NanoDano's blog

VirtualBox allows you to encrypt the virtual disk files at the VM level. This means you can use VirtualBox to encrypt the disks even if the operating system you are installing does not support disk encryption or you simply prefer not to use something like LVM disk encryption. One benefit of doing this is that you can still use dynamically expanding disks. If you choose an encrypted LVM disk, you can end up with the maximum size of the virtual disk being used which is highly inefficient for disk space.

Exceptions are a way of handling execution flow when an error occurs. This will show some examples of how to raise and handle exceptions, how to create custom exception classes, and how to detect if no exceptions are raised.

Ruby is a better Perl and in my opinion is an essential language for system administrators. If you are still writing scripts in Bash, I hope this inspires you to start integrating Ruby in to your shell scripts. I will show you how you can ease in to it and make the transition very smoothly.

The idea with 'enhanced shell scripting' is to create hybrid Ruby/Bash scripts. The reason for this is to take advantage of both worlds. Ruby makes it seamless to pass data back and forth with shell commands.

There are many times when running shell commands is easier or required when there is an external command-line utilities you need to run.

On the other hand, Bash syntax is quite ugly and difficult to remember, and it has very limited features. Ruby offers two tons of object-oriented power, along with tons of libraries and better syntax.

We will look at how to write 'enhanced shell scripts' using Ruby and other tips on taking advantage of both worlds.

A heredoc can be a nice way of passing a large block of text around in a script. Here are a few tips on using heredocs with Ruby.

The rake utility and Rakefile are Ruby's version of make and Makefile. Personally, I find rake much more pleasant to work with than make. While it is written in Ruby, you can use it as task runner for a project of any language. Let's look at some basic usage of rake.

If you are trying to run your Node.js application and you get something like this:

Error: Cannot find module 'C:\Users\Me\my_app.js'

then you are most likely trying to run the wrong file. It is possible you are missing a dependency that is needed from npm install, but if it says it cannot find the main file you are trying to run, then you are trying to run a file that does not exist. It is a common mistake.

This tutorial will walk through the basics of Python 3 virtual environments. The official documentation is available at https://docs.python.org/3/library/venv.html. All of these commands are run from your command prompt/shell/terminal, not from within Python.

Recently I needed to take my front end development skills to the next level. Whenever I needed to build a web interface, it was simple enough to use Bootstrap and the jQuery that came packaged with it. This worked fine when the templates were being rendered server-side using templates like with Django, Flask, WordPress, etc.

The better way to make web applications these days though is to have a separate REST API running the back-end, and then have a front-end that consists only of static HTML, CSS and JavaScript that interact with the API using AJAX calls.

I decided to take the time to learn Angular, React, and Vue.js enough to form an opinion and understand the benefits and drawbacks of each one. This is my comparison and conclusion. I chose Angular and I will explain why.

For reference:

• Vue.js - https://vuejs.org/
• Angular - https://angular.io/
• React - https://reactjs.org/

In search of the perfect desktop Linux distribution I have tried out quite a few and learned about the philosophies of each one. This is my comparison of some of the distributions I have tried over the years.

I will spoil it now and let you know that the winner in my book is Fedora!

When attempting to use SSH client in Fedora 29 within a VMWare Player virtual machine, I would receive a a broken pipe error immediately after a successful authentication request. This is the fix I found.