Tag: magazine

Posted on by — Leave a comment

How to setup a DNS server with bind

The Domain Name System, or DNS, as it’s more commonly known, translates or converts domain names into the IP addresses associated with that domain. DNS is the reason you are able to find your favorite website by name instead of typing an IP address into your browser. This guide shows you how to configure a Master DNS system and one client.

Here are system details for the example used in this article:

dns01.fedora.local (192.168.1.160 ) - Master DNS server
client.fedora.local (192.168.1.136 ) - Client

DNS server configuration

Install the bind packages using sudo:

$ sudo dnf install bind bind-utils -y

The /etc/named.conf configuration file is provided by the bind package to allow you to configure the DNS server.

Edit the /etc/named.conf file:

sudo vi /etc/named.conf

Look for the following line:

listen-on port 53 { 127.0.0.1; };

Add the IP address of your Master DNS server as follows:

listen-on port 53 { 127.0.0.1; 192.168.1.160; };

Look for the next line:

allow-query  { localhost; };

Add your local network range. The example system uses IP addresses in the 192.168.1.X range. This is specified as follows:

allow-query  { localhost; 192.168.1.0/24; };

Specify a forward and reverse zone. Zone files are simply text files that have the DNS information, such as IP addresses and host-names, on your system. The forward zone file makes it possible for the translation of a host-name to its IP address. The reverse zone file does the opposite. It allows a remote system to translate an IP address to the host name.

Look for the following line at the bottom of the /etc/named.conf file:

include "/etc/named.rfc1912.zones";

Here, you’ll specify the zone file information directly above that line as follows:

zone "dns01.fedora.local" IN {
type master;
file "forward.fedora.local";
allow-update { none; };
}; zone "1.168.192.in-addr.arpa" IN {
type master;
file "reverse.fedora.local";
allow-update { none; };
};

The forward.fedora.local and the file reverse.fedora.local are just the names of the zone files you will be creating. They can be called anything you like.

Save and exit.

Create the zone files

Create the forward and reverse zone files you specified in the /etc/named.conf file:

$ sudo vi /var/named/forward.fedora.local

Add the following lines:

$TTL 86400
@   IN  SOA     dns01.fedora.local. root.fedora.local. (
        2011071001  ;Serial
        3600        ;Refresh
        1800        ;Retry
        604800      ;Expire
        86400       ;Minimum TTL
)
@       IN  NS          dns01.fedora.local.
@       IN  A           192.168.1.160
dns01        IN  A   192.168.1.160
client          IN  A   192.168.1.136

Everything in bold is specific to your environment. Save the file and exit. Next, edit the reverse.fedora.local file:

$ sudo vi /var/named/reverse.fedora.local

Add the following lines:

$TTL 86400
@   IN  SOA     dns01.fedora.local. root.fedora.local. (
        2011071001  ;Serial
        3600        ;Refresh
        1800        ;Retry
        604800      ;Expire
        86400       ;Minimum TTL
)
@       IN  NS          dns01.fedora.local.
@       IN  PTR         fedora.local.
dns01       IN  A   192.168.1.160
client          IN  A   192.168.1.136
160     IN  PTR         dns01.fedora.local.
136     IN  PTR         client.fedora.local.

Everything in bold is also specific to your environment. Save the file and exit.

You’ll also need to configure SELinux and add the correct ownership for the configuration files.

sudo chgrp named -R /var/named
sudo chown -v root:named /etc/named.conf
sudo restorecon -rv /var/named
sudo restorecon /etc/named.conf

Configure the firewall:

sudo firewall-cmd --add-service=dns --perm
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Check the configuration for any syntax errors

sudo named-checkconf /etc/named.conf

Your configuration is valid if no output or errors are returned.

Check the forward and reverse zone files.

$ sudo named-checkzone forward.fedora.local /var/named/forward.fedora.local $ sudo named-checkzone reverse.fedora.local /var/named/reverse.fedora.local

You should see a response of OK:

zone forward.fedora.local/IN: loaded serial 2011071001
OK zone reverse.fedora.local/IN: loaded serial 2011071001
OK

Enable and start the DNS service

$ sudo systemctl enable named
$ sudo systemctl start named

Configuring the resolv.conf file

Edit the /etc/resolv.conf file:

$ sudo vi /etc/resolv.conf

Look for your current name server line or lines. On the example system, a cable modem/router is serving as the name server and so it currently looks like this:

nameserver 192.168.1.1

This needs to be changed to the IP address of the Master DNS server:

nameserver 192.168.1.160

Save your changes and exit.

Unfortunately there is one caveat to be aware of. NetworkManager overwrites the /etc/resolv.conf file if the system is rebooted or networking gets restarted. This means you will lose all of the changes that you made.

To prevent this from happening, make /etc/resolv.conf immutable:

$ sudo chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf

If you want to set it back and allow it to be overwritten again:

$ sudo chattr -i /etc/resolv.conf

Testing the DNS server

$ dig fedoramagazine.org
; <<>> DiG 9.11.13-RedHat-9.11.13-2.fc30 <<>> fedoramagazine.org
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 8391
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 6 ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION: ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096 ; COOKIE: c7350d07f8efaa1286c670ab5e13482d600f82274871195a (good) ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;fedoramagazine.org. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: fedoramagazine.org. 50 IN A 35.197.52.145 ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: fedoramagazine.org. 86150 IN NS ns05.fedoraproject.org. fedoramagazine.org. 86150 IN NS ns02.fedoraproject.org. fedoramagazine.org. 86150 IN NS ns04.fedoraproject.org. ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION: ns02.fedoraproject.org. 86150 IN A 152.19.134.139 ns04.fedoraproject.org. 86150 IN A 209.132.181.17 ns05.fedoraproject.org. 86150 IN A 85.236.55.10 ns02.fedoraproject.org. 86150 IN AAAA 2610:28:3090:3001:dead:beef:cafe:fed5 ns05.fedoraproject.org. 86150 IN AAAA 2001:4178:2:1269:dead:beef:cafe:fed5 ;; Query time: 830 msec ;; SERVER: 192.168.1.160#53(192.168.1.160) ;; WHEN: Mon Jan 06 08:46:05 CST 2020 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 266

There are a few things to look at to verify that the DNS server is working correctly. Obviously getting the results back are important, but that by itself doesn’t mean the DNS server is actually doing the work.

The QUERY, ANSWER, and AUTHORITY fields at the top should show non-zero as it in does in our example:

;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 6

And the SERVER field should have the IP address of your DNS server:

;; SERVER: 192.168.1.160#53(192.168.1.160)

In case this is the first time you’ve run the dig command, notice how it took 830 milliseconds for the query to complete:

;; Query time: 830 msec

If you run it again, the query will run much quicker:

$ dig fedoramagazine.org 
;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.1.160#53(192.168.1.160)

Client configuration

The client configuration will be a lot simpler.

Install the bind utilities:

$ sudo dnf install bind-utils -y

Edit the /etc/resolv.conf file and configure the Master DNS as the only name server:

$ sudo vi /etc/resolv.conf

This is how it should look:

nameserver 192.168.1.160

Save your changes and exit. Then, make the /etc/resolv.conf file immutable to prevent it from be overwritten and going back to its default settings:

$ sudo chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf

Testing the client

You should get the same results as you did from the DNS server:

$ dig fedoramagazine.org
; <<>> DiG 9.11.13-RedHat-9.11.13-2.fc30 <<>> fedoramagazine.org
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 8391
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 6 ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION: ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096 ; COOKIE: c7350d07f8efaa1286c670ab5e13482d600f82274871195a (good) ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;fedoramagazine.org. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: fedoramagazine.org. 50 IN A 35.197.52.145 ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: fedoramagazine.org. 86150 IN NS ns05.fedoraproject.org. fedoramagazine.org. 86150 IN NS ns02.fedoraproject.org. fedoramagazine.org. 86150 IN NS ns04.fedoraproject.org. ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION: ns02.fedoraproject.org. 86150 IN A 152.19.134.139 ns04.fedoraproject.org. 86150 IN A 209.132.181.17 ns05.fedoraproject.org. 86150 IN A 85.236.55.10 ns02.fedoraproject.org. 86150 IN AAAA 2610:28:3090:3001:dead:beef:cafe:fed5 ns05.fedoraproject.org. 86150 IN AAAA 2001:4178:2:1269:dead:beef:cafe:fed5 ;; Query time: 1 msec ;; SERVER: 192.168.1.160#53(192.168.1.160) ;; WHEN: Mon Jan 06 08:46:05 CST 2020 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 266

Make sure the SERVER output has the IP Address of your DNS server.

Your DNS server is now ready to use and all requests from the client should be going through your DNS server now!

Posted on by — Leave a comment

How to setup multiple monitors in sway

Sway is a tiling Wayland compositor which has mostly the same features, look and workflow as the i3 X11 window manager. Because Sway uses Wayland instead of X11, the tools to setup X11 don’t always work in sway. This includes tools like xrandr, which are used in X11 window managers or desktops to setup monitors. This is why monitors have to be setup by editing the sway config file, and that’s what this article is about.

Getting your monitor ID’s

First, you have to get the names sway uses to refer to your monitors. You can do this by running:

$ swaymsg -t get_outputs

You will get information about all of your monitors, every monitor separated by an empty line.

You have to look for the first line of every section, and for what’s after “Output”. For example, when you see a line like “Output DVI-D-1 ‘Philips Consumer Electronics Company’”, the output ID is “DVI-D-1”. Note these ID’s and which physical monitors they belong to.

Editing the config file

If you haven’t edited the Sway config file before, you have to copy it to your home directory by running this command:

cp -r /etc/sway/config ~/.config/sway/config

Now the default config file is located in ~/.config/sway and called “config”. You can edit it using any text editor.

Now you have to do a little bit of math. Imagine a grid with the origin in the top left corner. The units of the X and Y coordinates are pixels. The Y axis is inverted. This means that if you, for example, start at the origin and you move 100 pixels to the right and 80 pixels down, your coordinates will be (100, 80).

You have to calculate where your displays are going to end up on this grid. The locations of the displays are specified with the top left pixel. For example, if we want to have a monitor with name HDMI1 and a resolution of 1920×1080, and to the right of it a laptop monitor with name eDP1 and a resolution of 1600×900, you have to type this in your config file:

output HDMI1 pos 0 0
output eDP1 pos 1920 0

You can also specify the resolutions manually by using the res option: 

output HDMI1 pos 0 0 res 1920x1080
output eDP1 pos 1920 0 res 1600x900

Binding workspaces to monitors

Using sway with multiple monitors can be a little bit tricky with workspace management. Luckily, you can bind workspaces to a specific monitor, so you can easily switch to that monitor and use your displays more efficiently. This can simply be done by the workspace command in your config file. For example, if you want to bind workspace 1 and 2 to monitor DVI-D-1 and workspace 8 and 9 to monitor HDMI-A-1, you can do that by using:

workspace 1 output DVI-D-1
workspace 2 output DVI-D-1
workspace 8 output HDMI-A-1
workspace 9 output HDMI-A-1

That’s it! These are the basics of multi monitor setup in sway. A more detailed guide can be found at https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki#Multihead. 

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Most read articles in 2019 not from 2019

Some topics are very popular, no matter when they’re first mentioned. And Fedora Magazine has a few articles that have proven to be popular for a long time.

You’re reading the last article from the “best of 2019” series. But this time, it’s about articles written before 2019, but being very popular in 2019.

All of the articles below have been checked and updated to be correct even now, in early 2020. Let’s dive in!

i3 tiling window manager

Wish to try an alternative desktop? The following article introduces i3 — a tiling window manager that doesn’t require high-end hardware, but is powerful and highly customizable. You’ll learn about the installation process, some initial setup, and a few tricks to get you started.

Getting started with the i3 tiling window manager

Powerline

Would you like to have your shell a bit more organized? Then you might want to try Powerline — a utility that gives you status information, and some visual tweaks to your shell to make it more pleasant and organized.

Add power to your terminal with powerline

Monospace fonts

Do you spend a lot of your time in terminal or a code editor? And is your font making you happy? Discover some beautiful monospace fonts available in the Fedora repositories.

6 great monospaced fonts for code and terminal in Fedora

Image viewers

Is the default image viewer on your desktop not working the way you want? The following article shows 17 image viewers available in Fedora — varying from simpler to ones full of features.

17 alternatives to your default image viewer on Fedora

Fedora as a VirtualBox guest

Love Fedora but your machine runs Windows or macOS? One option to get Fedora running on your machine is virtualization. Your system keeps running and you’ll be able to access Fedora at the same time in a virtual machine. The following article introduces VirtualBox that can do just that.

How to install Fedora as a VirtualBox guest

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Tracking Translations with Transtats

Translation is an important step in software localization which helps make software more popular globally, and impacts international user experience. In recent years, localization processes have been evolving worldwide to become more continuous, faster, efficient with automation. In Fedora, the development of the Zanata platform and its plugins, then Transtats, and now the migration to the Weblate platform are part of this common ongoing goal. The localization of a desktop OS like Fedora is highly complex because it depends on many factors of the individual upstream projects which are packaged in Fedora. For example, different translation timelines, resources, and tooling.

What is Transtats?

Transtats is a web application which tries to tie up upstream repositories, translation platforms, build system, and product release schedule together to solve problems of mismatch, out-of-sync conditions and to assist the timely packaging of quality translations. Actually, it collects translation data, analyzes them, and creates meaningful representations.

Fedora Transtats is hosted at https://transtats.fedoraproject.org/

How to see the translation status of my package?

Just select Packages tab from left hand side navigation bar. This takes us to the packages list view. Then, search for the package and click on its name.

For example anaconda. On package details page, locate following:

Here, we have translation statistics from translation platform: Zanata and Koji build system. Syncs with the platform and build system are scheduled, which update differences periodically. Languages in red color indicate that there are translated strings remaining in the Translation Platform to be pulled and packaged, whereas, blue denote translated messages could not make 100% in the built package.

String breakage (or changes?)

In translation of software packages, one of the challenges is to prevent string breakage. Package maintainers should strive to abide by the scheduled Fedora release String Freeze. However, in some circumstances it could be necessary to break the string freeze and to inform the translation team on the mailing list. As well as, to update latest translation template (POT) file in the translation platform. Just in case these actions seem missing – translators may get new strings to translate very late or the application may have some strings untranslated. In the worst case, an outdated translation string mismatch may result in a crash. Sync and automation pipelines are there to prevent this, nevertheless it depends on the push or pull methods followed by package developers or maintainers.

To deal with the same context, we can use a job template in Transtats to detect this string change – particularly useful after string freeze in Fedora release schedule. This would be really helpful for the folks who look for packaging translations without string breakage, keeping translation template (POT) file in sync with translation platform, and testing localized form of the application for translation completeness to back trace.

How to detect string changes?

One of the options in Jobs tab is ‘YML based Jobs’. Where we can see available job templates.

The jobs framework executes all the tasks mentioned in the YAML, create appropriate logs and store results. Track String Change job basically:

  1. Clones the source repository of respective package.
  2. Tries to generate translation template (POT) file.
  3. Downloads POT file from respective translation platform.
  4. And, finds differences between both the POT files.

Actually, Transtats maintains mapping of upstream repository, Translation Platform project and respective build tag for every package.

Let’s take a closer look into this YAML. We can provide value for %PACKAGE_NAME% and %RELEASE_SLUG% in the next step – Set Values! For example: anaconda and fedora-32. Furthermore, a couple of things seek attention are:

  • In case the upstream software repository maintains separate git branch for fedora release, please edit ‘branch: master’ to ‘branch: <fedora-release-branch>’
  • In ‘generate’ block, mention the command to generate POT file. Default one should work for ‘intltool-update’ only, however, many packages do have their own.
  • A few packages may have gettext domain name different than that of package name. If this is the case, mention the gettext domain too.

As soon as the job is triggered, logs should be populated. If this is not a scratch run, a unique URL shall also be created at the end.

Left hand side is the input YAML and right hand side is respective log for each task. Here we can find the differences and figure out string mismatch.

In Transtats, we can create solutions to different problems in the form of job templates. And, scheduling of these jobs could be a step towards automation.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Top articles of 2019: Editors’ choice

The year is still ending and the perfect time to reflect and look back at some Magazine articles continues. This time, let’s see if the editors chose some interesting ones from 2019. Yes, they did!

Red Hat, IBM, and Fedora

IBM acquired Red Hat in July 2019, and this article discusses how nothing changes for the Fedora project.

Red Hat, IBM, and Fedora

Some tips for the Workstation users

Using Fedora Workstation? This article gives you some tips including enhancing photos, coding, or getting more wallpapers right from the repositories.

5 quick tips for Fedora Workstation users

Fedora and CentOS Stream

In this article, the Fedora Project Leader discusses the CentOS Stream announcement from September 2019 — including the relationship of Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and CentOS.

Fedora and CentOS Stream

Contribute to Fedora Magazine

Fedora Magazine exists thanks to our great contributors. And you (yes, you!) can become one, too! Contributions include topic proposals, writing, and editorial tasks. This article shows you how to join the team and help people learn about Linux.

Contribute to Fedora Magazine

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Top articles of 2019: For desktop users

It’s this time of the year again — the time to reflect, and look back at some Fedora Magazine’s most popular articles in 2019. This time it’s all about desktop users. Let’s highlight a few of the many articles written by our great contributors in 2019, focusing on Fedora as a desktop OS.

Dash to Dock extension for Workstation

When you’re serious about your desktop, and perhaps using many applications, you might want to see what’s going on at all times. Or at least the icons. The article below shows you how to have a dock at the bottom of your screen, with all your apps — both running and favourites — visible at all times.

Try the Dash to Dock extension for Fedora Workstation

Tweaking the look of Workstation with themes

When you like how your Linux desktop works, but not so much how it looks, there is a solution. The following article shows you how to tweak the look of your windows, icons, the mouse cursor, and the whole environment as well — all that within GNOME, the Workstation’s default environment.

Tweaking the look of Fedora Workstation with themes

i3 with multiple monitors

One of the great things about Linux desktop is the never ending possibilities of customisation. And that includes window managers, too! The following article shows how to use one of the very popular ones — i3 — with multiple monitors.

Using i3 with multiple monitors

IceWM

If you’re looking for speed, simplicity, and getting out of the user’s way, you might like IceWM. The following article introduces this minimal window manager, and helps you install it, too, should you be interested.

IceWM – A really cool desktop

Stay tuned for even more upcoming “Best of 2019” articles. All of us at the Magazine hope you have a relaxing holiday season, and wish you a happy new year.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Best of 2019: Fedora for developers

With the end of the year approaching fast, it is a good time to look back at 2019 and go through the most popular articles on Fedora Magazine written by our contributors.

In this article of the “Best of 2019” series, we are looking at developers and how to use Fedora to be a great developer workstation

Make your Python code look good with Black on Fedora

Black made quite a big impact in the Python ecosystem this year. The project is now part of the Python Software Foundation and it is used by many different projects. So if you write or maintain some Python code and want to stop having to care about code style and code formatting you should check out this article.

Make your Python code look good with Black on Fedora

How to run virtual machines with virt-manager

Setting up a development environment, running integration tests, testing a new feature, or running an older version of software for all these use cases being able to create and run a virtual machine is a must have knowledge for a developer. This article will walk you through how you can achieve that using virt-manager on your Fedora workstation.

How to run virtual machines with virt-manager

Jupyter and data science in Fedora

With the rise of Data science and machine learning, the Jupyter IDE has become of very popular choice to share or present a program and its results. This article goes into the details of installing and using Jupyter and the different libraries and tools useful for data science.

Jupyter and data science in Fedora

Building Smaller Container Images

Fedora provides different container images, one of which is a minimal base image. The following article demonstrate how one can use this image to build smaller container images.

Building Smaller Container Images

Getting Started with Go on Fedora

In 2019 the Go programming language turned 10 year old. In ten years the language has managed to become the default choice for cloud native applications and the cloud ecosystems. Fedora is providing an easy way to start developing in Go, this article takes you through the first step needed to get started.

Getting Started with Go on Fedora

Stay tuned to the Magazine for other upcoming “Best of 2019” categories. All of us at the Magazine hope you have a great end of year and holiday season.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Best of 2019: Fedora for system administrators

The end of the year is a perfect time to look back on some of the Magazine’s most popular articles of 2019. One of the Fedora operating systems’s many strong points is its wide array of tools for system administrators. As your skills progress, you’ll find that the Fedora OS has even more to offer. And because Linux is the sysadmin’s best friend, you’ll always be in good company. In 2019, there were quite a few articles about sysadmin tools our readers enjoyed. Here’s a sampling.

Introducing Fedora CoreOS

If you follow modern IT topics, you know that containers are a hot topic — and containers mean Linux. This summer brought the first preview release of Fedora CoreOS. This new edition of Fedora can run containerized workloads. You can use it to deploy apps and services in a modern way.

Introducing Fedora CoreOS

InitRAMFS, dracut and the dracut emergency shell

To be a good sysadmin, you need to understand system startup and the boot process. From time to time, you’ll encounter software errors, configuration problems, or other issues that keep your system from starting normally. With the information in the article below, you can do some life-saving surgery on your system, and restore it to working order.

InitRAMFS, Dracut, and the Dracut Emergency Shell

How to reset your root password

Although this article was published a few years ago, it continues to be one of the most popular. Apparently, we’re not the only people who sometimes get locked out of our own system! If this happens to you, and you need to reset the root password, the article below should do the trick.

How to reset a root password on Fedora

Systemd: unit dependencies and order

This article is part of an entire series on systemd, the modern system and process manager in Fedora and other distributions. As you may know, systemd has sophisticated but easy to use methods to start up or shut own services in the right order. This article shows you how they work. That way you can apply the right options to unit files you create for systemd.

systemd: Unit dependencies and order

Setting kernel command line arguments

Fedora 30 introduced new ways to change the boot options for your kernel. This article from Laura Abbott on the Fedora kernel team explains the new Bootloader Spec (BLS). It also tells you how to use it to set options on your kernel for boot time.

Setting kernel command line arguments with Fedora 30

Stay tuned to the Magazine for other upcoming “Best of 2019” categories. All of us at the Magazine hope you have a great end of year and holiday season.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Firefox GNOME search provider

Search is a central concept in the GNOME user experience. It provides quick navigation and shortcuts to recently used documents, places and software.

A search provider is used by an application to expose such data to the users via the GNOME Shell search screen. As for Web browsers currently only Gnome Web (Epiphany) have integrated this feature.

This long awaited feature finally arrives with the latest Firefox update in Fedora. Although there’s an upstream effort to ship it in Mozilla official builds, Mozilla builds are missing a generic way to install the GNOME Shell integration system. This explain why this specific feature has to be shipped by particular distributions.

Firefox search provider is launched when an active Firefox instance is running. It gets live data from user profile. An offline search provider was also considered but it’s not yet implemented right due to SQL database locks at Firefox profiles.

To get web search results on top of your search you may also need to activate Firefox in the search configuration. To do so go to Settings -> Search, find Firefox and move it on top of the list.

Now you can use the Gnome search facility to search the web.