Linux Articles

A walk through the MastoSum deployment pipeline: a version tag triggers Forgejo Actions, builds and signs a UBI-based image, then hands deployment to a rootless systemd/Podman host via a path unit and explicit cosign verification.

Fedora Hummingbird brings the distroless container model to a full, image-based rolling operating system, and it ships a catalog of hardened language images alongside it. I rebuild the mastogreet bot’s Containerfile on top of registry.access.redhat.com/hi/python to see what changes, what shrinks, and where the commercial Red Hat Hardened Images downstream fits in.

The entire Red Hat documentation site and the full Knowledgebase fit into a single OCI container that updates weekly, runs locally with a web UI and Solr search, and is included in every RHEL subscription that bundles Satellite. I have it on my laptop. I use it daily. Almost nobody I talk to knows it exists. This post is my small contribution to fixing that.

A “real” RHEL container on a Fedora laptop, an Arch box for the AUR, an Ubuntu box for that one vendor tool that ships .deb files only, all of them with your home directory mounted, your shell history shared, and GUI apps that integrate into your desktop as if they were native. Distrobox uses Podman to make that boring instead of clever, and it pairs especially well with Atomic distributions where the host is meant to stay immutable.

A “control node” with a hand-curated venv works. Until it doesn’t. A colleague has different collection versions, CI installs a slightly newer Python library, and a playbook that ran yesterday now fails. Execution Environments turn the control node into a versioned container image. ansible-builder produces it, ansible-navigator runs against it, and the same artifact ships from your laptop into AAP/AWX without modification.

Hand-writing Quadlet files works for one host. For a fleet, the containers.podman collection’s native Quadlet generation lets you describe containers as Ansible state, including secrets, registry logins, and templated configuration. A small Mastodon welcome bot makes a concrete example.

My ThinkPad T14s shipped with an Intel XMM7560 LTE modem that would not register on the network until Lenovo’s proprietary FCC-unlock helper ran. I replaced it with a roughly 100-line bash script from a ModemManager merge request, and along the way learned that the “unlock” is just a small challenge-response handshake that is easy to explain in plain shell.

An opinionated production-ops guide to Podman on Linux servers - why I prefer it over Docker, how Quadlets replace Compose files, and practical patterns from real deployments including secrets management, auto-updates, and Docker compatibility.

Deploying Keycloak 26 as an identity provider using Podman Quadlets with network segmentation, secret management, and systemd integration.

Backups are the thing everyone knows they should do and nobody does well enough. Here’s my multi-stage strategy for keeping about a dozen servers safe: ZFS snapshots with sanoid, off-site replication with syncoid to rsync.net, Proxmox Backup Server with an S3 backend for VMs, and a creative Podman trick for backing up RHEL hosts that don’t have proxmox-backup-client. Plus a dead man’s switch, because the only thing worse than no backups is backups that silently stopped working three months ago.