Year: 2020

I've recently set up 4 proxmox configurations and have had successful and mixed results virtualizing previous hardware installs. Virtualizing previous hardware installs means that I've taken an existing Windows computer and used a software tool to copy the drive in full and made a special file out of it that I then copied over to the proxmox server itself and converted to an file format that proxmox understands and then I imported that into a virtual machine configuration. After doing that I was successful at using proxmox to boot that and run it as if it were on the actual hardware. The conversion process takes a while and configuring it after it has booted also takes some time. Once done you'd remote desktop into it and use it as if…

I hear on podcasts like from Ask Noah that Lenovo laptops are killer. He really means that a specific model or two are killer. All the rest of them are pretty much junk. I don't recommend anyone purchase then. Over the years of supporting and fixing computers I have had a lot of experience with Lenovo laptops. Years and years ago they were pretty good products. These past few years have shown me that these are not good products, primarily due to poor craftmanship. It's as if they are trying to produce the worst product they can to get the most money out of the customer. The primary thing that I find at issue are in securing the hinges to the bottom or top bezel. Invariably the screws that hold…

Again, Inuit's support is abhorrent. No adequate explanation of what error 606 is. After some searching I found a post that had been updated 4 days prior that says to just keep trying because their system is having difficulties. These developers need to know that their software has to work all the time without causing issues otherwise users are going to stop using their product and that will hurt the industry as a whole. Who wants to spend all their time trying to work out issue after issue just to get their software working. If I have to fiddle to get your software to work your software doesn't work. This issue was resolved after rebooting windows 10.

I ran into this today and found that Intuit's support on the matter was the most abhorrent. The solution that I found was to turn off the AOL Tech Fortress. Disable that and run the install again. I ran the installer from the folder underneath the main folder on the drive. So, I went into the Turbo Tax folder and ran the installer from there. Initially I started with just running the default installer for Turbo Tax. That gave me the "error deleting run registry key for deletion" new install on windows 10. I then went into the folder mentioned above and then ran the installer directly. That failed with the error 65535 Windows installer error. I noticed an app specific 3rd party notification pop up (not part of hte…

This is a published draft: The Proxmox Mail Gateway (PMG) is a nice appliance, however, one has to wonder how much time is spent by the developers perfecting it.  The people that do the mail gateway also do the virtualization server. The purpose is kind of neat.  If you just want to set up a basic email server without all the bells and whistles, such as greylisting, clamav, spam assassin, etc, you do that and then use this virtual appliance to handle all of that.  So, the PMG handles incoming emails and checks them for the nasties, such as spam, blacklists, whitelists, etc.  and when the email passes all the checks it forwards the email itself to the actual email server.  To do this you install the PMG and set…

When dealing with Windows issues which are many and quite varied the go to is to say to switch off it.  Go somewhere else.  Choose something like Mac OSX or Linux.  Those are good choices.  Mac though is pricey and you could find yourself in a few years so outdated that Apple no longer supports your hardware even though that hardware is Apple's creation.  Seems funny doesn't it?  Apple doesn't support in their software the hardware that they create.  What that means is you have to buy a new pricey computer. Not going to happen.  Linux is an advanced user friendly operating system with an overabundance of quality software that is also quite powerful. Well, this isn't really about switching it is about the fact that Microsoft just keeps screwing…

So, you're working on a project or learning how to implement something new to you and you have to do some research online. You begin by going to https://www.duckduckgo.com and doing your search.  It comes up with possibilities. You follow those as links to something you think will tell you the ins and outs.  Only you find that it's more of what someone else said in another link but it's different.  You read it and find that half the answers people are giving are just not consistent or are a different way of doing things or the post is so old that it makes no sense to keep reading.  So, you go back and you look for more.  Maybe you change your search terms. In the end you wind up…

I noticed from a report sent by the Proxmox backup routine that the backups last night failed.  I looked into this and saw that the storage object for network backups had a ? badge and that this indicated that the status was unknown. I opened the storage container configuration and noted that everything looked right.  I noticed that the configuration used my account name and remembered that I'd just changed the password for it.  I decided that this was not a good idea to use my account and created an account specifically for handling these jobs. The issue was the storage object, so I took a picture of the configuration and blew away the storage object reference in Proxmox. Since this was going to a CIFS share in a container…

Ever run into those situations where when you find out the cause you think that it was a senseless nightmare? That's what I get when I work on Windows (anything).  Today was one of those reminders.  I'd been given the task to figure out why Windows 10 was reporting a 1tb drive as 500gb.  This was on an Acer Aspire laptop.  Windows itself revealed no answers.  The internet was full of wanna be experts.  You know when they provide every different type of solution most of which are way off the mark and you have to wonder where they came up with the idea? I wound up taking out the drive because the Acer Aspire laptop wouldn't respond to F2 to bring up BIOS nor any other hotkey to bring…

Wordpress says you have to upgrade your insecure version of PHP 7.0.  PHP 7.4 is the current version. You have to add the repository, then update. Ubuntu: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php sudo apt-get update Debian: sudo apt install apt-transport-https lsb-release ca-certificates sudo wget -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/php.gpg https://packages.sury.org/php/apt.gpg sudo sh -c 'echo "deb https://packages.sury.org/php/ $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/php.list' sudo apt update Change to the php version. sudo update-alternatives --config php Enable the correct version in apache. sudo a2enmod php7.4 Disable the old version. sudo a2dismod php7.0 Then restart apache2. sudo systemctl restart apache2