This "Coding and Techy Stuff" category is here because peripatetically I make a living as a software engineer. This is where I put anything related to coding and technology, and sometimes just unrelated information such as you might find posted on ycombinator's always-intellectually-curious Hacker News.
(I sometimes craft my headlines to be search-engine-friendly, which is why they sometimes look odd in person). If you have multiple VirtualBox images running in Ubuntu or similar Debian-based flavors of Linux, you know it can be frustrating to switch between the different images using the favorites […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Security Onion prefers to think that it's talking to the world, not a proxy. But you can do it. It took me awhile to get this working because I was also trying to get Apache Basic Authentication working. Alas, Security Onion is so complex that I was only able to get Authentication working smoothly […]
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 […]
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 […]
ShellInABox is a tidy little app that works well, but when you configure it to connect via SSH directly instead of using its internal shell, it throws up a couple minor errors when logging in: command-line line 0: unsupported option "rhostsrsaauthentication" command-line line 0: […]
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 […]
I did this on a Devuan system, which is basically Ubuntu without systemd. This not a well-known distro, so your mileage may vary, but I think it will all work as described on vanilla Ubuntu or similar Debian-based flavors. At the end of this article is a list of URLs I used while putting this all […]
I did this on a Devuan system, which is basically Ubuntu without systemd. This not a well-known distro, so your mileage may vary, but I think it will all work as described on vanilla Ubuntu or similar Debian-based flavors. At the end of this article is a list of URLs I used while putting this all […]
I was oddly not able to find quick hits on this topic when I searched, so I finally just tried it, and it worked so easily I was quite surprised. As a long-time attempter-of-things-so-new-that-they-often-fail, I remember when it was a hassle to install Linux on Mac. For years it was frustrating. I […]
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 […]
There are several answers given to this question at AskUbuntu.com. What worked for me was the simplest of them, and what I did was one step simpler than what was given. So here's what works for me using PopOs 20 (which is just Ubuntu 20 with some elegant UI, drivers, and useability improvements). […]
If you have not already seen the famous 'Expert' comedy sketch, you're in for a treat. It's had 26 million views so far, so maybe you already know it. The sketch illustrates in a very funny way how badly an expert can be treated by a team of non-experts who all depend on his expert knowledge, but […]
If you get this error while running the iRedMail install script: [FAIL] Starting nginx: nginx failed! invoke-rc.d: initscript nginx, action "start" failed. dpkg: error processing package nginx-full (--configure): installed nginx-full package post-installation script subprocess returned […]
Yes, it can be done. You have to use the 2014 version of Sketchup, and you have to tweak the Windows Imaging Component DLLs which are not installed by the .NET 4 installer. The .NET 4 installer only installs a couple of the 4 DLLs you need, so you have to deploy the other two and install/register […]
Reads article about a rogue process in Windows related to Microsoft Store. Reads enough of the article to recognize it's a component he never uses, so can be safely disabled. Opens command prompt, uses it to invoke regedit to edit registry to disable the subprocess that is most suspicious, leaving […]