What do you think this is?

Just thoughts of a restless mind...

Asking my home to play music

Don't you love open source and the capabilities it provides? My constant tinkering of my home automation has no end! The latest improvement is asking the system to play my favorite music. And I remembered that the advanced capabilities of using Rhasspy with Home Assistant with as little code as possible is not clear to everybody. So here is an explanation of how this works, and how I leveraged these capabilities to satisfy my music needs.

Moving KVM/QEMU VMs

I often have multiple virtual machines for different purposes. Some I keep idle, some I destroy and recreate when needed, and some I use for actual work and they stay there forever.

Recently I ran out of space. It was not really bad planning on my side, I just didn't have more space to allocate at the moment. I got a new disk to dedicate just to VMs. The new disk is faster but it's not very big; if I'm not careful I will run out of space again.

I decided to move some virtual machines; just the ones that have a GUI. The server based ones that are not interactive can stay in the old and slightly slower disk.

Securing administrative access with MFA

Now that multi factor authentication is gaining ground I thought I would write a simple guide on how to secure administrative access with MFA on Linux systems. The solution is simple and based on Google Authenticator. The good thing with Google Authenticator is that it's a typical TOTP/HOTP solution and as such does not require any internet connectivity on either the server or the client. The configuration examples provided are more or less appropriate for openSUSE Leap 15 and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS