Block the Accept Cookie Popups with I Don’t Care About Cookies

📅 April 30, 2021
“This site uses cookies…Do you Accept?”

“Do you want to accept cookies?”

“Usage of the site constitutes your acceptance of cookies. Do you agree?”

Do you care about cookies? I sure don’t.

It seems like a majority of the web sites today display a popup asking the user to accept or reject cookies. Often, this is presented in the form of a popup that covers a portion of the content.

Is there a way to automatically remove these annoying nag questionnaires?

Yes! Using a Firefox/Chrome web browser extension called I Don’t Care About Cookies, these popups become a thing of the past.

Bash: Get Motherboard Information

📅 April 22, 2021
Imagine the scenario: Mr. Tiddlywinks the Teddy Bear needs to find out what kind of motherboard is in the system he is logged in to, but he cannot open the case, look inside, or consult a manual. There is no why to know by looking at the system.

Can Mr. Tiddlywinks discover the motherboard model from the command line?

Hey, this is Linux, so the answer is definitely yes!

I encountered a similar situation where I needed to know motherboard details and what was supported by the hardware. Details can be obtained from a manual, but to know what motherboard manual to consult, I first needed to know the model and maker of the motherboard.

“Why not just open the case and look?”

This is not an option when logged in remotely or if the system is physically inaccessible for whatever reason.

Here are three ways to learn about the motherboard from Bash.

NFS: How to Automount with autofs

📅 April 18, 2021
NFS (Network File System) is a great way to mount remote drives across a network and treat them like local drives on a local Linux system.

With a 10 gigabit Ethernet connection (10GbE) and remote SSD or NVMe storage, remote drives can be every bit as speedy and zippy as local SSD or NVMe storage. This is an excellent way to create centralized network storage for multiple Linux clients.

One little downside to NFS involves auto-mounting the remote shares using /etc/fstab. If the server is online, everything is good, but if there is no network connection, client boot time increases as Linux times out while attempting to mount a nonexistent remote share.

One way to solve the automounting problem is to use a program called autofs.

Intel NUC, Linux, Pi-Hole, and NAS – Part 10: NFS

📅 April 9, 2021
The Intel NUC project has turned out to be a fun, impressive gift that continually bequeaths gifts.

So far, we have turned this low-power, quiet, speedy machine into a miniature Xubuntu powerhouse with features like,

 

• Pi-Hole
• FTP server
• SSH server
• DLNA server for use with clients like Emby
• Network monitoring station (NMS) to show network activity on a managed switch
• 10 gigabit Ethernet (10GbE)

Can we improve the NUC further?

Indeed we can! Our next experiment utilizes NFS, the network file system to let us mount remote directories locally and transfer files at 10GbE speeds so they behave like local NVMe storage.

I wanted to experiment with NFS after encountering some issues with FTP and slower (less than 300 MB/s) speeds using SSH. The result was better than expected and easier to set up too given the robustness of NFS.

This article shows how to set up a simple NFS server on a private LAN so client Linux computers can mount a remote NFS directory hosted on the NUC server so we can share those silly cat videos.