SSH : No matching host key type found. Their offer: ssh-rsa,ssh-dss

Got this while connecting to my mikrotik router via ssh
 
Unable to negotiate with <ip address> port <ssh port>: no matching host key type found. Their offer: ssh-rsa,ssh-dss
 
A workaround posted on Atlassian shows how to set an old signature algorithm to be used by your ssh client.
 
Added this in my ~/.ssh/config
 
 Host bitbucket.org
    HostkeyAlgorithms +ssh-rsa
    PubkeyAcceptedAlgorithms +ssh-rsa

Read more here:
https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Bitbucket-articles/OpenSSH-8-8-client-incompatibility-and-workaround/ba-p/1826047

Kannel : Multiple SMSC with MT Load Balancing

 Just had the time to try setting up load balancing for MT.

Turns out I just had to replicate my SMSC and use the second USB modem device. smsc-id set the same, then used in sendsms-user as default-smsc.

Browsing the status shows duplicate SMSCs. Sending automatically load balanced.

Now to test for flawless continuous operation....

Ubuntu 20 : Kannel : Cannot start with store-file failing System error 13

Tried Kannel on an Ubuntu 20 SBC and got this error when testing the store-file

2022-11-11 00:47:47 [1337] [0] INFO: Cannot open any store file, starting a new one
2022-11-11 00:47:47 [1337] [0] ERROR: Failed to open '/etc/kannel/store' for writing, cannot create store-file
2022-11-11 00:47:47 [1337] [0] ERROR: System error 13: Permission denied
2022-11-11 00:47:47 [1337] [0] PANIC: Cannot start with store-file failing

Doesn't get resolved through usermod, my installation is under root.

Solution was to move the store file to a folder accessible to Kannel, so I placed it in the log file for now.

store-type = file
store-location = "/var/log/kannel/store"

That works.

Conky : Linux System Monitor Desktop Display

Are there times when you feel your system turns sluggish and you want to quickly check what's causing it? I now find it troublesome to launch top and system monitor one by one to check resource usage on my device, so I installed Conky for a desktop display system monitor. Here's what I see now.

Shows CPU, RAM, swap, network usage and top processes! Now I can Identify possible bottlenecks in a glance.

Check out Conky here https://github.com/brndnmtthws/conky/wiki

Config for the setup, below.

--[[
Conky, a system monitor, based on torsmo

Any original torsmo code is licensed under the BSD license

All code written since the fork of torsmo is licensed under the GPL

Please see COPYING for details

Copyright (c) 2004, Hannu Saransaari and Lauri Hakkarainen
Copyright (c) 2005-2021 Brenden Matthews, Philip Kovacs, et. al. (see AUTHORS)
All rights reserved.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
]]

conky.config = {
    alignment = 'top_right',
    background = false,
    border_width = 1,
    cpu_avg_samples = 2,
    default_color = 'gray',
    default_outline_color = 'gray',
    default_shade_color = 'gray',
    double_buffer = true,
    draw_borders = false,
    draw_graph_borders = true,
    draw_outline = false,
    draw_shades = false,
    extra_newline = false,
    font = 'sans:size=10',
    gap_x = 20,
    gap_y = 80,
    minimum_height = 5,
    minimum_width = 5,
    net_avg_samples = 2,
    no_buffers = true,
    out_to_console = false,
    out_to_ncurses = false,
    out_to_stderr = false,
    out_to_x = true,
    own_window = true,
    own_window_transparent = true,
    own_window_argb_visual = true,
    own_window_class = 'Conky',
    own_window_type = 'desktop',
    show_graph_range = false,
    show_graph_scale = false,
    stippled_borders = 0,
    update_interval = 1.0,
    uppercase = false,
    use_spacer = 'none',
    use_xft = true,
}

conky.text = [[
${color grey}$color $sysname $nodename $kernel $machine
$hr
${color grey}Uptime:$color $uptime
${color grey}CPU Usage:$color $cpu% ${cpubar 4}
${color grey}RAM Usage:$color $mem/$memmax - $memperc% ${membar 4}
${color grey}Swap Usage:$color $swap/$swapmax - $swapperc% ${swapbar 4}
${color grey}File systems: $color ${fs_used /}/${fs_size /} ${fs_bar 6 /}
$hr
CPU1 ${cpu cpu1}% ${alignr}CPU7 ${cpu cpu2}%
${cpubar cpu1 5,100}${alignr}${cpubar cpu2 5,100}
CPU2 ${cpu cpu3}% ${alignr}CPU8 ${cpu cpu4}%
${cpubar cpu3 5,100} ${alignr}${cpubar cpu4 5,100}
$hr
${color grey}Networking:
Up:$color ${upspeedf wlp1s0} ${color grey} ${alignr} Down:$color ${downspeedf wlp1s0}
${upspeedgraph wlp1s0 30,200} ${alignr}${downspeedgraph wlp1s0 30,200}
$hr
${color grey}Processes:$color $processes  ${color grey}Running:$color $running_processes
${color grey}Name              PID     CPU%   MEM%
${color lightgrey} ${top name 1} ${top pid 1} ${top cpu 1} ${top mem 1}
${color lightgrey} ${top name 2} ${top pid 2} ${top cpu 2} ${top mem 2}
${color lightgrey} ${top name 3} ${top pid 3} ${top cpu 3} ${top mem 3}
${color lightgrey} ${top name 4} ${top pid 4} ${top cpu 4} ${top mem 4}
]]

Kannel : Persist Queue to Preserve MT SMS Even After System Restart

To persist your MT SMS queue add store-type and store-location settings in the core group of  your kannel.conf

group = core

...

store-type = file

store-location = "/etc/kannel/store"

Also, make sure your store-location folder is owned by kannel.tl

Node-GYP Failed With Python3 on Yarn Install

I was trying to set up an old development environment for a rails application on Fedora 33 but installing node dependency modules via yarn install failed with the message below.

gyp ERR! stack Error: Command failed: /usr/bin/python3

Since python3 is installed by default, the print command with python2 syntax was raising an error.

For a quick fix, I installed python2 via 'dnf install python2' and configured npm to use that version. 

# npm config set python /usr/bin/python2

After that, yarn install succeeded.

I read there is another way, which is to update to a newer node-gyp version, but that might require an upgrade of other dependencies I'm not familiar with.

Creating a Bootable Windows 10 USB Flash on Fedora 31

TL;DR; use WoeUSB

I haven't used my XPS13 for more than a couple of months now. Thought my girlfriend would like to use it because it's easy to carry around. She prefers Windows over Linux, though, so I had to restore the OS it had when I got it.

I remember creating a backup image before I wiped the disk and installed Linux. Wrote the image to a USB flash storage then came the first issue. My Dell Backup and Restore image does not work as expected. It displays options for reset, restoration and reinstallation(?), but each option failed. A message read 'cannot identify system disk number'. Tried reformatting the SSD to fat32 then to NTFS, still did not work.

It's good that Windows 10 is now easy to download from Microsoft's website. Downloaded the 5GB image and wrote it to a USB flash storage then I tried booting the XPS using the USB flash. Failed. No bootable disk found. Using fdisk, I checked the USB flash if bootable then tried but couldn't set the bootable flag.

So, googled quickly how others write a bootable Windows USB flash and found a post on fossmint (https://www.fossmint.com/woeusb-create-bootable-windows-usb-sticks-from-linux/) where the Martins used woeusb.

sudo dnf install WoeUSB

Installed WoeUSB, wrote the Windows 10 image, and viola, I was talking to Cortina during the OS installation. 'Yes'... 'Skip'... 'Yes'.