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Richard Audette's Projects, Problems, Solutions, Articles on Computing and Security

Resolved: Ubuntu Kernel SRU Period had ended error

I have Ubuntu Livepatch running on one of my PCs, and I was getting the following error: 1 *** System restart required. Kernel SRU period has ended *** It was clear that I needed to update the kernel to continue to receive patches, but an apt-get upgrade wasn’t installing a new one. It wasn’t clear to me how to identify and update to the latest supported kernel, and it took some searching around.

And Now For Something Mildly Different

On October 18th 2023, I migrated this website from WordPress hosted on an AWS EC2 VM, to a static website built with Hugo, now hosted on AWS S3. And this morning (October 21st), I just shut down the VM. I spun up the first version of this VM on February 5th, 2014 - so this setup has served me well for 9 years. It was rebuilt 3 times, starting with Ubuntu 13.

Enjoying our lemonade: How my team came out ahead from a 4 week outage

I work on a web based product which supports hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. Our servers were first built out in 2014, before I joined the team. By 2018, our environments were starting to look dated, with some components approaching end of life. I submitted an intake request with our shared-services infrastructure team to modernize it, and assess a move to Azure, but as everything was still supported, and as we had no new requirements, we were unable to make a case, as other lines of business had much more pressing concerns.

Starting rootless containers at boot with Podman

I’m building out a new server at home, and decided to try out Podman instead of Docker for running containers. Everything is a bit different. I wanted some containers to start on boot, as I had previously setup with Docker. I found an article that got me most of the way there, but it was missing a few key things for rootless containers. Here’s how I got a Vaultwarden container I setup, named vaultwarden, booting for user username and group groupname, on an Ubuntu / systemd based system.

Python gps / gpsd KeyError

I have been adding GPS logging to my Bicycle Dashcam. All of the example Python code (eg: https://gpsd.gitlab.io/gpsd/gpsd-client-example-code.html) I’ve found online throws this error after about a minute: 1 Exception has occurred: KeyError'el'File "example2.py", line 12, inwhile 0 == session.read():KeyError: 'el' I’m not sure if this is a problem unique to my GPS receiver, but it regularly sends data that is not “class”:“TPV” (eg: “class”:“SKY”) - TPV is the data with coordinates, and whenever that happens, all the sample code throws a KeyError.

Creating Generated Video

When I presented my blogging bot here a couple months ago, a friend suggested I try to create generated video content - check out the linked video to see what I’ve been able to do so far: https://youtu.be/WkfGq42OyBI It’s not quite there - the body movements are random, the eyes aren’t focused on the camera, some of the mouth movements don’t seem to match the face. I’ve added a street scene in the background to make it a bit more interesting.