Coding and Techy Stuff

Configuration for FreeBSD inside VirtualBox with Gnome3, sudo, nano, and bash, including avoiding the black screen

Coming into FreeBSD anew from the Linux world. I'm happy with it as a server, no changes needed. I like the much-more-secure ambiance. But now experimenting with it as a desktop, I've already decided I like sudo, bash, and nano better than su, sh, and ee. And I want Gnome. At this point, I've  […]

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Install Ubuntu Server .deb package without starting service using dpkg --unpack

On Debian flavors like Ubuntu, apt and dpkg default to starting a service as soon as it is installed. This is almost always a good idea, but I ran into the strange problem that the service was misconfigured. Starting it was not a good thing. Stopping and re-configuring it after it started was not  […]

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Use Network Manager to handle 'device not managed' or 'unmanaged' issue in Ubuntu for SecurityOnion at Digital Ocean

An out-of-the-box install of Ubuntu 18.04.5 at Digital Ocean will not work for a SecurityOnion installation, because of the way cloud-init is managing the network. Security Onion prefers NetworkManager to manage the network. Cloud-init is required by Digital Ocean for deployment of a custom image.  […]

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Use fdisk and parted to resize a 100Gb custom image of Ubuntu for Digital Ocean to prepare for a 320Gb SecurityOnion install

Digital Ocean cannot deploy a Custom Image larger than 100Gb. Security Onion requires 200Gb to install. To workaround the Digital Ocean limitation, create a 100Gb custom image of Ubuntu, configured with only three partitions: /boot, /, and /tmp. (Leaving out /nsm and swap requirements for the  […]

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Install and whitelabel Grafana with a custom grafana_icon.svg and a few other minor changes

Grafana is an amazing application, one of the most active open source projects in the world, and they are firmly committed to the Free Software / Open Source way of doing things. You should know up front that the following information enables a feature (whitelabel) which is part of the Enterprise  […]

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How to configure Ubuntu via /etc/network/interfaces using ifupdown managed by Network Manager for Security Onion

That headline is a mouthful, so let's break it down: How to configure Ubuntu via /etc/network/interfaces using ifupdown managed by Network Manager for Security Onion In more simple terms I would prefer this headline: "How to configure Ubuntu with ifupdown for Security Onion," but it turns  […]

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What to do when qemu-guest-agent on CentOS does not work after installing with yum

After installing qemu-guest-agent with yum, which was easy enough with sudo yum install qemu-guest-agent I did not see IP information in the proxmox host, so I knew it was not yet working. I tried several things, none of them worked. First I tried looking at the status. Got an error indicating the  […]

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Kill a Proxmox VM that won't quit with a one-liner using the pve node's command prompt

I was using the handy information at Proxmox can’t stop VM – How we fix it! (bobcares.com) for a while. They have a two-line approach which does the job, but displays the (very) long command line for starting a proxmox VM on the screen while doing so. To me, facing a wall of text while searching for  […]

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Installing ShellInABox on Debian, Ubuntu, Devuan, etc and configuring for white-on-black GUI

You can install shellinabox with your Debian-flavored package manager with a single command: sudo apt install shellinabox White text on black screen The default setting is a white screen with black text. You can right-click to switch it, but if you're like me you'll want to set it to black screen  […]

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Accessing OPNSense Web UI running within Proxmox on the WAN interface by disabling reply-to

After I migrated from pfSense to OPNSense for my firewall embedded within a Proxmox lab, I was stumped for two days looking for this obscure setting. It was a problem right out of the box: After I got the interfaces configured and assigned static IPs for the two network interfaces, I tried and tried  […]

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