The IT Blog

Category: HowTos

Stuff that was hard to find & fix

  • Farewell to my 11.5-Year-Old RaspberryPi Weather Station

    Eleven and a half years ago, I built my first RaspberryPi weather station using sensors from Tinkerforge. Today, I shut it down for good. Not because it failed — but because its job is done. It’s been replaced by a Netatmo setup, and unfortunately, I don’t need it anymore. But admitting that a project’s lifespan is over always takes some effort — well, to me at least.

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  • How to get the ‘<‘, ‘>’ and ‘|’ keys on a Dell Latitude 5300

    Since a while I am using a refurbed Dell Latitude 5300. I’m pretty happy with it. Just recently I was doing some stuff via SSH on my RaspberryPIs when I noticed that the Dell’s keyboard does not contain the ‘<‘ key. Not a big deal usually – just Linux Shell working is quite uncool without the ‘>’ and the pipe ‘|’ characters.

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  • How to solve weird Docker Errors on Ubuntu

    After being so happy about all the services that I brought up last weekend, I forgot to do one thing: rebooting. Today I rebooted for some reason and the containers didn’t came up again.

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  • How to Use a Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q as a Powerful Home Server

    As an IT enthusiast, I’ve long been (and still are!) a fan of the mini computers. My main Pi already runs multiple services like , and – which often pushes it near its limits. Well, recently I found myself wanting to add even more services to my local network. Unfortunately, my NAS can’t host Docker containers, so expanding compute power became necessary.

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  • How to batch migrate Repos from Bitbucket to Codeberg

    When I was browsing through my code archive, I noticed that I was missing some projects and wondered where I had left them after my recent re-install. Just then I noticed that I still had some private repos at Bitbucket. As I just needed a place to back up the code, I decided that I could move it to Codeberg.

    Codeberg describes itself as “[…] a non-profit, community-led effort that provides Git hosting and other services for free and open source projects.”. Codeberg e.V. itself is a registered non-profit association based in Berlin, Germany.

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  • How to check the Email Security Level of your Provider

    If you’ve ever wondered which security protocols your email-provider supports, there is an easy way that I found via Mastodon:

    The European Commision provides My Email Communications Security Assessment (MECSA) (https://mecsa.jrc.ec.europa.eu/) with which you can quickly check, which of the protocols your provider supports (StartTLS, x509 Ceerts, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, DANE, DNSSEC).

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  • How to delete all content from LinkedIn

    As I’ve written earlier, I’m going more and more away from LinkedIn (like here and here). During my activity, I decided that I want to go a step further and remove all my content (posts, answers, likes) from LinkedIn. On Mastodon, I have auto-delete activated already for various reasons. Now I wanted to clean up LinkedIn, too!

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  • How to set up Navidrome for MP3 Streaming on a RaspberryPi

    Recently I noticed that I hardly ever listen my MP3 music collection – mainly because I don’t like my music players (both on mobile and on the desktop). So, let’s look for a nicer player!

    I had only two constraints: 1) it should be able to use the files from OneDrive/NAS and 2) it should be able to cache them (in case of no connectivity). And as I went through the candidates, I stumbled across Navidrome:

    Navidrome allows you to enjoy your music collection from anywhere, by making it available through a modern Web UI and through a wide range of third-party compatible mobile apps, for both iOS and Android devices.

    Navidrome also supports Playlists and Internet-Radio! Nice. So why not let it run on a RaspberryPi at home and make it available through my VPN? But would I have enough RAM left? I just tried!

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  • How to selfhost Peertube

    I’ve been thinking about selfhosting my videos for quite a while now. Sure, Youtube is the de-facto-standard. But honestly, I don’t perform on ANY platform that is steered by an algorithm, and I simply dislike the way those monopolies can “dictate” what is seen and can be seen. Elena Rossini recently wrote a nice post about it, that nails it quite well. I know: I don’t pay for it, so what should I expect …

    Anyways! I hesitated for quite a while to rent a VPS, install Peertube, maybe according databases, redirect a subdomain, keep it maintained … ah well … or maybe just not.

    But – also thank you to Elena Rossini (@_elena@mastodon.social) – I got aware of YunoHost:

    YunoHost is an operating system aiming to simplify server administration and therefore democratize self-hosting while making sure it stays reliable, secure, ethical and lightweight. It is a copylefted libre software project maintained exclusively by volunteers. Technically, it can be seen as a distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux and can be installed on many kinds of hardware.

    And I must admit that I really liked the setup procedure! It’s well described in the Yunohost Documentation and worked like a charm.

    If you are afraid of self-hosting any application listed in the YunoHost App-Store … DON’T be afraid. VPCs/VPSs are really cheap to get as well … I chose a tiny VPC from Strato for example.

    See the result on https://video.franzgraf.de/

    Give it a try! Self-hosting might be easier than you think.

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  • How to add SSH public key authentication in Linux

    It’s pretty easy, but every time I have to look up the right permissions for .ssh and the authorized_keys file. The solution is described on StackOverflow and the OpenSSH FAQ:

    mkdir ~/.ssh
touch ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
chmod 700 ~/.ssh
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

# now paste the user's public key here:
cat > ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

    done.