The man page says that sudo allows a permitted user to execute a command as the superuser or another user, as specified by the security policy. However most of the sudo use that I've seen/done is really a privilege escalation with switched user being just a consequence of that. Even the famous XKCD 🥪 webcomic shows sudo being used in this way. Most of the time this small difference does not really matter, but sometimes it's really inconvenient.
This is mostly a note I've written for my self so that I can quickly recall how to sudo
when I really only want to do
something without the su
part. Let's have a look at another less popular but sometimes quite a bit more appropriate option.
continue reading (about 7 minutes to read)
In the previous article I've looked at economic side of using cold storage for Rustic backups. In this part I'll look at technical side of things - setting up the cold storage, migrating existing repository to this backend and restoring from backup.
continue reading (about 10 minutes to read)
There's alternative implementation of Restic rewritten from scratch in Rust - Rustic. It offers some extra neat features. One such feature is support for cold storage. This blogpost started as my research notes to figure out whether it makes financial and technical sense to use this. I've ended up writing two articles in the series. This part focuses on economic (both financial and complexity) cost of such solution.
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Contabo is an EU-based VPS provider with reasonably affordable pricing. However, it does come with some compromises. The billing structure is monthly with a setup fee, making it more suitable for specific workloads. Another limitation is the limited official OS support, specifically the absence of NixOS as an option. Online resources on setting up NixOS on Contabo are scarce and can be clunky or outdated. Here's my approach that's hopefully easy to follow.
continue reading (about 6 minutes to read)
Outside of very specific deployments and industries, serial port on a modern hardware - if present - is usually overlooked and completely ignored. Over the years it became the floppy of external ports. These days one is more likely to see it as an icon representing I/O port than to physically use it.
Which is exactly why I also didn't see it for what it was - a simple, yet elegant solution to my particular problem. Because as it turns out, serial port still has much to offer even in 2023.
continue reading (about 16 minutes to read)