Simple containerised MariaDB setup

 

 Quite often I might want to try out some little network-connected tool or technology and to do this I try to run them in a container for the benefit of their config isolation. In most cases I want to do something quick and easy and I start-off by hunting-down a container image on DockerHub and then fire that up under Podman (would you like one of my pamphlets about why Podman is a superior religion to Docker?).

    More often than I'd like to admit, my heart will sink when I see in the documentation for these random container images something like "just set the db-name/user/password variables and it'll work". I figure that whatever it was I was looking at is more complicated than I'd hope and I give-up and try something else (my other religion is "You probably don't need an RDBMS").

    However in the back of my mind there's a little voice saying "You lazy sod! Why don't you just have a scratch MariaDB server ready to go that can be trashed and re-created easily?". So that's what this post is about.

Basic Internet "No knead" baguette bread

Here's one I prepared earlier!

So, this is basically just a slightly tweaked rip-off of this "5 minute baguette" recipe video from Voila - Voila! on YouTube. I got sick of trying to hunt-down the video bookmark just to read the recipe quantities again, so I thought I'd write them up here for reference.

Spoiler alert: The "5 minute" title just refers to the actual working time. It still takes overnight to prove, which improves the flavour and texture of the bread immensely, and also helps to smooth over any rough parts of the prep or ingredient ratios. There's also tens of minutes to bake and rest before you can enjoy the fruits of your labour.

I'll start with the most basic and simple presentation of the recipe and then talk about the details and finally put in a couple of slightly more fiddly tweaks at the end.

Set-up SSH with PAM tokens under Fedora 39

 

So in years gone past, I've had systems with SSH and PAM configured "nicely" to allow users to log-in using either a pre-shared SSH public key pair or a password together with a one-time token from the Google authenticator app running on my Android phone.

When I tried to set this up again recently with the current Fedora release (39), it didn't work as I expected. So I spent a couple of head-scratching days fiddling with every little nitty-gritty setting trying to find-out the problem. It turned-out that there are several things that needed to be changed, so I thought I might as well blog it for posterity.

Thin client router part3: Bare metal atom

"Bare Metal Atom" is the name of my Skrillex cover band... OK, maybe that joke's not ready for a revival yet.

In this part of my Dell Wyse 3040 thin client hacking series I'm going to bite the bullet and run bare metal OpenWRT on the 3040. In part 1 of the series I showed all the things I needed to do to run any software other than the inbuilt ThinLinux client software. Then I messed-about with a fairly pointless (but personally satisfying) exercise in running a virtual machine of OpenWRT on it in part 2.

Thin client router part 2: virtual insanity

 

So in part 1, I set-up the hardware and the base OS install. Now I'd like to try out OpenWRT with the Dell Wyse 3040 thin client and the Comfast CF-953AX USB3 WiFi6 1800Mbps adapter. Unfortunately the thin client has an Atom x5-Z8350 CPU, which none of the official OpenWRT binaries will run on it directly (more on that in part 3, I guess). Nevertheless, I'd still like to test-out the WiFi adapter with OpenWRT, so I'll do the next best thing: run it in a virtual machine.