If you want to use GPU accelerated video encoding in Linux you’ll end up using ffmpeg (even if you may not know that it’s used underneath the software you’re running). While experimenting with a Nvidia card, I found myself struggling with the Nvidia documentation about how to build ffmpeg with CUDA support. Fix missing dependencies […]
Author: Marcel
A LLM (Large Language Model) is the basis for most current AI tools. Fortunately there are lots of open source models that can be run on your own hardware (if it is powerful enough). However I asked myself more than once: what is powerful enough? Hardware requirements While experimenting with LLMs one of the first […]
Categories
Analyzing Ubuntu Initial Ramdisk
While investigating ZFS snapshot problems I was looking into Ubuntu 24.04 initial RAM disks (initrd/initramfs). So here’s what I found. Unpacking RAM disk Over the years many different ways to pack a RAM disk were used (things like cpio archives, squashfs, and so on). Since it has been a long time since I was forced […]
Categories
ZFS snapshot problems
While experimenting with encrypted ZFS root file systems, I encountered some odd behavior concerning snapshots: I had created a separate /etc file system with snapshots. The listing of the snapshots shows up, however all snapshot directories were empty: However zfs reported, that the snapshots contain data, so I guess the snapshots are created, they’re just […]
Docker hub recently announced an upcoming request limit to their registry. So in order to reduce the amount of requests issued there, the idea of a caching proxy solution comes to mind. Possible solutions Fortunately there are some projects already working on that problem. However there are different approaches. Some of the projects I found […]
In my latest Ubuntu server installation I was aiming for a fully encrypted file system. In order to unlock the file system from remote this requires some extra work – here’s what I found: How does it work? The first obvious question is: If everything is encrypted, how can we even boot up a system? […]
In order to investigate a possible Ubuntu server installation on top of (encrypted) ZFS, I decided to first do this with the desktop version. Reason for that is simple: The desktop version of the installer contains an option to install on a root ZFS volume (guess what: the server version does not). So I started […]
Categories
ZFS feature upgrade
ZFS comes with quite a set of features. However when upgrading zfs, new features are not enabled by default for compatibility reasons. This may be reported by zpool status: In order to get more information about possible new features you can use zpool upgrade: You can add option -v to get more detailed information about […]
Till now I was mainly using mod_auth_mellon in order to do SAML-based authentication for web services. I did so because it seemed quite easy to configure (and the Ubuntu mod_shib package had a nasty bug some years ago when I made first contact with SAML). However mod_shib (part of the shibboleth service provider (SP) implenetation) […]
Categories
Unattended Ubuntu ISO
I recently built an unattended installation ISO to ease installation of Windows 11 test machines. So why not do the same for Ubuntu? While looking around I found solutions for Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04. The 22.04 version basically works fine for Ubuntu 24.04. Nothing the less some modifications were required: the key server URL was […]