0x79 - a blog

Routing all traffic through VPN: iptables

March 31, 2015

There are a couple of good tutorials on how to set up your own OpenVPN server (e.g. here, here, or here). To route all traffic through VPN, you need to set up some iptables on the server, which is also well documented. This post is about a problem i encountered that was not described anywhere: on every reboot of your machine the iptables are reset.

To solve this, you want to save your iptables to a file and load them on the startup of the network interfaces.

1. Setup iptables as usual:

   iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 10.8 …

Media Keys for Spotify Client on Ferora

March 17, 2015

Users of the lpf-spotify-client on fedora do not automatically have the media keys bound to the client. You can do that by sending dbus commands to the spotify process (dbus is already installed as a dependency of systemd)

Just bind the following commands to your media keys in system settings.

Play/Pause:

dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.PlayPause

Stop:

dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.Stop

Next:

dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.Next

Previous …

Spotify Client crashes after gtk2 update

March 02, 2015

I recently ran in to some problems with the lpf spotify client for fedora (version 0.9.11.27). It was randomly crashing with a segfault caused by a gtk2 update. Downgrading gtk2 to 2.24.22 solved the problem.

You can also temporarily disable the gtk update by adding the following line to /etc/yum.conf

exclude=gtk2

yum - list packages you actually installed

February 05, 2015

If you want to find out, which packages you installed (without package dependencies), use the following commands to do it:

# find the most recent history entry
yum history list
    Loaded plugins: langpacks, refresh-packagekit
    ID     | Login user               | Date and time    | Action(s)      | Altered
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
       152 | System <unset>           | 2015-02-05 22:42 | Update         |   11   
       151 | System <unset>           | 2015-02-05 00:05 | Install        |   80   
#...

# get detailed information on changes from update no.1 till the latest entry
# grep for " Install" (don't forget the leading space, to omit Dep-Install entries)
yum history info 2..152 | grep " Install"
#...
    Install     gnuplot-4.6.3-6.fc20.x86_64                         @updates …

What the Enigmail Wizard actually does

January 28, 2015

I just reinstalled Enigmail for Thunderbird and was wondering what settings are actually changed during by the setup wizard, in particular the preferences section, to "change a view default settings to make OpenPGP work better on you machine"

1. Disable Loading IMAP parts on demand
   • sets mail.server.default.mime_parts_on_demand to false
     • From Thundebird KB:
       True (default): Fetch the minimum portion of the message needed.
       False: Fetch the entire message, including attachments regardless of whether they're needed.
2. Disable flowed text (RFC 2646)
   • sets mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed to false
     • From Thundebird KB:
       True (default): Send plain-text messages with flowed attribute, allowing rewrap.
       False …