Category: Uncategorized

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  Mac though is pricey and you could find yourself in a few years so outdated that Apple no longer supports your hardware even though that hardware is Apple's creation.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  

The one thing about computing is that it is so literal.  I wish programmers would add some intelligence into their products, yet allow us to override it. In this case for a customer a user attempted to forward an email from her old email account to the one I set up on their very own email server.  It worked great, but I didn't have the proxmox mail gateway put in place. When I set this up I immediately got a message from her telling me that the forwarded message didn't go through to the new server, that it had rejected it and sent her a reject message. She forwarded me the rejected email and I looked it over and found that it said SPF failure. I checked her registrar's DNS…

I just set up an email server for someone and after encouraging them to use it I decided to configure some of the features, one of which was the signature block.  I initially just wanted to ensure that the reply that I make to a user has the quoted text from the original email below where I type and to have my signature in the proper place just above the quoted text. I did some searching and found that you have to set this in identities under roundcube's settings.  I chose to do this and received an error Service Unavailable Error 600.  That's the rough wording. After searching one person said that the issue could be a permissions issue in the plugins folder.  I checked and ensured that all the…

Proxmox is set up in an exceptional way, except one. That is obviousness for certain features.  It tries but fails.  Here's what I mean. When set up proxmox you tell it to create storages.  In my case I have the SSD that I installed promox onto.  It sets up a small portion for the OS and the remainder is left to allow for you to use as you see fit.  In my case I always set up a second drive or array of drives.  This is where all my containers go and is typically much larger than the boot drive that promox was installed on. Here's the issue that I dealt with yesterday and today.  I set up an email container based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.  In here I installed…

https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/23/windows-unpatched-zero-day-bug/?guccounter=1

These guys claim to be researchers.  They are researchers with over 24,000 IPv4 addresses?  Something's fishy here. On most systems you have a firewall.  You have a firewall at your router and you have a firewall at your workstation. In Linux you may use iptables and/or UFW.  The goal of these is to block IP addresses of users that you believe are nefarious or have no reasonable need to even be looking at your computer. For instance, someone sending you email is a reasonable use.  Someone visiting your website is reasonable use.  Someone testing the ports on your email or web server is not reasonable.  In the strictest word those should be banned at the very first attempt to scan or break in. In Linux you have UFW that can…