Last week, for the better part of 4.5 days, this site was offline. Along with, of course, every other domain hosted hereon . Here’s the timeline of my actions Tuesday, reboot to update kernel revs system did not come back online over the next several days, tried all kinds of diagnostic attempts, including verified host was pingable, …
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Category:technical
vw to start driving into the cloud
VW is planning to put cameras and sensors on new cars sold after 2018 to aid self-driving vehicles, create better maps, and more. Ford announced concept vehicles back in 2010 that could Tweet while they drove. Pretty sure I don’t like this move on the part of VW – technologically, it’s super cool. But from …
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supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
The slide deck for my recent talk on “Embracing the Change Freeze” – http://byrbyr.ga/w Presented at the January PHPUG / Tech Talks meetup in Lexington KY on 19 Jan.
apple tv – how apple can beat amazon and google
In e99 of Exponent, Ben Thompson makes a compelling case for his idea that {{Amazon Echo}} (Alexa) is an operating system – and that Amazon has beaten Apple (with {{Siri}}) and {{Google Home}} (with Assistant) at the very game they both try to play. And I think he’s onto the start of something (he goes …
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results from running pi-hole for several weeks
I came across pi-hole recently – an ad blocker and {{DNS}} service that you can run on a {{Raspberry Pi}} in Raspian (or any {{Debian}} or {{Ubuntu}} (ie Debian-like)) system. Using pi-hole should obviate the need for running ad-blockers in your browser (so long as you’re on a network that is running DNS queries through pi-hole). …
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i’m surprised facebook doesn’t offer something akin to aws, gcp, azure, etc
Given the ridiculous popularity of {{Facebook}}, their huge datacenter investments, super-resilient computing models, etc, I’m very surprised they haven’t gotten into the cloud computing business like Amazon’s {{AWS}}, Google’s Cloud, {{Microsoft Azure}}, Digital Ocean, etc.
watch your mtu size in openstack
For a variety of reasons related to package versions and support contracts, I was unable to use the {{Red Hat}} built {{KVM}} image of {{RHEL}} 7.2 for a recent project. (The saga of that is worthy of its own post – and maybe I’ll write it at some point. But not today.) First thing I …
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apple finally did what i asked for 6 years ago
Thanks, Apple. About time someone did this! We can now charge a laptop from either side. Like should have been possible for decades. Reference – Do any laptops exist with multiple power connectors?
automating mysql backups
I want to backup all of the {{MySQL}} databases on my server on a routine basis. As I started asking how to get a list of all databases in MySQL on Stack Overflow, I came across this previous SO question, entitled, “Drop All Databases in MySQL” (the best answer for which, in turn, republished the …
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change your default font in windows 10
Starting from a tutorial I found recently, I want to share how to change your default font in Windows 10 – but in a shorter edition than that long one (and in, I think, a less-confusing way). Back in the Good Ole Days™, you could easily change system font preferences by right-clicking on your desktop, …
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there is no such object on the server
Gee. Thanks, {{Active Directory}}. This is one of the more useless error messages you can get when trying to programmatically access AD. Feel free to Google (or DuckDuckGo, or Bing, or whomever) that error message. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Your eyes bleeding, and gray matter leaking from your ears yet? No? Then you obviously didn’t …
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new service – free, secure password generation
Today, I am formally announcing a brand-new service / website for secure password generation. Go visit password.cf Get yourself random passwords of commonly-required lengths and complexities*. Password Varieties: 4 of 4 upper & lower alphanumeric lower alphanumeric Lengths generated: 12, 16, & 24 characters Visit the {{GitHub}} project page .. .. if you want to …
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turn on spf filtering with postfix and centos 7
After running my new server for a while, I was noticing an unusually-high level of bogus email arriving in my inbox – mail that was being spoofed to look like it was coming from myself (to myself). After a great deal of research, I learned there is a component of the {{DNS}} specification that allows …
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helping a magpierss-powered site perform better
I rely on MagpieRSS to run one of my websites. (If you'd like to see the basic code for the site, see my {{GitHub}} profile.) One of the drawbacks to Magpie, and dynamic websites in general, is they can be bottlenecked by external sources – in the case of Magpie, those sources are the myriad …
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how did i never know about .ssh/config?
I’m sure folks have tried to explain this to me before, but it wasn’t until today that it finally clicked – using .ssh/config will save you a world of hurt when managing various systems from a {{Linux}} host (I imagine it works on other platforms, too – but I’ve only started using it on {{CentOS}}). …
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wordpress plugins i use
As promised last time, I now have a page dedicated to the {{WordPress}} plugins I use. Check it out, here.
use prettypress if you’re running a wordpress blog
Like my list of used Chrome Extensions, I’m building a list of recommended {{WordPress}} plugins. But until I get it done, I have to give some pretty big props to PrettyPress. It’s a plugin that lets you edit in Visual, Text, and {{Markdown}} – the markup format of sites like reddit, {{GitHub}},, {{GitLab}}, and the …
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improve your entropy pool in linux
A few years ago, I ran into a known issue with one of the products I use that manifests when the {{Red Hat Linux}} server it’s running on has a low entropy pool. And, as highlighted in that question, the steps I found 5 years ago didn’t work for me (turns out modifying the t …
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can you disable encryption on a windows server?
This was asked recently on Server Fault. I’m asking if there’s a way to prevent files from being encrypted. I’m referring to some extent to ransomware, but specifically I want the following scenario: Windows File server w/ shares (on the E: drive) I want a way to tell the above server “don’t allow files on …
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how to turn a google+ community into a quasi “mailing list”
Spurred by a recent question from an acquaintance in town, I asked on Google+ whether or not you can enable emailed notifications for a Community. This led to the elaborate Settings page for G+. It turns out that if you combine enabling a Community’s “Community notifications” (under the specific Community’s settings (which you find by …
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more ad blocking extensions
The list of ad blocking extensions I have installed has grown. Add to the previous two these two: Adguard uBlock
an even cleaner facebook most recent feed
Several months ago, I wrote-up a brief how-to on just showing the most recent news feed on Facebook. I added a new Chrome extension today that helps speed-up your Facebook experience – Facebook Flat. It makes your Facebook views “flat” from a design perspective (no pun intended, but the extension falls a little flat when …
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on ads
My colleague Sheila wrote a great, short piece on LinkedIn about ads recently. And this is what I commented: I held off for years in installing ad blockers/reducers. But I have finally had to cave – been running Flash in “ask-only” mode for months now, and just added a couple blocker/reducer extensions to Chrome recently …
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putting owncloud 8 on a subdomain instead of a subdirectory on centos 7
After moving to a new server, I wanted to finally get {{ownCloud}} up and running (over SSL, of course) on it. And I like subdomains for different services, so I wanted to put it at sub.domain.tld. This turns out to be not as straight-forward as one might otherwise hope, sadly – ownCloud expects to be …
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automated let’s encrypt ssl certificate renewal on centos 7
In my how-to for Let’s Encrypt, I gave an example script that can be called via cron (or manually) which will renew Let’s Encrypt {{SSL}} certificates under {{CentOS}} 6. If you want to do it on {{CentOS}} 7 (which is what I am now running), use the following: cd ~/letsencrypt git pull systemctl stop httpd.service …
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