By default Flask writes logs to the console in plain-text format. This can be limiting if you intend to store your logs in a text file and periodically send them to a central monitoring service. For example, Kibana, only accepts JSON logs by default.

You might also want to enrich your logs with additional metadata, e.g. timestamps, method names, log type (Warn, Debug, etc.). In this post we will use the Python logging library to modify Flask’s logging format and write them to a text file. In the end we will see how to periodically send these logs to an external service using Flume.

In our app we would like to setup two types of loggers. One for …

Yubikey is currently the de facto device for U2F authentication. It enables adding an extra layer of security on top of SSH, system login, signing GPG keys, and so on. It is also compatible with several other authentication methods, such as WebAuthn and PAM.

This post will show how to leverage your Yubikey for unlocking the system lock-screen, both with and without using a password. It will then delve into how to automatically lock the screen when the Yubikey is unplugged.

To achieve logins with Yubikeys we require a PAM configuration. PAM or Pluggable Authentication Modules define the authentication flow for common Linux utilities, such as sudo, su, and passwd. We will override the default authentication flow for the xlock …

Collectd is Unix daemon used for periodically collecting system usage statistics, which can include identifying CPU or memory bottleneck issues. The collected data can then be transformed to graphs using RRDtool or a Grafana dashboard (Grafana provides real time graphs and complex search queries).

The daemon itself is modular and functions through external plugins with each plugin performing a distinct function. This post will explore a plugin which collects weather information of a given city. The first section will explain how the plugin configuration works and how to plot a graph of the output data using RRDtool. Finally, we will delve into the plugin internals and see how it is written.

Note: For an intro on how to setup Collectd …

This blog post has been converted from a presentation I gave during the Thematic CERN School of Computing 2019.

When planning a journey to a new country or a city it helps to mark down all the places you would like to visit and eventually create a travel plan for each day. I personally use Google Maps for finding places of interest including historical buildings, museums, and libraries. As an example, if I was to visit say Split, Croatia I could search for “places to visit split” on Google Maps. It will then list all the attractions based on features such as reviews and popularity.

Although it is possible to individually “Save” each place in Google Maps, it does not …

The RPM system facilitates the user to query and update a software package. It also allows examining package interdependencies, and verifying package file permissions. This blog post will describe the process of building an RPM package using the rpmbuild utility and will then explain how to schedule build tasks using Koji. Finally, it will describe how to automate the build pipeline using continuous integration in GitLab.

1. RPM Package Manager

RPM Package Manager is an open-source package management system which was originally designed for Red Hat Linux, but it is now supported on most Linux distributions. RPM packages can generally be of two types:

• Binary RPM: A binary RPM contains the compiled binary of a complete application (or a library …