Inspired by this old post from Rob Smith I have started making some changes to the blog. All of the pages are now signed using my GPG key, and can be verified by running curl https://www.brianlane.com/ | gpg --verify on the page. Rob did this by adding a plugin to Jekyll, but I’m using the Pelican static blog system for these pages, and as far as I can tell Pelican’s plugin support has no way to make sure your plugin is the final one being executed.

The story of how I saved $388.53 by fixing my broken trackball

Changing how HMS shows the movies so that it will load faster.

Setting up an offline movie player using a Raspberry Pi and a Roku player.

I am transitioning to a new GnuPG key, here is my transition statement, based on one from Simon Josefsson Here is my signed statement: - -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512,SHA1 OpenPGP Key Transition Statement for Brian C. Lane I have created a new OpenPGP key and will be transitioning away from my old key. The old key has not been compromised and will continue to be valid for 30 days, but I prefer all future correspondence to be encrypted to the new key, and will be making signatures with the new key going forward.

I was going to write about using mock to make live iso's without using virt-install, but this week is the OpenStack Summit and one of the things you can use livemedia-creator (lmc) for is making disk images for use with OpenStack. If you followed the instructions in my previous post on creating live isos you already have everything you need except the kickstart and OpenStack. I'm not going to cover how to setup OpenStack, I used the instructions from the RDO project Quickstart without too much trouble.

In this post I am going to describe how to create bootable live isos using livemedia-creator (lmc). It was created so that the same Anaconda installer logic would be used for installing systems and creating bootable media like the live iso. lmc can also be used to create disk images, but I'll cover that in the next post. Anaconda and kickstart are used to install the packages, and lmc compresses the filesystem and wraps it up in an iso.

Fedora 22 is almost here, so I thought I'd write a couple posts on how to use lorax and livemedia-creator to create bootable Fedora images. I'll start with lorax. It is used to create the Anaconda boot.iso which is used to install systems using a network connection. You can also automate your installations by using the boot.iso with a kickstart file. Lorax is part of the current release-engineering workflow and is used to create the boot.

Home Media Server is a Roku application for streaming video from a http server. I started the project in 2009 after Roku released the SDK for their devices . Originally it was a server and a client, but I rewrote it in 2010 as just a client so that the only external dependency was a http server that could handle partial file requests. In 2013 I rewrote the client to use the gridScreen layout which lets you display more content at the same time and makes it easier to split things into categories.

There are occasions where I’d like to be able to ssh to a system without using the password or having to setup a ssh key. Another alternative for authentication is the pam_oath module which allows you to use OATH applications like FreeOTP or Google Authenticator for 2-factor logins. Start by installing the required packages. This is specific to Fedora, other distributions will be similar but slightly different in fun and challenging ways.