NYM is a project that targets improving privacy by decomposing network packages from different hosts, so that origin and target cannot be traced. You can check more about the NYM project at their site at https://nymtech.net/. The project uses Open Source technology to run, and they have a nice docs with details on how to run a node at https://nymtech.net/docs/, and the one relevant for mixnodes at https://nymtech.net/docs/run-nym-nodes/mixnodes/. ...

May 9, 2021 · 2 min · Pablo Iranzo Gómez

Install RHEL7/Centos/Fedora on a software raid device

Installing Linux on a RAID has lot of advantages, from using RAID1 to enjoy protection against drive failures or RAID0 to combine the size of several drives to create bigger space for files with all the smaller disks we have. There are several RAID level definitions and may have different uses depending on our needs and hardware availability. For this, I focused on using raid1 for the system disks (for greater redundancy/protection against failures) and raid0 (for combining several disks to make bigger space available for non important data).. ...

March 28, 2015 · 4 min · Pablo Iranzo Gómez

Customize RHEL/CentOS installation media (EL4/EL5+)

Introduction A standard install media, (let’s talk about a DVD for easier start) has several files/folders at his root, but most important are: isolinux (where the loader lives) images (for extra files for installer to load) Packages for installation (RedHat/ for EL4, Server/Client for EL5) Usually, a distribution has, for its main binaries, more than 2 gigabytes of data, that enables one target to act as a multifunction server/workstation, but that you will not usually load on the same system. Furthermore, since the DVD creation, there have been so many updates/patches that make your installation a ‘outdated’ install that you’ll need to upgrade to have recent patches. ...

January 23, 2010 · 5 min · Pablo Iranzo Gómez
This blog is a participant in the Amazon Associate Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.