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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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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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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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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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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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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lock screen slideshow in windows 10

In similar fashion to what I wrote about for {{OS X}} last year, and spurred by this article from {{Microsoft}}, here is my brief guide for doing the same on {{Windows 10}}. Click your Notifications button near the clock. Now click All Settings And you’ll see this Click Personalization, then Lock Screen. Select “Slideshow” from the …
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let’s encrypt centos 6 – truly free ssl

There’s been quite a bit of excitement surrounding Let’s Encrypt recently – a truly 100% free {{SSL}} issuer. Last week I helped a friend of mine get his first Let’s Encrypt certificate generated and configured for his website. One of the things I found incredibly frustrating is that Let’s Encrypt does not have a package …
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owncloud vs pydio – more diy cloud storage

Last week I wrote a how-to on using Pydio as a front-end to a MooseFS distributed data storage cluster. The big complaint I had while writing that was that I wanted to use ownCloud, but it doesn’t Just Work™ on {{CentOS}} 6*. After finishing the tutorial, I decided to do some more digging – because …
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create your own clustered cloud storage system with moosefs and pydio

This started-off as a how-to on installing ownCloud. But their own installation procedures don’t work for the 8.0x release and {{CentOS}} 6. Most of you know I’ve been interested in distributed / cloud storage for quite some time. And that I find MooseFS to be fascinating. As of 2.0, MooseFS comes in two flavors – the …
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merging centos iso images

Thanks to @Anon on Unix.SE for the pointer on how to do this. And to @Andy‘s comment on @mmckinst‘s answer for the warning about additional packages you may need. As my three readers know, I run a {{CentOS}} mirror. One of the idiosyncrasies of CentOS, like its upstream {{RHEL}}, is that DVD ISOs aren’t always just one image – …
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setting-up etherpad in centos 6

To add to my tutorial collection, here’s how to setup EtherPad on CentOS 6 (x64). As in the IRC tutorial, I used a Digital Ocean VM for this 🙂 What is EtherPad? It’s an open-source collaborative text editor that works like Google Docs – ie, all editors/viewers can see changes from everyone else in realtime. …
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automatically extract email attachments with common linux tools

I had need to automatically process emails to a specific address to pull attachments out, and this is how I did it: $ yum install mpack $ cat extract-attach.sh #!/bin/bash rm -rf ~/attachtmp mkdir ~/attachtmp mv ~/Maildir/new/* ~/attachtmp cd ~ munpack ~/attachtmp/* rm -rf ~/attachtmp $ crontab -l */5 * * * * ~/extract-attach.sh Why, …
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setting up an unreal irc server on centos 6

Ever want to run an IRC server? I recently set one up at irc.datente.com using a Digital Ocean VM running CentOS 6.5 x64. Here’s what I did, if you want to replicate the process for yourself (full documentation available from Unreal’s website): acquire CentOS 6.5 x64 server (as I mentioned, I used Digital Ocean) `yum …
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network install of centos 6

I wanted to try something different when playing with CentOS 6 recently, so I did a network install. Other than one very small detail, the install is identical to installing off a normal ISO. Here’s the difference: use the netinstall.iso (eg http://centos.datente.com/media/6/isos/x86_64/CentOS-6.4-x86_64-netinstall.iso) when it asks for the URL to grab your image from, use something like http://centos.datente.com/media/6/os/x86_64 (make …
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automatically returning a host to the unprovisioned server pool in hpsa

In conjunction with the customized PXE process I wrote about previously, it could be highly desirable to be able to return a server to the unprovisioned server pool in HP’s Server Automation. This is a specifically-Linux procedure: though I’m sure something similar can be done with Windows*. run an ad-hoc script against a target server that …
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defaulting pxe boots with hpsa

I recently found a very helpful nugget with regards to OS Provisioning with HP’s Server Automation product. OS Prov is most typically done using PXE (or the similar bootp process). SA provides a PXE server that gives a boot menu to network-booted systems. That menu contains a variety of choices: linux, windows, winpe, etc. In …
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