Fedora Magazine runs a handy article for anyone using work/corporate VPNs from a home computer – “Using the NetworkManager’s DNSMasq plugin“. This is also not the only use for the DNSMasq plugin. It comes in useful when you work local cluster setups for development or testing. Furthermore, pretty much any setup where you need to route DNS queries to different servers, this can either be used out of the box, or provide good ideas as to how to solve the problem.
As I’ve mentioned many times, I’m a huge fan of GraphViz software suite in general, and the dot tool in particular. It’s super handy for generating graphs and diagrams out of plain text files.
Today though I came across a problem that I haven’t seen before. While trying to generate an updated PNG graph from a dot file that used to work just fine before, I got the following:
$ dot -Tpng source.dot -o destination.png
Format: "png" not recognized. Use one of: canon cmap cmapx cmapx_np dot dot_json eps fig gv imap imap_np ismap json json0 mp pic plain plain-ext pov ps ps2 svg svgz tk vdx vml vmlz xdot xdot1.2 xdot1.4 xdot_json
That looks weird. I tried the same with a few other formats and none of them were working. A quick Google search around found the solution over at StackOverflow. All I had to do was:
$ sudo dot -c
After that, dot started working as always.
These days it is a common practices to manage, version, and share configuration files for command line tools (bash, vim, etc) via a GitHub repository. There are plenty of open repositories to study and borrow things from, as well as the tools and scripts to help one with setting things up. Have a look at the awesome-dotfiles – a curated list of dotfiles resources.
Fedora Magazine runs an article about rcm – one of the many tools that are handy for managing dotfiles.
Personally, I haven’t heard of rcm until now. My own setup went through several iterations, varying from custom scripts, to Puppet, and now to Ansible. Have a look here. By the way, my dotfiles aren’t only about the command line tools. I also keep my desktop environment configuration in there (MATE + i3).
croc is a very simple but super useful utility, which helps with occasional file transfers between two computers. When you need to send a few files to a friend on another computer or in another country – this might just be the easiest way. No need to setup HTTP or FTP servers, Samba or NFS shares, or register at one of the million web services that provide such functionality.
croc is written in Go and is compiled for a variety of operating systems, include Linux, Windows, and macOS. It even has a simple GUI for those who wants it.
If you missed the opportunity to attend the recent AnsibleFest Austin 2018 event, here are a couple of interesting links for you, via Jeff Geerling’s blog (aka geerlingguy):
There’s plenty of stuff to play with over the next weekend or two.