If you are using a self-hosted Netlify CMS as the online editor for your SSG powered Website and you are using the editorial workflow (you have publish_mode: editorial_workflow in your config.yml), a pain point is that you do not see a preview of the live page when the page …

Static Site Generator (SSG) is in vogue for building Web sites. Compared with traditional content management system (CMS), SSG is more performant, flexible and easier to maintain for people comfortable with coding . However, for the non-technical crowd, a WYSIWYG online editor is still the way to go. Netlify CMS fills …

This blog has undergone a few migrations over its 15 years life span.

It started out as a Blogger account in 2005. The purpose was to record some system administration details when I was an assistant professor at university, setting up my laboratry for students.

Then Yunyao joined in after …

DokuWiki is one of the most easy-to-use open source Wiki software. It is a very good internal documentation tool for small or medium sized organizations.

Comparing with using Google Docs for the same purpose, one advantage of using a Wiki is that it is more searchable and navigable. In addition …

Discourse is a modern forum software that is quite popular in the technology circle. One can install a Discourse server easily with the recommended method of using docker. All the services needed by the Discourse server, e.g. Postgresql and Redis, will be running inside a docker container, which is …

Sentry is a fairly popular service for tracking exceptions and errors in production softwares. They also provides a docker recipe for people who want to self host their own sentry server. This post shows how to enable LDAP authentication for such a self hosted sentry server, using freeIPA as the …

The point of setting up freeIPA for an intranet is to enable single-sign-on (SSO) for all the internal services that requires authentication and authorization. LDAP, originated from my alma mater University of Michigan, is one of the most widely accepted solutions to the problem. freeIPA can serve as a LDAP …

FreeIPA is the open source version of RedHat's identity management solution, which nicely integrates several open sources services that are important for managing an intranet: 389 LDAP Directory Server, MIT Kerboros, NTP, DNS, SSSD and others. 

Most of my servers are virtual machines in AWS EC2. To manage such a …

Since Drupal 6 is no longer supported, I upgraded this site to the lasted version of Drupal 8.4.2 by following the guide. As you can see, the upgrade mostly worked. However, there are a few points of caution as well as some unresolved problems.

As before, I setup …

MathJax seems to be the emerging standard for displaying math on the Web at this moment. It is supported by American Mathematical Society and American Physical Society, and has already been adopted by major math related discussion venues such as Physics Forums and Stack Exchange. MathJax displays math using CSS …

This site was setup in 2007 with Drupal 5, and it has not been upgraded until today. I did not feel the need to upgrade since this is just a personal blog. A few days ago I wanted to install a module, but Drupal version 6 is required, so I …

Today I tried to search "clojure" using the search box at the top right corner, but could not find anything. I know I wrote a few posts on Clojure recently, so there must be something wrong with the search functionality here. This is a Drupal site, and this should be …

Ok, what is centralized authentication? Why bother? Well, if each person in your home or organization uses her/his own computer only, no need for this. However, if you or your organization have a bunch of machines and people need to login to different machines at different times, you've got …

NFS (Network File System) is an old Unix technology that enables a machine to mount a remote file system. This is desirable for centralized authentication, as the user can access the same home directory no matter which machine he uses.

Server

Install NFS server:

apt-get install nfs-kernel-server

Edit /etc/exports …