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Debian is what might be noted as a top level distribution. A distribution in Linux parlance is similar to a recipe. Let's look at that so that the rest of this makes sense. At the beginning of Linux since it was open and free it meant that you had to have some technical knowledge to make it work. To get it installed you would compile everything and build the OS. Everything was compiled. You configured everything. This was quite a burden so groups of people started their own recipe of sorts to make it easier for other to use Linux. Instead of you compiling it they did all that work and assembled it like a puzzle and then distributed the end result. These ultimately were turned into ISO files. ISO…

Even though Asterisk has a blacklist feature what we are trying to accomplish here is to find a good method of querying based on the name part the caller ID rather than just the caller's phone number. The purpose of the blacklist is to block a number you enter into the blacklist. If the number is there the system will either hang up on them or send them to purgatory. This works fine if the number is always the same. If the name is the same but the number changes (because the caller is spoofing the number) you'll get an endless number of calls from the same bad guys. If you enter each number into the blacklist your list will keep growing. Imagine a local business who's number has been…

To resolve this you have to go into settings and then system and reset to default. After a short delay it will return to the normal resolution. What happened is that after installing Arctic Zephyr Reloaded everything looked good. At this point I wanted to see how the ProjectM visualization looked while playing music. During the steps to get to that I hit the full screen button on my tablet which is set to control Kodi running on the chromecast. Nothing happened so I hit it again. This was hit at the wrong time. If you know anything about how Kodi works on windows and Linux if you press the full screen button on yatse (the remote control for Kodi) it will either put it into windowed mode or it…

The Telegraf package is installed using the package manager of pfsense. It is simple to install. All that is really needed after that is the location of your Influxdb (or whatever server), the database name, username, and password. With this filled in and the settings being saved that is pretty much it, except... I found that the Telegraf service was starting and stopping on its own. I looked over this and noticed there was a list of Telegraf outputs. I realized that I needed to select one. Telegraf didn't need it selected in order to save, so that's a bug. But when you do select the proper Telegraf output the service won't stop and start repeatedly. Ensure you have the Telegraf "Outputs" selected. If you are using influx then select…

I set this so that I might make better use of my ram and that it might provide slightly better performance. Following the instructions I checked the box and filled in the values for both ram and tmp ram disk. I set the values from the default to 1gb each. After rebooting I received messages that the /var was full. This computer has 16gb of ram so I felt that 1 gb for each should be sufficient. Apparently not. The defaults for those settings is 256 and 1024 meaning 256mb of ram for one and 1gb for the other. I'm not sure why it failed. I accessed the terminal at the computer. At the console I could see that DHCP was not active as none of my interfaces were listed.…

In trying to allow root to log in to another host using rsa keys I received various errors most of which were related to permissions. However, I had created a config file in /root/.ssh.pub. In this file was a second at the top for all hosts and one of those was the IdentityFile where it pointed to /root/.ssh/id_rsa. When having another section for the host that states the IP address and username with nothing else pfsense generates a message saying invalid format. If I changed the permissions to the files I got different messages. All folders had the proper ownership. When I removed the line that pointed to the IdentityFile the ssh worked. I think it was because it is looking for the id_rsa file instead of the id_rsa.pub file.…

I have a few comments about their short segment on email self-hosting, specifically what they all agreed about it. While listening I couldn’t help but think to myself “these people are talking about a subject with which they have almost zero experience”. I could hear myself thinking as each person spoke that they were wrong on virtually every point. Most of that complexity is easily overcome once you spend the time to do the work. When I say “do the work” I’m actually talking about doing the work in putting it together, trying to figure out the various tools, and understanding the links between everything. This is just like what you did when you started to learn Linux. Once you figure that out you realize your reticence was grossly over…

Imagine your desktop all inverted. The pictures look like photo negatives. Online searches keep pushing you to the Ease of use magnifier to resolve the issue. This is really annoying that everyone pushes you to that. Other searches push you to high contrast. Others push you to inverted colors. The cause of the issue was Color Filters. It had been turned on and set to invert colors like a negative. When this happened the computer owner tried to get it back to normal so they went in chose a dark theme -- this inverted it to a light theme because of color filters. Everything was still like a negative but it did look light in color. When I finally discovered it I blame this on Microsoft. Who on earth would…

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.