The foundation of every ISMS is a “living” inventory. In an ideal world, this communicates with the Ansible, Bash or PowerShell scripts within IT Operations. Snipe-IT, which I value and have successfully used for many years, was unknown to c’t up until now. Enjoy the read (in German): “IT-Assets im Griff” in der c’t Ausgabe 7/2021.

Yesterday evening I rolled out the new update on my Nextcloud 21 instance. In the coming days, functional tests and adjustments will follow on the scripts for rolling out on customers’ systems Looking with interest on my Prometheus monitoring, how far the performance improvements affect actual implementation. That’s not usually worth an extra microblog. My point is, that I haven’t seen such a smooth upgrade of a Nextcloud main release with such broad app support for a while. Read more

Everyone knows the alert when visiting a website with expired certificates. At least once a month I stumble into one or I receive tickets with questions asking what to do. “Nothing” is my reply in most cases. “The mistake is on the other side”. On this occasion, my very special appreciation to the owners and/or administrators of such sites for the extra work required. The obvious solution to avoid such embarrassments: A software or service with periodic checking and notifications. Sounds obvious, but unfortunately doesn’t always work. Read more

Part II - Please Refuel and some new Bumpers Just in time for the new year, the revived Apple Macbook Pro with Debian from the first part is back on my desk. It served well in December. Now, it’s time for a pit-stop: Would you refuel and change bumpers, please? Battery Replacement after 12 years I was way off the mark with the expected endurance: I wrote something about 1.5 hours last month. Well this may have been 7 years ago when I last worked with it. Today the battery doesn’t last for even half an hour. Over Christmas at home on lockdown this is not a problem, though it is a nuisance as it was carefully but clearly pointed towards me. Read more

Rescue-Ops before Christmas Eve What is the worst-case scenario right before Christmas during a Corona Lockdown? Let’s leave zombie apocalypses, too little toilet paper or slow internet connections aside for a moment. Right! A broken laptop. Exactly such a call for help came to me this afternoon from my own circle of friends. I was asked if I had a spare notebook available shortly. Coincidentally, yes. An old mid-2009 Macbook Pro 13" has been hanging around in the corner for years. Too valuable to be thrown away, technically perfectly okay, but unfortunately no longer supported by Apple. There she is again, the planned obsolescence1. Read more

Battery Today I will report a brief description of the battery and power management of Mobian on a Pinephone. Reading the battery parameters from the console was already quite special. The usual way with upower was not successful and provided only zero values. Without ACPI the readout only worked with: # cat /sys/class/power_supply/axp20x-battery/uevent My first measurements: At idle with active mobile network, BT and WLAN and 50% display brightness the power consumption is about 2.5 to 3W. At 100% display brightness it jumps up to 3.5 to 4W each time without any apps in the background. From the desktop perspective this may not sound bad, but in fact it is. Read more

Screenshots What was missing in the first part the day before yesterday, I will catch up today: Screenshots! This led to the question of how to do this? A hotkey like in iOS (home + on/off switch) is unknown to me on the Pinephone. The classic desktop Linux tools like Gnome Screenshots or Peek are installable but do not work properly. It’s quite banal, they fail due to the fact that I cannot trigger any hotkey on a touch display UI. As a solution I have chosen the workaround via SSH and grim taking screenshots remotely in the background while in the app in the foreground, Waylands makes it possible. Read more

Holy Unboxing Welcome to my new blog series and travel report. After more than 12 years with Apple iOS, and before that already 7 years with Microsoft PocketPC devices and before that - we are already in the 90s - with Palm (my PalmV is still alive!) I finally think it’s time to move on and start a new journey. Away from proprietary, closed systems with their wiretapping assistants1, the uncontrolled extraction of behavioral data, the constant intrusion of a more less subtle nudgeing2 and the latent threat of simply being bricked3. Read more

This weekend, Jochen T. contacted me with an interesting question about Hugo and the theme I am using for this blog: I don’t understand how I can create a “normal” feed, I have searched for help, but found nothing. My feed only contains the categories “micro”, “blog” or “page”, but I would like to have a feed with the individual posts in full text (like you). Due to the fact that others might have the same question, I answer this in the public of course after prior request and approval by Jochen. Read more

Winter is coming! Winter time has already arrived, and soon the Corona Lockdown aswell. Sitting at home in the warmth with a cup of tea, having a complete overview of the IT is a good feeling. The catchword here is “complete”. I don’t rely on traditional blackbox monitoring solutions1 but rather on the whitebox solution called Prometheus2. Behind Prometheus there is no single company but an initiative of various ones. The who-is-who of the tech industry with RedHat, Amazon, Apple, ARM and many others3. Of course Prometheus comes with a free licence and is completely open-source. Read more