Bash

Some notes on how to record audio from a terminal in Ubuntu 20.04LTS

 in Bash / GNU/Linux  tagged audio / bash / ffmpeg / GNU/Linux / linux / pactl / record / terminal / ubuntu / ubuntu 20.04LTS by

Recently, we were trying to record the audio that was played on the system speakers using an Ubuntu 20.04LTS desktop. In the installation, there was no dedicated audio recorder installed and we did not want to install any. To record, we used the following command to get the list of all audio sources available to the system:

pactl list short sources;

The pactl command produced results like so:

3	alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1f.3.analog-stereo.monitor	module-alsa-card.c	s16le 2ch 44100Hz	SUSPENDED
4	alsa_input.pci-0000_00_1f.3.analog-stereo	module-alsa-card.c	s16le 2ch 44100Hz	SUSPENDED
10	alsa_input.usb-Dell_DELL_PROFESSIONAL_SOUND_BAR_AE515-00.iec958-stereo	module-alsa-card.c	s16le 2ch 44100Hz	SUSPENDED
12	alsa_output.usb-Dell_DELL_PROFESSIONAL_SOUND_BAR_AE515-00.analog-stereo.monitor	module-alsa-card.c	s16le 2ch 44100Hz	IDLE

We knew that the system was using the Dell soundbar in analog mode to play the music (as we could see in the Settings under the Sound category, which is depicted below), so we copied the following name from the line that starts with the number 12:

alsa_output.usb-Dell_DELL_PROFESSIONAL_SOUND_BAR_AE515-00.analog-stereo.monitor

Then we used that monitor name as an input device for FFmpeg like so:

ffmpeg -f pulse -i alsa_output.usb-Dell_DELL_PROFESSIONAL_SOUND_BAR_AE515-00.analog-stereo.monitor test.mp3;

When we were done recording, we pressed CTRL+C to stop the recording.

Ubuntu – Overwrite dockerd default settings

 in Bash / GNU/Linux  tagged bash / bridge / default-address-pools / docker / docker-compose / dockerd / GNU/Linux / network / systemctl / ubuntu by

Trying to create a new bridge on docker, we got the following error

$ docker-compose up -d;
Creating network "docker-compose_new_bridge" with driver "bridge"
ERROR: could not find an available, non-overlapping IPv4 address pool among the defaults to assign to the network

After investigating, we realized that it was due to some default limitations of docker that did not allow more virtual networks to be created. To overcome the problem, we read that we had to give access to more address space using the /etc/docker/daemon.json.

On Ubuntu that file did not exist so we created it and copied the following content to it:

{
  "default-address-pools": [
    {
      "base": "172.80.0.0/16",
      "size": 24
    },
    {
      "base": "172.90.0.0/16",
      "size": 24
    }
  ]
}

Source: https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/dockerd/

This configuration allowed Docker to reserve the network address space 172.80.[0-255].0/24 and 172.90.[0-255].0/24, that provided the daemon a total of 512 networks each owning 256 addresses.

To apply the changes to the daemon, we restarted it:

sudo systemctl restart docker.service;

and then we applied our changes to our docker ecosystem:

docker-compose up -d;

How to retrieve the SSL cert expiration date from a PEM encoded certificate?

 in Bash / GNU/Linux  tagged certbot / certificate / enddate / expiration / openssl / PEM / ssl by

We use the following command to get the ending date of PEM encoded certificates that are generated using certbot and Let's Encrypt:

openssl x509 -enddate -noout -in fullchain.pem;

To get a list of all certificates and their expiration dates, we issue the following find command that executes the above snippet on each result while printing the name of the file first.

find ~/certificates/ -name "fullchain.pem" -print -exec openssl x509 -enddate -noout -in '{}' \;

In this example, the certificates are in our home folder under the name ‘certificates’. The results will look like the following sample:

/home/tux/certificates/example.com/fullchain.pem
notAfter=Aug 22 10:12:55 2021 GMT
/home/tux/certificates/site2.example.com/fullchain.pem
notAfter=Nov 22 03:22:44 2021 GMT