Linux

Got an email from Google saying they are “improving the experience of the Free Tier” by discontinuing F1-micro type of instance in favor of E2-micro type and I need to switch if I want to continue receiving the Free Tier discount.

E2-micro instances get 12.5% of 2 vCPUs, are allowed to burst up to 2 full vCPUs for short periods and have 1 Gb of RAM.

After rebooting my VM into E2-micro type I decided to upgrade Ubuntu as well.

Evidently something has changed in the initramfs-tools package since the last time I did maintenance because instead of trying to adjust LZMA2 dictionary size while compressing an initramfs image using xz archive tool it just quit with an error. Initramfs image is built every time you install a new version of a kernel image so this prevented the upgrade from finishing properly.

Hello friends, as I promised in my previous post I’m going to tell you about configuring GoogleWiFi router with a Raspberry Pi server acting as DHCP and DNS server / VPN gateway. While part related to NordVPN is vendor specific I feel it would not be too hard to use similar setup with any VPN provider. Feel free to skip VPN related part.

I’m not sponsored by NordVPN, instructions provided as is and as any information from the Internet should be used carefully.

With lot of time spent home during stay-at-home order active in my area I decided it’s a time to overhaul my home network setup.

I think I’ll get into details in the following posts but at this time I want to tell about an issue with DHCP leases I was able to track down using tcpdump.

Hey-hey kids it has been a while, right? Ok, I’m planning to blow the dust off this blog.

Don’t expect anything grandiose yet but I did some homework and moved the blog from Octopress to Hugo so this tin lizzy has a heart of a fighter jet now.

See you soon.

Recently I was investigating quite an interesting issue - there is Ubuntu based VM our testers run some tests on. It was reported they’re unable to log into the virtual machine.

After a brief investigation it became clear the issue is not network or SSH key related.

These are records from auth log:

/var/log/auth.log

Feb 28 20:21:39 test-instance sshd[21954]: pam_unix(sshd:session): session opened for user ubuntu by (uid=0)
Feb 28 20:21:39 test-instance systemd-logind[756]: New session 75 of user ubuntu.
Feb 28 20:21:39 test-instance sshd[21954]: fatal: fork of unprivileged child failed
Feb 28 20:21:39 test-instance systemd-logind[756]: Removed session 75.

Quite an obscure error message, but smells like cgroup problem. Indeed: