Recent posts

Ansible k3s on vms 1.2.0 and delegated_vm_install 2.0.3 released

1 minute read

cloud-init

I prepared a few update releases of some ansible roles related to provision virtual machines with libvirt over the last weeks.

Mainly clean up releases and makes sure that everything works on different GNU/Linux distributions out of the box.

One “big” change is the removal of the dependency on the cloud-localds utility to provision virtual machines with cloud-init. This enables the usage of the roles on Linux distributions that don’t provide this utility.


Ansible-k3s-on-vms v1.2.0

An Ansible playbook to deploy virtual machines and deploy K3s.

https://github.com/stafwag/ansible-k3s-on-vms

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Use a GPG smartcard with Thunderbird. Part 3: Setup Thunderbird

5 minute read

In previous blog posts, we discussed setting up a GPG smartcard on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD.

In this blog post, we will configure Thunderbird to work with an external smartcard reader and our GPG-compatible smartcard.

beastie gnu tux

Before Thunderbird 78, if you wanted to use OpenPGP email encryption, you had to use a third-party add-on such as https://enigmail.net/.

Thunderbird’s recent versions natively support OpenPGP. The Enigmail addon for Thunderbird has been discontinued. See: https://enigmail.net/index.php/en/home/news.

I didn’t find good documentation on how to set up Thunderbird with a GnuPG smartcard when I moved to a new coreboot laptop, so this was the reason I created this blog post series.

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New release Ansible role stafwag.ntpd, and clean up Ansible roles

2 minute read

I made some time to give some love to my own projects and spent some time rewriting the Ansible role stafwag.ntpd and cleaning up some other Ansible roles.

There is some work ongoing for some other Ansible roles/projects, but this might be a topic for some other blog post(s) ;-)

freebsd with smartcard

stafwag.ntpd


An ansible role to configure ntpd/chrony/systemd-timesyncd.


This might be controversial, but I decided to add support for chrony and systemd-timesyncd. Ntpd is still supported and the default on the BSDs ( FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD).

It’s possible to switch from the ntp implementation by using the ntpd.provider directive.

The Ansible role stafwag.ntpd v2.0.0 is available at:

Release notes

V2.0.0

  • Added support for chrony and systemd-timesyncd on GNU/Linux
    • systemd-timesynced is the default on Debian GNU/Linux 12+ and Archlinux
    • ntpd is the default on all operating systems (BSDs, Solaris) and Debian GNU/Linux 10 and 11
    • chrony is the default on all other GNU/Linux distributes
    • For ntpd hash as the input for the role.
    • Updated README
    • CleanUp

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Use a GPG smart card with Thunderbird. Part 2: setup GnuPG on FreeBSD

19 minute read


Updated @ Mon Sep 2 07:55:20 PM CEST 2024: Added devfs section
Updated @ Wed Sep 4 07:48:56 PM CEST 2024 : Corrected gpg-agent.conf


I use FreeBSD and GNU/Linux. freebsd with smartcard

In a previous blog post, we set up GnuPG with smartcard support on Debian GNU/Linux.

In this blog post, we’ll install and configure GnuPG with smartcard support on FreeBSD.

The GNU/Linux blog post provides more details about GnuPG, so it might be useful for the FreeBSD users to read it first.

Likewise, Linux users are welcome to read this blog post if they’re interested in how it’s done on FreeBSD ;-)

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