Year: 2021

We are now in a world where the developers never tell you what you need to change, they just imply a change. They may have documented something but good luck finding it. They may have even talked about it publicly, but we all weren't there to hear or see. Their comments about things are lost in long lists of google results and lost in the wash of time and complexity. Developers today do this to you... "what is 2+2"? It's not 3 and it's not 5. What is it? 10? The answer the developer should give you is "what is 2+2"? ... it's 4 -- period. I don't need to guess. I don't need to extrapolate. Just give the answer developers. The point here is that we all have to…

Windows lets you enter your user name and then enter your password and then tells you that you must enter it a second time. This happens when you are switching from a local account to an online account. You may have changed your password recently or just changed it in response to the windows failure to accept your current password. The only solution that I found is to instead of changing from local to online is to just create a new windows account as an online account. Here windows will accept your account password After doing this you will want to copy your windows local account data to the newly created online account.

Whoogle is a way to search Google without the tracking and other evil shit that Google does to you. It is like duckduckgo except it only searches Google and does so without any invasive data collection and targeting of consumers without their permission. It does not send data about the device or user doing the search. It does not aid another search engine. Microsoft does not get the search data to use in their engine, which is what duckduckgo does..reports your search and metadata to Microsoft. The interface is fast to load and the searches are prompt. There's a certain amount of configuration that can be done. It can be run from within a Proxmox container. I examined both Google search results and whoogle. They are nearly identicle. What's missing…

Yes. I had a problem where my syslog wasn't being rotated and a year had gone by. This made the tracking center appear to have incoming mails that weren't there...they were from a year ago. I wrote about it in another post. That got me to wondering. Does the Proxmox mail gateway when setup to fetch mail from another service provider actually run the rules against the mail destined to the target mailbox? After clearing up the issue with the syslog rotation I found that indeed it does process the rules. This is nice as there is a lot of spam that comes into my google mail box and it is one reason I do not want to go there. This is years after inactivity. There are still entities that…

It is possible to block by subject using the PMG. My reasoning for doing this is that I want to continue to get emails from certain parties but I don't want to get certain regular spam from them. For instance, I'm not interested in Google My Business. I do want to continue to get emails from Google just in case I need to reset my password, etc. To do this it consists of 3 parts. The first is to create a "what object". This can be found under the "Mail Filter" menu on the left side of the window. Here you click to create the what object by giving it a name and a description. The second part is to click on your new "what object" and focus your eyes…

The purpose of this is to use chroot to contain specific users to specific folders and to limit the commands that they can use while in chroot. The chroot has no root control. convert all the Proxmox containers that are operating as SSH jump servers into containers that if broken into the intruder will have an extremely limited environment in which to operate. determine the security concerns and to work out how to quickly set up the service environment for users. Not all users need a full container with their own processors, memory and storage. Many users can operate under a single container only to be restricted to chroot and the commands available therein. Proxmox is just one hypervisor out of many. It is the one I use. This even…

Obviously without the network nothing works on Proxmox. No way to get in, no way to serve pages, nothing is possible except by going to the physical console and typing commands. The process is pretty simple to upgrade. You are actually upgrading to Debian Bullseye (probably from Buster). Predictable issues can crop up. The answers to those issues are not always what the developer states. And the forums and other requests for help are not typically on point because they only cover the basics. In our case we were upgrading 1 of 3 nodes in a cluster as a test. There was nothing in the documentation that stated that all nodes need to be upgraded at once. When we went through the upgrade we followed the online guide for doing…

The LTS idea is pretty nice. It does aid users. It does help keep things stable for some. There is a problem though, maybe a few. The latest issue for me is that newer hardware comes out every year with the LTS typically staying in use for 2 or more years. If you end up having to buy a new computer (due to hardware failure) and it has new technology. The newer XC-1660G-UW92 computer that has a newer Intel UHD chipset for video and a newer SATA mode called "Intel". Using a distribution such as Linux Mint, even their latest version, you are going to be stuck on an old kernel. In this case 5.4. This kernel does not have the driver for either the SATA mode for the nvme…

In looking at the Proxmox Mail Gateway's (PMG) Tracking Center I became alarmed that it appeared that emails were being exchanged between users (I thought the issue was from my roundcube web mail as each email addressee matched an entry in the contacts part of Roundcube). Those emails were not sent by me nor were any received by me. I began looking for the cause and shutdown webmail. I cloned the containers. I brought non-webmail back up and began more investigation. I also noted that the dates in PMG tracking were one day off. I looked at the /var/log/maillog on both the mail gateway and my mail server. I could not find any lines matching those sent and received emails. I looked at /var/log/authlog too with no success. I then…

My influx database system has been running fine for a long time. Then suddenly my grafana was displaying nothing and it indicated bad gateway, and then ultimately to "influxdb.service: Failed at step EXEC spawning /usr/lib/influxdb/scripts/influxd-systemd-start.sh: Permission denied". The messages from systemd are cryptic and it is my opinion that they need a new maintainer. Redhat basically isn't taking the right steps to simplify and to clarify their product. It is only getting more complex and harder for people to figure out the issues unique to using systemd. Aside from that the issue boils down to the fact that after an update the /usr/lib/influxdb/scripts/influxd-systemd-start.sh was no longer marked as executable. The issue goes back to at least 2015. That's 6 years. There's a thread that talks about this issue and that's…