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  • Putty-like SSH port forwarding on Linux and MacOS

    As a Linux or Mac user you benefit from a very useful, built-in terminal and SSH client implementation that’s mostly identical across all Unix-like systems. The situation used to be different on Windows. Before Windows supported a built-in SSH client on the command line Putty was (and still is!) one of the primary tools available…

  • Podman secrets: a better way to pass environment variables to containers

    Podman became the standard container runtime with Oracle Linux 8 and later, and I have become a fan almost instantly. I especially like the fact that it is possible to run containers with far fewer privileges than previously required. Most Podman containers can be started by regular users, a fact I greatly appreciate in my…

  • Vagrant: always provision virtual machines

    Since Spectre and Meltdown (2 infamous side channel attack vectors on CPUs) have become public I thought about better, more secure ways to browse the web. When I read that a commercial vendor for operating systems created a solution where a browser is started in a disposable sandbox that gets discarded when you exit the…

  • Creating a Java Stored Procedure in Oracle Database

    This blog post provides a quick (and dirty) way of creating Java Stored Procedures in Oracle Database because I can’t ever remember how to do that. The Java Developer’s Guide details the use of Java in the database, chapter 5 explains how to create Java Stored Procedures. Please refer to the documentation for a proper…

  • Installing Podman on Oracle Linux 8

    Rather than having to use a search engine to read up on how to install podman on Oracle Linux 8, I thought I’d write the procedure down. Hopefully this saves you (and me) a few minutes next time the task comes up. I probably should write a short Ansible Playbook at some point, but that’s…

  • Avoid “Warning: Additional provider information from registry” for OCI Terraform Provider

    After updating my main development workstation to Fedora 36 including all the tools I regularly use I noticed a change when working with Terraform code. The call to terraform init succeeded but was accompanied by a warning: $ terraform version -no-color Terraform v1.2.3 on linux_amd64 $ terraform init -no-color Initializing the backend… Initializing provider plugins……

  • Generating Table DDL in Oracle Database

    Generating table DDL is a common requirement. Unfortunately it’s not quite common enough for me to remember the syntax by heart, so this post serves as a reference to myself how to do this. Hopefully it saves you a few minutes, too. I used Oracle SQLDeveloper Command-Line (SQLcl) version: 22.1.1.0 build: 22.1.1.131.0820 for this post,…

  • Retrieving passwords from OCI Vault for use in Terraform

    This post is written with the intention to complement the excellent “A comprehensive guide to managing secrets in your Terraform code” by Yevgeniy Brikman. Its aim is to detail how Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Vault (OCI Vault) can be used to securely store credentials and subsequently use them in Terraform scripts. If you haven’t done so…

  • Linking Containers with Podman

    Users of the Docker engine might find that their container runtime isn’t featured prominently in Oracle Linux 8. In fact, unless you change the default confifguration a dnf search does not reveal the engine at all. For better or for worse, it appears the industry, or at least parts of it, are switching from Docker…

  • Vagrant: mapping a Virtualbox VM to a Vagrant environment

    This is a small post hopefully saving you a few minutes mapping Vagrant and VirtualBox environments. I typically have lots of Vagrant environments defined. I love Vagrant as a technology, it makes it super easy to spin up Virtual Machines (VMs) and learn about new technologies. Said Vagrant environments obviously show up as VMs in…