How to fix the crontab error `rename: Operation not permitted`

Today, something unexpected happened while I was working on one of our Linux machines. I issued the crontab -e command to add a cron job to my user’s crontab file, modified and saved it, only to the following error: crontab: installing new crontab crontab: crontabs/<user>: rename: Operation not permitted crontab: edits left in /tmp/crontab.hgmsOH/crontab Puzzled, I checked whether my user permissions were all right, if the disk was full, and several other things....

January 25, 2024

rsync with a different user

Today I learned how to rsync with a user different than the one connected to the remote. Why would one want to do such a thing? The data I need to download from that server is owned by ‘backup,’ a different, service-only user. I wanted to avoid going the change-permissions slippery route and allow my user direct access to the data. Looking at the rsync documentation, I learned about the nifty --rsync-path=PROGRAM option:...

August 23, 2023

Troubles with VirtualBox and the Windows Subsystem for Linux

Today I learned the hard way: don’t you dare running a vanilla install of VirtualBox together with Windows Subsystem for Linux v2 (WSL2). It won’t work. That’s because WSL2 uses Hyper-V under the hood, which is incompatible with VirtualBox. According to the official documentation for VirtualBox v6.0: Oracle VM VirtualBox can be used on a Windows host where Hyper-V is running. This is an experimental feature. No configuration is required. Oracle VM VirtualBox detects Hyper-V automatically and uses Hyper-V as the virtualization engine for the host system....

February 14, 2021