Managing Configuration files with etckeeper

Managing your /etc configuration files using version control is a good practice. Trust me, someday this will save your skin.

In the post I'll share setup notes for using etckeeper with git version control. You can install etckeeper and git using system package manager.

# Initialize etckeeper
sudo etckeeper init 

# Commit all your /etc/ configurations into git
sudo etckeeper commit '...enable etckeeper...'

# Check the commit history of file 
$ sudo git log /etc/passwd
commit 322b63ede6cf3073a8f48a883b49d5b3b60fdfb9
Author: arky <arky@localhost.localdomain>
Date:   Wed Mar 5 07:11:47 2014 +0000

    ...enable etckeeper...

There is very little etckeeper documentation out there. You can learn more from this dated Ubuntu Server 10.04 etckeeper wiki page.

So-Fi Sunrizer Solar bag with flexible panels

Robert Kaiser walks in with his Sunrizer bag and says "Here is what you need for Africa". This designer bag sports a flexible solar panel and provides USB connections to charge your devices while you carry. Stylish, Waterproof and rugged enough to hold your laptop, mobile phones, music player and charger cables. Love this bag but at €179.00 EUR it's expensive.

Checkout out www.So-fi.com for more solar products.

Using Archivemail to pruning Mailman archives

The mailman server I maintain for a local non-profit is running out of disk space.Time for some spring cleaning. Decided to archive all mailing-list archives older than 2 years. Grabbed the nifty Archivemail python program and installed with 'python setup.py'.

The archivemail is a tool for archiving and compressing old email in mailboxes. It moves messages older than the specified number of days to a separate mbox format mailbox that is compressed with gzip.

Don't forget to back up mailman mbox files before you start pruning mailman archives.

# Prune mbox file
$ cd /var/lib/mailman/archives/private
$ archivemail --days=550 name-of-list/list.mbox 

# Wipe and rebuild archive
$ cd /usr/lib/mailman
$ bin/arch --wipe