Tag Archives: macos

How to configure macOS TimeMachine and Ubuntu 20.04

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Recently I wanted to be able to backup my Mac via TimeMachine, but unfortunately I did not have a large enough HDD to back up, so I’ve decided to backup to one of my servers. Not until recently that was not an option until I ran into a blog post that produced an step by step configuration to run successfully, but what I did find out was that my server was getting full and TimeMachine did not do a good enough job deleting old backups. So, I found a single command to limit the backups, but what I found was that if the plist has been already copied (meaning a backup was already ran), the new limits won’t be recognized. So you will need to run a new backup with carrying the limits on the new plist to the server.

Below are the steps to successfully be able to config a TimeMachine backup server with limits on your backups so you don’t run out of storage 😉 .

  1. Ensure that you have a ubuntu 20.04 LTS image running with enough storage to perform the backups
  2. Run sudo apt install -y netatalk avahi-daemon
  3. Run sudo vi /etc/netatalk/afp.conf
  4. Add a section for your Time Machine:
    [Time Machine]
      path = /media/path/to/backups
      time machine = yes
  5. Create a directory to act as the Time Machine:
    sudo mkdir -p /media/path/to/backups
  6. Run sudo chown nobody:nogroup /media/path/to/backups
  7. Run sudo chmod 777 /media/path/to/backups
  8. Restart netatalk:
    sudo service netatalk restart
  9. Now, on your Mac, before doing anything else, might be smart to put a limit on your backup.  The command below will put a 100GB limit.
    sudo defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine MaxSize 102400
  10. At this point… you should be able to open the Time Machine settings in System Preferences and use Select Disk… to pick your new Time Machine backup drive. Where /media/path/to/backups should show up on the path.
  11. Enjoy your Time Machine backups 🙂

sources

https://www.grizzly-hills.com/2019/11/02/ubuntu-19-10-setting-up-time-machine/

Time Machine: Setup a size limit for backup volumes

Docker container + X11 on macOS = Awesome

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I’ve been exploring dockerizaton lately more and more and I think I like the idea of having my apps in containers.  I am not going to lie, it does take some time to get used to, but it is pretty cool the things that you can do.

One thing that I think I wanted to accomplish was able to run X11 apps through docker.  I found Docker Headless VNC container and that was slick.  Where I was able to run a whole Xfce environment within a Docker container!!! kudos to those folks.  Now, my challenge was that in my case, I didn’t want a fat image and/or configure each app to download of configuring. So, this wasn’t my solution at this time.  So, I decided to explore further and found a way to run X11 from a Docker container in macOS.  Below are the steps on how to accomplish this.

  1. Install XQuartz (X11),  Docker and homebrew.  You can follow their respective installation process.
  2. Install socat which is a “multipurpose relay.”  This will allow us to call the display. 
    brew install socat
  3. Create you local Dockerfile.  In this particular case, I am using Ubuntu latest (which at the time of this post is 16.04.1 LTS).  On your terminal, you can do “vi Dockerfile” and paste the info from below in that file. 
    FROM ubuntu:latest

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y firefox

RUN useradd -ms /bin/bash developer && \
 echo "\ndeveloper ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL" >> /etc/sudoers

USER developer
ENV HOME /home/developer
CMD /usr/bin/firefox
  4. Then, let’s build the Docker image by doing the following… 
    docker build -t firefox .
  5. Now, on a different terminal, run the following command… 
    socat TCP-LISTEN:6000,reuseaddr,fork UNIX-CLIENT:\"$DISPLAY\"
  6. Then come back to your old terminal (or a different one) and run this command 
    docker run -ti --rm \
-e DISPLAY=$(ipconfig getifaddr en0):0 \
-v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
firefox
  7. At this point, you should have opened a Firefox instance from your Docker container through X11 on macOS 🙂
    If you didn’t… take a look at the steps again.  Happy dev and opening other X11 instances.

Sources:

http://fabiorehm.com/blog/2014/09/11/running-gui-apps-with-docker/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16296753/can-you-run-gui-apps-in-a-docker-container#

https://github.com/mbessler/docker-gnucash

https://hub.docker.com/r/palshife/ssh/

https://hub.docker.com/r/palshife/gnucash/

https://github.com/ConSol/docker-headless-vnc-container

https://askubuntu.com/questions/192050/how-to-run-sudo-command-with-no-password

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27701930/add-user-to-docker-container

https://askubuntu.com/questions/842572/file-in-etc-sudoers-d-not-recognized