If you’re using the fantastic Nextcloud and like to feel comfortable browsing all your auto-uploaded photos like once upon a time you did in some proprietary Picasa or so, you can benefit from Preview Generator, which will take care of pre-rendering the thumbnails. As it states you must add some cron magic to get it working and the Nextcloud folks asked for a tutorial, here’s how to do it with cron or (my preference) with systemd timers. Read more

Let’s assume you might not following the Ceph hype for whatever reasons or experiences. And also you might have found a working solution with Sheepdog for clustered block storage. And you’re probably using Proxmox, where Sheepdog is very well integrated (uses existing Corosync cluster). Well done ;) Proxmox sometimes ships Corosync updates, which means the Corosync cluster service will be restarted. As Sheepdog relies on it, it might get confused and dazed. Read more

Besides my usual intention to run everything with Docker, this time i wanted to run Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) without Docker (on a VPS which is unable to run Docker). The link above provides instructions on how to setup repositories and packages for your distribution. To be able to start the service, you’ll just need to create some self-signed certificates (and run the setup behind nginx or Apache reverse proxy). Read more

Gitlab CI does a great job when used with Docker and dependencies, e.g. your app tests need a database or a webserver or whatsoever. Unfortunateley, this does not involve complex setups where you need multiple services connected to each other like Selenium Grid and it’s nodes or probably an API and it’s database. Let’s asssume you have your fancy app, which talks to an API, which itselfs needs a database to run (and you probably want to test against the same database like in production and not sqlite). Read more

Docker Enterprise EE and it’s trusted registry has this great feature for security scanning images, which can be included in promotion policies and so on. If you however are not using EE or either DTR, there’s an awesome project from the CoreOS team called Clair. Just check the intergrations for a list of projects using it. I’ve started using this in Gitlab CI as an additional step to check images before uploading it to the builtin registry. Read more