A Simple ASCII Christmas Tree in Bash

📅 December 23, 2021
Let’s make a simple multi-colored Christmas tree using ASCII art!

The flexibility of Bash allows us to create some interesting text effects at the command line. Just for fun! To help add some festive Christmas cheer to a Bash terminal this year, we can write a Bash script that will display a small Christmas tree using ANSI color escape sequences to alter tree, star, and ornament colors.

Ho, ho, ho, let’s go!

LVM Using NVMe and LUKS Encryption in Linux

📅 December 4, 2021
Create a large, single drive from multiple, smaller drives!

Linux is the gift that keeps on giving! It seems whenever I encounter a problem, Linux already has a solution, and that solution has been a part of Linux for the longest time…ready and waiting as part of the system for the day when I need to use it.

Logical volume management (LVM) is one such provided solution to a real world problem. I encountered a situation where I needed 3 TB of super fast storage only made possible by NVMe storage devices. I already had two perfectly good and perfectly fast NVMe drives on hand. One was a 1 TB NVMe, and the other was a 2 TB NVMe.

On their own, neither provided enough storage. 3 TB NVMe does not exist. What to do? Do I grit my teeth and purchase an expensive 4 TB NVMe for a side project? Ouch. That is a lot of money to plunk down.

Isn’t there a way to use what I already have? Indeed there is! With LVM, I was able to combine the two NVMe drives in order to function as a single 3 TB drive. Perfect! Plus, we can encrypt the LVM logical volume using the built-in LUKS encryption system to protect the data from snooping forensics programs.

So, what is the performance like in Linux? Is LVM consisting of two NVMe devices as fast as a single NVMe device? Is LVM with NVMe easy to set up?

Here is my experience and what I did to create a single 3 TB NVMe storage solution using two NVMe drives in Linux.

SanDisk 1TB MicroSD

📅 December 1, 2021
It’s tiny! It’s a terabyte! It’s a micro SD!

Imagine having a terabyte(*) worth of storage in a space smaller than a fingernail. I had the opportunity to use a 1TB micro SD with Linux, and here are my results with this tiny marvel.

(*) The asterisk, as shown on the packaging, means, “Read the fine print on the back of the box.”