VirtJunkie

Authenticate to vRealize Orchestrator API using PowerShell

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 13:27:40 -0400

I’m working on a project that requires direct interaction with the vRO API from a third party system. Maybe I’m getting less effective at using Google in my old age, but I had a heck of a time finding good solid code for authenticating to the API using anything, including PowerShell.

Typically I’d use Invoke-vRARestMethod from PowerVRA for this, but unfortunately I had some additional requirements that mandate me using a bearer token.

Configure vROps To Send Alerts to OpsGenie and Microsoft Teams

Fri, 23 Jul 2021 18:35:59 -0400

Packer, Photon, Python, Flask, WSGI, vROps. Holy smokes folks.. I’m not sure I could make a more click-bait-y post if I tried!

I recently took a position at a new company and had the opportunity to stand up a greenfield environment. Part of this environment was obviously configuring monitoring. Since we’re pretty heavily tied to VMware here, we’re using vROps for our monitoring. For escalation of alerts, we’re using OpsGenie, and for normal collaboration we’re using Teams. Unfortunately, vROps versions older than 8.4 do not support sending alerts to OpsGenie or Teams out of the box. Fortunately, we can still get this working with a bit of work.

Big Things have Small Beginnings – How I Beat 2020

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 09:56:22 -0400

I’ve got well north of a decade of VMware experience and I finally took the the VCP-DCV exam. Much more importantly, this is the third cert I’ve achieved in the last month. The state of the world got me down. I decided I didn’t like that feeling, so I did something about it. I’m embracing hard learning and pushing myself to learn net new technologies while also expanding my current baseline. I’ll get the AWS Certified Solution Architect – Associate cert before October, and a couple more before the end of the year. I’m not quite ready to talk about the last two, but they are going to be significant. Most importantly, I’m feeling good!

VMware Provisioning using Hashicorp Terraform – Part 2

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 09:00:00 -0400

In the first part of this series we went over Terraform at a very high level and discussed a basic example of using it to provision a single Windows VM or a single Linux VM. While this is a helpful baseline, it doesn’t realistically help us when defining our application structure in code. For example, if you wanted to set up a three tier application you’ll need to have three separate instances of the project we used. At that point we’re not really gaining much efficiency over deploying a template in vCenter. In this post I’ll discuss Terraform Modules, give an example of how to store your Terraform Module in GitHub, and provide a real-life example of how to deploy a three tier application using multiple source images.

Jitsi for Just in Time Conferencing using Terraform on Vultr with Route 53

Mon, 04 May 2020 09:00:00 -0400

With everything going on in the world with COVID-19 and the social distancing that is happening, people are looking to connect with friends, family and co-workers via Video conferencing more than ever. Recent vulnerabilities in Zoom have made people more cognizant than ever that security needs to be considered when using these platforms no matter what you are using them for.

Jitsi is an open source video conferencing platform that I’ve been hearing about a lot lately, and finally had a chance to look into. In this post I’ll explain how to use Terraform to provision a Jitsi instance when you need a conference and tear it down when you are done. We’ll be using Vultr and their Jitsi “application” and AWS Route 53 for DNS.

Set Up Enpass With HTTPS Protected WebDAV and Ditch LastPass

Mon, 27 Apr 2020 09:00:00 -0400

It’s time to ditch cloud based password managers. There.. I said it. What we are doing when we use them is giving ownership and management of our trusted secrets to someone else, and hoping that they will be able to protect them from bad guys, and make sure they are available when we need them.

That’s a heck of an ask, isn’t it? I’ve been a LastPass customer for a very, very long time.. I use it to share secrets with my family, I use it on my mobile device to log into apps. It’s a safe bet to say it’s a critical piece of how I operate, and they have never once let me down. That said, if they asked for money to continue using their service, I’d have to pay. If they had a security event where secrets were compromised or if they lost my data, I’d be in very, very bad shape.

In this article, I will talk about how to set up a WebDAV share that’s protected by HTTPS using Traefik, Let’s Encrypt, and a WebDAV container on your own server, and use it to sync your secrets with devices.

VMware Provisioning using Hashicorp Terraform

Wed, 22 Apr 2020 09:00:00 -0400

As a part of my effort to use Infrastructure as Code to define and automate VMware environments, I’m taking a look at Terraform for VMware provisioning. In this article, I will give a brief intro to Terraform, talk about how it can help in managing your enterprise environments, as well as how it’s different than Ansible. I’ll also provide example code and description for how to provision Windows and Linux VMs.

Poor Man’s AutoDeploy Using Custom Kickstart, and Python

Thu, 09 Apr 2020 09:00:00 -0400

I recently encountered a situation where I needed to provision hundreds of ESXi hosts. The thing is, there was no vSphere Autodeploy, or HPE Synergy Image Streamer, and no ability to (long story, trust me here) spin them up. No way I’m going to manually provision all of those hosts by hand, so what’s a guy to do?!

This solution will automatically provision ESXi hosts and “get them on the network” so you can add them to vCenter just by using tools that VMware gives us, and a little bit of creativity.

While I designed this solution to work with hundreds of production ESXi hosts, there’s nothing from preventing you from using this method in smaller production environments, or even your own home lab.

VMware Template Management using Hashicorp Packer

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 09:00:00 -0400

VMware Templates: they make life amazing, don’t they? Creating a your first vSphere template is easy, but there are limitations when using them in enterprise environments. In this article, I will talk about the downsides of traditional enterprise template management, how Packer can help, and give examples (and code!) for creating Windows and Linux templates in VMware vCenter using Packer.

Table of Contents

Toggle

Traditional Enterprise Template Management
Enterprise Template Management With Packer
Source Code
Packer Intro
Packer Template File & User Variables
Linux Templates
Windows Templates
- Autounattend.xml
Examples
- Windows
  - In Action
- Linux
  - In Action
References

Traditional Enterprise Template Management

Templates Across Multiple Sites – create a master template and replicate to ensure the same state exists
1. Introduces operational complexity
2. Extends the total amount of time it takes to patch all templates
OS and Application updates need to be performed for every application on every template
1. Repetition sucks!
2. Introduces risk due to C2K errors
Template creation ends up being a work of art.
1. Individuals sometimes spend years fine-tuning all of the customization in a windows template.
2. On-boarding time is significantly increased
3. Projects delivered by third parties will take extra time to complete projects, as reverse engineering will need to occur in templates
Documentation? Do you have it for your Windows and Linux Template?

Deploy VCSA via PowerShell

Mon, 16 Mar 2020 09:00:00 -0400

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about how organizations can provide services can operationalize the principles behind Infrastructure as Code in a way that’s accessible. In my experience, if a tool isn’t easy to use, it won’t be used. This is one of the biggest barriers to organizations (and companies that provide services, like mine) benefiting from IaC. It’s my intention that this script will achieve a high level of usability and will also generate and consume reusable code for future use.

vExpert 2020

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 20:43:04 -0500

I’m happy to announce that I have been selected as a vExpert in 2020!

Validate Network Connectivity Across A VMware Cluster

Mon, 21 Oct 2019 19:45:26 -0400

It’s the network team’s fault…

The Scenario

Imagine you have an environment that has hundreds of VLANs. When you build a new cluster, there’s a real possibility that one host out of many is mis-configured on just a single port group or VLAN. It’s a pretty simple issue, but it’s like finding a needle in a haystack. Because of that, it’s incredibly difficult to troubleshoot, so I wrote a script to run through every ESXi host, and test connectivity on each port group.

RVTools: Parse Multiple Outputs Using Powershell

Sun, 11 Aug 2019 11:00:14 -0400

If you haven’t used RVTools before, I’d definitely suggest taking a look. In case you’re one of the few that has not used it, it’s a quick tool to generate a point-in-time report of the inventory/configuration/health of a vSphere environment. While it’s one of the best tools out there for a quick and dirty report of an environment, the challenge I often face is that it outputs too much data. The other challenge I’ve faced is that it’s incredibly difficult to combine and analyze data from multiple outputs.

VCSA 6.7: Error trying to join AD, error code [40024]

Sat, 03 Aug 2019 09:38:00 -0400

Tried joining a VCSA to AD today and received the error message:

Error: Idm client exception: Error trying to join AD, error code &#91;40024], user &#91;administrator], domain &#91;home.lab], orgUnit &#91;]

PowerCli – Deploy Linked Clone with Static IP

Thu, 18 Jul 2019 22:36:32 -0400

I’m not sure why it’s been so hard to find a snippet online that gives me the ability to create a linked clone while selecting a static IP address, but it was. I ended up writing a quick function to help.

Quick Tips for freeing up space in Linux

Tue, 25 Jun 2019 09:26:31 -0400

Practice what you preach, right? I try to keep my root partition on my personal machine pretty anemic.. usually between 40G and 60G. However, lately I’ve been running out of space and I wasn’t sure why. Here are a few tips and tricks for finding the culprit, and freeing up some space.

Webex Teams on Linux

Sat, 01 Jun 2019 09:59:50 -0400

My company standardized on Cisco Webex Teams for persistent chat. Unfortunately, webex teams does not have a linux client, and recommends that people simply use the web client. Unfortunately, I’m more used to this answer than I’d like, but fortunately I don’t have to any more.

PowerCLI – Get All VM Details from get-task

Mon, 04 Mar 2019 22:18:20 -0500

I’ve been working on a project that uses the -runasync parameter on the move-vm cmdlet. The obvious problem with running jobs asynchronously is that you lose the ability to determine the status of whatever task as soon as you submit it.

Ubuntu Cosmic 18.10 – Use Ansible To Deploy Docker

Fri, 14 Dec 2018 17:45:36 -0500

As it turns out, Docker doesn’t officially support any version of Ubuntu past Artful. This is a bit of a challenge if you want to use a state configuration manager such as Ansible to deploy Docker, or even if you want to install it manually. I was able to get this working by using the test branch of the docker release for Ubuntu Cosmic.

Ubuntu – Add Keyboard Shortcut for line in

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 17:30:38 -0500

I use the line in connection on my desktop to route audio for sources other than my PC to the speaker system attached to my computer. For whatever reason, this is still annoyingly cumbersome, even in 2018. For years, I’ve done this by using Alsamixer, a command line mixer. This is fine enough, I guess, but I wanted something a bit more intuitive. The finished result shows the screen popup below, and is triggered by a key combination that executes a script.

Use PowerCLI to determine the ESXi host with the most available RAM

Tue, 11 Dec 2018 17:30:28 -0500

I’m working on a project right now that requires me to do a shared nothing cross vCenter vMotion of about 6K VMs. As you might know, cross vCenter vMotion requires you to specify the ESXi host and the Datastore your VM will live in within the target vCenter; no targeting a cluster of any kind. This brings up some interesting challenges when trying to automate the migration of such a large amount of VMs. One in particular, is the need to target the ESXi host that has the most free space. I am using the function below to do just this – hopefully it helps!

Thin Provision VMs on Workstation Pro using the vmrun Command

Tue, 27 Nov 2018 09:00:16 -0500

Continuing my series on provisioning VMs on workstation pro outside of the GUI, I’ve got a functional script that will create a linked clone using the vmrun command.

It allows you to specify the following options on the command line:

Clone VM in Workstation 15 Pro via REST API using Powershell

Mon, 26 Nov 2018 09:51:36 -0500

After posting yesterday about modifying the parent image to allow for hostname changes, I was still looking for something a little more streamlined. I remember reading about the new REST API that is available on workstation, so I wrote a little script to use the Workstation API to clone a VM.

Prompt For A New Hostname on Boot

Sun, 25 Nov 2018 21:52:25 -0500

I’ve been brushing up on a few technologies in my home lab, and have found myself using VMware workstation for some simple tasks that don’t require a whole virtualized environment. Workstation didn’t set the hostname of my Ubuntu 18.xx VMs properly after they booted. Maybe I’m a little spoiled by guest OS customization or missing something, but either way, I needed a way to quickly spin up a whole VM and have it’s hostname set correctly. It’s definitely not the cleanest, and I realize I would be better off using the Workstation Pro REST API, but I’m not there yet.

Set Up A Headless Raspberry Pi

Thu, 04 Oct 2018 21:38:41 -0400

I find myself setting up Raspberry Pi’s more frequently than I’d like. I never ever have a monitor connected. Below is the method I use to get wireless network connectivity without connecting an Ethernet cable or a monitor and keyboard. This is here because I’m tired of sifting through incorrect articles to find this information.

Reboot! (Welcome to VirtJunkie!)

Sat, 04 Aug 2018 16:07:58 -0400

It’s been 4 years since my last post – wow!

Welcome to VirtJunkie! As the name implies, I want a place to write about things I’m looking at or am interested in relating to Virtualization (and automation).

A lot has changed for me since my last post. Shortly after my last post, I started working for a large Swiss bank that prohibited me from contributing to a blog. I left that company and spent 3 years at Solarwinds where I shouldhave been contributing to this blog more, but I didn’t. It’s my goal here to provide high quality, relevant content.

VMware Powercli – Gather NIC Driver and Firmware Versions from Hosts via vCenter

Mon, 20 Oct 2014 15:46:58 -0400

I recently encountered an issue in vSphere 5.5 where I wasn’t able to change the interface speed on an ESXi host from auto-negotiate to anything else. After a good amount of troubleshooting I was able to determine that this issue was occurring due to the fact that the NIC firmware version and driver version on a blade server was out of date. VMware has a good KB article on how to grab the firmware and driver versions that I followed. However, the problem is that even on the most modest ESXi host that isn’t running 10G to it, you’ll likely have a minimum of 4 NICs on it. This means that you’ll have to enable SSH on every host you want to check, run one command per NIC each of them (or run a one line script that loops through them, but will that really save you time..?). It doesn’t take a very large cluster for that to become a very large endeavor.

This PowerShell script will connect to a vCenter server, allow you to scan all ESXi hosts, or only hosts within a particular cluster, and output the results in object format so that you can manipulate them how you wish.

Use VMware PowerCLI to Pull CDP information from ESXi Hosts

Fri, 25 Jul 2014 16:48:21 -0400

I like having documentation, but I hate creating documentation. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m slightly lazy at times, however, my own personal preferences for what I’ll call “Effort Allocation”, are not the root of my dislike for creating documentation. The issue really stems from the fact that creating it is very time consuming, tedious, and usually lower on the priority list.

However, sometimes it’s not you that failed to create the documentation. Consultants frequently fall into this category.

The issue I’m handling here is documenting CDP information from the perspective of ESXi hosts using PowerCLI.

Modify DNS Records via Powershell

Tue, 20 May 2014 23:28:22 -0400

Over the past few months I’ve been doing a lot of work with VMware Horizon 6. I’m not going to go into details, as VMware has done a great job doing that, plus I’m under a NDA. Suffice to say, details that have been provided suffice if you’re just looking for info.

In my company sponsored lab environment, I have HWS 1.8 deployed in feature/option parity compared to production. Deploying a second instance of HWS (perhaps a pre-release version), is challenging, due to DNS/Reverse DNS Checks that are done.

Anyways – the reason you’re probably here is to find out how to systematically modify DNS records, so here ya go!

Powershell – Provision NetApp Volume as NFS Datastore to vCenter

Tue, 29 Apr 2014 13:48:11 -0400

For anyone that’s ever been through the process of provisioning a new datastore to multiple ESX hosts, you know it can take some time. Below are the steps I use

Create Volume on NetApp
Set Security Style to Unix
Enable Storage Efficiency
Set NFS Export permissions to allow Read/Write + Root Permissions to all applicable hosts
Mount datastores on ESXi hosts

For a handful of hosts this is fine, but adding it to anything more than 4-5 hosts is reaaally painful in my experience. Below is a script you can use to take care of these steps in one swipe.

Horizon Workspace – Offline Upgrade – v1.5 to v1.8

Sat, 12 Apr 2014 22:49:46 -0400

After upgrading several different environments to Horizon Workspace 1.8, it’s become clear to me that the “offline upgrade” feature is something that should be used whenever possible. Maybe it’s just the environments I’ve worked in, but going from 1.5 to 1.8 takes much much longer than going from 1.0-1.5. This guide is intended to help you accomplish an offline upgrade from 1.5 to 1.8, while having a plan to restore to 1.5 in case of a failure. This is the fastest process I have found to perform the upgrade. Even with these measures, I’d plan on getting a 4-5 hour outage window for a production environment (2 connector, service, gateway, data virtual appliances)

VMware Horizon Workspace – Part 3 – Configure VMware vPostgres External Database

Sat, 23 Nov 2013 00:09:43 -0500

In this post I’ll show in detail how to configure Horizon Workspace to use an external database during the install process. This post is part of a series showing how to configure VMware Horizon Workspace in a production environment. You’ll need an external database to have multiple service virtual appliances, so this should be a requirement for your environment. This process was suprisingly not trivial for me, however it could have something to do with the fact that I haven’t used postgres sql in the past.

Update: Exchange 2010 – Bulk Mailbox Migration In Batches (The Right Way)

Wed, 04 Sep 2013 00:50:49 -0400

In June I added a post on how to migrate exchange 2010 mailboxes to an Exchange 2010 DAG in a controlled fashion. Since then I’ve completely restructured the script and made it an all-in-one solution.

VMware Horizon Workspace – Part 2 – Configure Nginx as Frontend with Microsoft CA

Thu, 01 Aug 2013 22:45:23 -0400

So yesterday, VMware released Horizon Workspace 1.5. HUGE improvement over the GA release… Holey smokes. Any further tutorials will reference this version.

Anyways, more to the point. In this post I will demonstrate how to do a base configuration of Horizon Workspace using an internal Microsoft Certificate Authority with Nginx as a frontend. This setup is only acceptable for setting up workspace in a lab environment, since in a production environment you’ll need a trusted third party cert. Doing this in a lab environment is important because it will allow you to set up and test every feature you’ll be using in a production environment.

Requirements:

Microsoft Active Directory Certificate Services
Linux Machine running Nginx
Horizon Workspace 1.5 Downloaded and installed with no configuration.
- We’ll be using the workspace FQDN of hzn.test.in (This obviously assumes the domain of test.in)

VMware Horizon Workspace – Part 1 – Enable SSH

Tue, 30 Jul 2013 17:16:59 -0400

I’ve never met a VMware Admin who will use the console to access a VM if they have a choice. There are plenty of tutorials out there that will show you how to do this, but since I’m starting a series, I guess I’ll throw the same info on the internet, but put my own spin on it.

VMware Horizon Workspace – Part 0 – Intro

Tue, 30 Jul 2013 16:54:46 -0400

I’ve been working with Horizon Workspace since it went GA in March. At this point in time, I’m happy to say that I’ve got Workspace set up in a production environment.

In this series, I will be covering how I configured each part of this suite. I would expect that this process will become exponentially easier as time goes on. One thing to note is that I will write these posts assuming that you are at least moderately familiar with linux and Workspace. I will not go into details on how to install packages, deploy the VA, use the web interface. Use Google if you’re looking for that boring stuff 🙂 Here we go!

NetApp: Get Statistics from Multiple Filers With One Command

Thu, 11 Jul 2013 22:05:56 -0400

Does anyone actually find NetApp OnCommand System Commander to be fast enough for normal operation? I’ll admit, I still create a good amount of Volumes and LUNs using it, but it leaves a lot to be desired in the performance category. If you follow my blog at all, you know that I’m in the middle of a migration from a non-ha exchange environment to a DAG. Being the sensible admin that I am, I have multiple copies of my Exchange databases on different storage arrays, controlled by different NetApp filers. Using System Manager to monitor the space usage of the Volumes hosting my mailbox databases is way to slow for my comfort.

RSA SecurID Integration With VMware Horizon View Fails During sdconf.rec Upload

Fri, 28 Jun 2013 15:03:23 -0400

When trying to upload a sdconf.rec file to Horizon View 5.2, you receive the following error:

[text]
Invalid file size of 2,770 bytes. The RSA Configuration file size must be between 512 and 2,048 bytes.
[/text]

Exchange 2010 – Bulk Mailbox Migration In Batches

Thu, 27 Jun 2013 08:04:37 -0400

Update:
I created a new version of this script here
I recently completed a project that involved migrating Exchange 2010 Mailbox role from a standalone server to a Database Availability Group, or DAG. This was a large project that took a lot of time and planning, and had the potential to be very tedious. Fortunately, with a little knowhow, you can automate many of the tedious tasks.

I wanted to be in full control of mailbox migration, so my requirements were fairly strict:

Use PowerShell to get Service Auto-Start Status Along with Human Readable Service Name

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 22:30:55 -0400

This falls into the “Come on Microsoft” category.

I have been writing a script that will gather a bunch of information from servers, and returns an object with the information. Part of what I’m gathering is the servers that are set to auto start, and have their corresponding service stopped.

While you can get a list of services that meet part of this criteria like this:

Register VMware Workspace as a Cloud Storage Provider in Office 2013

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 14:25:52 -0400

I was lucky enough to spend the previous week in New Orleans, LA at Microsoft TechEd. I had a great time checking out the latest and greatest that our Redmond buddies are about to throw our way or has already tossed.

I spent the majority of my time focusing on Sharepoint 2013 and Exchange 2013, but I was able to spend some time focusing on the client side of things as well. One thing in particular that stood out to me in this area is how Microsoft is putting a lot of time and development into making their clients “Cloud Friendly”. Office 2013 is the first version that fully supports cloud storage providers.

Microsoft has graciously ~~strategically~~ provided us with built in compatibility with Skydrive. While this makes things easy to get things up and running, it makes any IT Admin experience a combination of nausea, anger, and anxiety. If you’re fortunate enough to have a sponsored, approved, supported cloud storage solution, you’ll undoubtedly want to use it.

I’ll show you how to accomplish just that in this post.

Disable Multiple Services using Powershell

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 17:00:53 -0400

Over the past few months I’ve been doing a lot of work that’s required me to get into the Services control panel on Windows Server. While it’s fairly easy to get in and change the status of one service using the windows services control panel (WIN+R, Services.msc), it gets annoying when you need to do this multiple times, and even worse if you need to take action on multiple services.

Fortunately, powershell gives us the ability to do this very easily.

Here’s how:

Use PowerShell to Update Specific AD User’s Description Field with Last Login Time

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 12:00:31 -0400

I encountered a challenge today that was fun to fix. There’s an Organizational Unit in my AD setup that has historically been used to store disabled AD objects instead of deleting them.

When an employee leaves the organization, our standard procedure is as followed:

Disable User Object
Move to separate OU (IE AD://internal.msd/disabled/users)
Update Description field with something like: Disabled by [username] on [date]
Retain user object for x amount of days, then tombstone it.

Best laid plans of mice and men… yada yada…

vCenter 5.1 – Unable to Log in to vSphere Web Client

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 19:00:30 -0400

In a new installation of vCenter 5.1, when trying to access the vSphere Web Client for the first time, you will encounter the following message:

[text]
In order for this direct link to work, you must first log in to the
vSphere Web Client at least once from https://{webclient
-host}:{webclient-https-port}.
[/text]

You can resolve this error and fix the issue using the following steps:

NetApp – Unable To Delete Snapshots (Dependency: busy, backup[n], dump)

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 19:00:05 -0400

I came across this error when a NDMP backup of a large volume failed.

To isolate the exact error and resolve the issue, I ran the following commands:

ESXi 5.1 – Regain Access to Host After Setting Wrong Default Gateway

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 16:56:03 -0400

I’ll admit – I’ve done this once or twice. Each time causes me some grief while trying to get things set up correctly.

Here’s how to fix this issue as long as you have access to the Direct Console UI or ESXi Shell.

Monitor NetApp SnapMirror via Solarwinds Server and Application Monitor

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 21:39:35 -0500

So yesterday I talked about using a Powershell script with in Solarwinds to monitor volume sizes. Using the NetApp Data ONTAP Toolkit, we have the ability to do monitor a lot of different things, and track the information using Solarwinds. In this post I will show how to monitor SnapMirror relationships using Solarwinds.

Monitor NetApp SAN via Solarwinds Server and Application Monitor

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 21:57:12 -0500

I was unable to find any examples for how to do this online, so I came up with my own solution using the NetApp Data ONTAP toolkit as well as a slight modification of your powershell profile.

Run As Different User (All the time, without holding shift!)

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 00:17:19 -0500

The title of this post has bothered me since… forever. I really don’t like to take extra steps for things I do on a regular basis…

VMware 5.1 – Virtual Machine Disks Consolidation Is Needed

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 12:44:14 -0500

I received the following message today on one of my production VM’s.

You can use these steps to resolve this issue.

Install NetApp DataOnTap Powershell

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 12:27:40 -0500

I have been using the NetApp Data ONTAP toolkit a lot lately, and I’m going to throw some tutorials on this site relating to it.

Let’s go through the steps we need to follow to get the toolkit installed on your machine.

SSH Auto Login Using Putty

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 22:17:18 -0500

I once had a person tell me that the most successful individuals in IT are lazy. Years after hearing that, the notion has stuck with me and translates into much of how I attach problems.

If you’re like me, you use putty to connect to servers via SSH frequently. Now, I know that you can use key based authentication using puttygen, but in the scenario that you don’t want to go that route, you can use the method below to create windows shortcuts to automatically log into a host using putty.

Change the Author of Multiple WordPress Posts

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 02:08:17 -0400

Disclaimer: This idea requires access to the shell on your webserver.

This is the SQL query you’ll use:

UPDATE wp_posts 
SET post_author='[NEW ID]' 
WHERE post_author='[EXISTING ID]';

I had posts that were assigned to Admin (which by default is user ID 1), and I wanted to assign them all to my user (which in this case is user ID 2).

My query looked like this:

UPDATE wp_posts 
SET post_author='2' 
WHERE post_author='1';

That will go through the posts database and update the author for all of them.

Back Again

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 00:38:41 -0400

Sometimes I wonder how the content for this blog still exists… I started this blog more than 3 years ago using Drupal, and since then I’ve converted the SQL to be used with wordpress, and had numerous problems that could have caused me to lose everything. Somehow I still have it, and I’m happy that I do.

I have to say that this version of wordpress is so much better than the version I was using before (which was 2.1)

Power Supply Need Calculator

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 15:19:37 -0400

I decided to get a new case for my main computer today, and chose a micro atx case due to the fact that I’ve always had a big case and am sick of it…

I realized that the small PSU’s that come with micro atx cases might not support my 3 HDDs and1 DVD+RW drive, so I found a great PSU need calculator that I wanted to share.

Here it is.

SSH Local Port Forwarding Made Easy

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 16:03:07 -0400

I’ve been using this for a while now, and have found it a great little trick for accessing services that are blocked due to a firewall.

It’s pretty simple, you just have a few parts to the command string. The first command argument tells ssh to forward a local port (LP) to a remote machine Remote) on a remote port (RP). The second part is something you’re probably familiar with, the destination that you’re connecting to (Destination).

Problems with AllPeers in Firefox

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 23:26:22 -0400

I found out recently, like a lot of people, that the AllPeers Firefox extension went Open Source. So naturally, I realized the hype it created and installed it.

Unfortunately, I never tested it, because none of my friends wanted to install it, so there it sat right there in my Firefox installation, dormant. It wasn’t until today that I had problems with it.

I restarted my computer today, and tried to start up Firefox, and it did nothing… So I started up the console, and started Firefox. It started starting up fine, with loading of AllPeers, then had a segmentation fault error…

Howto: Convert NRG Files to ISO Files

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 23:55:28 -0500

I recently got a couple fo CD images from a friend in the NRG format, and wanted to burn them to a couple of CD-R’s. Here’s the process I used to do this:

sudo apt-get install nrg2iso
nrg2iso original_image.nrg new_image.iso

Then just use k3b, gnomebaker, or your favorite CD Burning software to burn the ISO.

Jon

HowTo: Use Find on Linux to Execute Commands Recursively

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 03:07:18 -0500

I just used the best music player on the planet to organize my music really nicely. It organized them by filetype, first letter of artist, artist, and album. The problem was, it left some dangling folders that I wanted to delete so my library looked clean on the filesystem. So I decided to use a little bit of linux command line fun to get the folders removed.

Using AOL Instant Messenger with PHP

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 22:14:55 -0500

I’ve been looking for a while for a way to integrate PHP and AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). Up until now I haven’t found a way to do it besides the stuff Here. Fortunately, I got a little distracted in my studies and found what looks like a Dynamite OO Library Here.

Look in the future for some examples of how to use this.

Jon

Howto: Play Multimedia Files Requiring Binary (w32codecs) Codecs in Ubuntu Edgy

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 10:06:06 -0500

I’ve been trying to do this for a while, and finally this morning I came to a solution.

To do this follow the following steps:

Howto: Connect to a Wireless Access Point from Command Line in Linux

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 13:50:47 -0500

This took me a little time to figure out, so I thought I’d share it with you.

This assumes that you’re using a PCMCIA (PC Card), but it should mostly work if you are using Ndiswrapper too.

Running… or lack thereof

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 23:11:45 -0500

So over the entire summer I ran 4 times per week easily. Sometimes it was more, and sometimes it was less. I stayed on my running schedule for the first few weeks of school, but after that it got harder and harder to keep it up until i wasn’t running at all. That’s been the case for the last month or so…. until yesterday that is.

Stuff Lately

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 06:13:05 -0500

I’m starting a new category called “Personal” on this blog. I find it pretty boring just talking about tech related / howto stuff all the time. Seeing as how it’ JonHoweOnline.com and not JonHowesTechOnlyBlog.com I’m going to act accordingly.

HowTo Restore Grub Boot Password In Ubuntu Dapper

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 03:32:24 -0400

A cardinal rule with computer security is that if you have physical access to a computer, you can pretty much do whatever your heart desires to it. Luckily, this includes removing the grub password from a linux box so that you can restore the root password…

Your best course of action in doing this is to download a bootable linux cd. The one that I tested this with is a worthwhile download even if you’re just reading this for fun.

Connect Outlook to a Caldav Server

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 02:41:04 -0400

In the past I’ve used The Hula Projet as a mail server, but one thing has always lacked in terms of real production readiness in my opinion – Outlook Integration.

Juice Experimentation

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 21:27:02 -0400

I’m a big fan of Bolthouse Juices. Up until today I’ve only tried the strawberry bananna flavor. Unfortunately, I’m getting sick of that one, so I tried a new flavor, the Green Goodness flavor.

It tasted pretty good, but it definitely looked disgusting, see for yourself:

Sweet Stuff With Facebook

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 16:46:33 -0400

I was checking out my Facebook account today and noticed that they have a new thing called Notes. It seems like you can import your posts from your personal blog right into Facebook. Better yet was the fact that it was painless to do. All that I did was enter the address of this blog, and Facebook went out and grabbed my feed and imported all of the posts as Facebook Notes! Way to go again Facebook for doing some innovative stuff.

New Theme

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 23:04:12 -0400

I’m going to be experimenting with themes on here over the next week or so. Let me know what you think!

Use AIM on the Command Line

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 01:50:43 -0400

I get bored a lot. There are up sides to this and down sides to this. For some reason I decided that I wanted to find a command llne (CLI) AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) client. I found one that works great called BSFlite.

You an see an image of what it looks like at their site Here.

There aren’t any binaries for Debian or Fedora, but compiling from source was easy. Just “make” it and then copy the compiled binary to a directory like “/usr/local/bin”.

CMS Switchover

Sat, 29 Jul 2006 01:19:39 -0400

After using Drupal for almost 2 years I decided that it’s time for me to try out something different. As you can see I decided on WordPress.

I used the guide at spindrup.us to convert my database from drupal to be used with wordpress.
You can still see my drupal installation here if you want to, but there won’t be any more updates there.

Enjoy,

Jon Howe

How To Reset Your Root Password Using Grub Single User Mode

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 16:03:21 -0400

Today I was confronted by someone who lost their root password, lucky for them they were using grub as their bootloader and it wasn’t password protected. This is the default for Ubuntu, Fedora, and other distros

There are X steps to this process:

Step 1. Get into the Grub Editor
When you boot you’ll probably see a few options in your grub menu. Unless you’re sure what kernel that you want to use, select the kernel at the top of the list and press e.

I’m Okay (and so is my blog)….

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 22:13:02 -0400

Long story short:

The computer that this blog is on was up for over 220 days, and when I restarted it, things were all messed up.

The only thing that I really wanted to back up was this blog, but I was unable to dump the mysql database because I couldn’t get it (mysql) to start.

I ended up copying the raw database in /var/lib/mysql to a backup directory.

Then I went on this whole crazy journey trying to convert my drupal database to be used with wordpress…… That didn’t work too well.

Scan a File with Multiple AV Scanners at once Online

Sat, 08 Jul 2006 15:05:11 -0400

I recently got a file that could have been contaminated by some kind of a virus. I decided not to risk my newly installed, and unprotected Win 2k3 Server installation, so I found a great scanner online that scans it with multiple viruses at once.

It’s located here.

Later,
Jon Howe

Enabling Samba and SWAT on Ubuntu

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 07:37:12 -0400

I recently got an album from AllOfMP3.com on my laptop while I was away from my house, and wanted it on my desktop computer. In the past I’ve used Samba to transfer from Windows to Linux, so that’s what I did this time.

There were a couple of problems though, i didn’t have samba installed or configured because I just switched from Ubuntu Breezy to Ubuntu Dapper. Samba can be a bit of a pain to set up by hand, so that’s why I use SWAT (Samba Web Administration Tool).

Install IE6 SP1 In Linux Using Wine and then some…

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 07:32:15 -0400

I’ve recently come across the need to use Internet Explorer in linux, and decided to find a way to do it. It’s possible to just install it by hand using wine, but I wanted an easier way. This led me to WineTools.

With WineTools you can easily install a plethora of windows apps easily and automatically.

On a different note, I set up Gallery2 on this server again due to the fact that I have a nice camera now. Right now there’s just some random stuff, but soon (read: next saturday) I’ll have a lot more pictures due to the fact that I’m going backpacking during the week of the 4th of July at North Manitou Island.

Potato Burger

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 20:01:42 -0400

This is probably the cheapest recipe I know.

What you need:
1 potato
1/4 cup flour, maybe less
olive oil
any seasonings you want, I use garlic powder, salt, and pepper

Shred the potato with a cheese grater. Squeeze out some of the liquid over the sink. Mix in some flour until it’s just a sticky mess. Heat up a skillet on medium and put a few splashes of olive oil on the pan. Make some patties with the potato, and fry just like a regular burger.

HowTo: Mount Bin/Cue files in Linux

Tue, 30 May 2006 07:04:28 -0400

Okay, so I I lied a little bit. I’m not sure how to mount a straight bin/cue file combination in Linux, but I do know that it’s really easy to convert them into an ISO file, and then mount the ISO in debian based linux.

sudo apt-get install bchunk

The syntax from bchunk is as follows:
bchunk [-v] [-p] [-r] [-w] [-s]

So if i wanted to convert image,bin and image.cue into image.iso, I’d run the command:
bchunk image.bin image.cue image.iso

Take a Stand Against the Madness; Stop the RIAA!

Fri, 05 May 2006 16:37:21 -0400

From EFFs Site:

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is on a rampage, launching legal attacks against average Americans from coast to coast. After over 18,000 lawsuits and counting against P2P users, file sharing has continued to increase rapidly. Meanwhile, music fans, like 12 year-old Brianna LaHara, college student Cassi Hunt, and parent of five Cecilia Gonzalez, are being forced to pay thousands of dollars they do not have to settle RIAA-member lawsuits, and many other innocent individuals are being caught in the crossfire.

Protecting Your Server From SSH Bruteforce Attacks and Portscans

Fri, 05 May 2006 16:26:23 -0400

First of all, this entry is not being entered in Drupal 4.7, I haven’t had the time to get that set up yet.

The other day I decided to take a look at my server logs, which is something that I should have been doing all along. I found out that more than one host has been brute force / dictionary scanning my ssh server. I decided that even though my passwords are strong, that I really didn’t want people to have the ability to do that. Fortunately for me there are some tools out there that work great for this very purpose. The one that I chose is called DenyHosts.

Drupal 4.7.0 Released

Mon, 01 May 2006 09:11:38 -0400

From the Drupal Homepage:

After more than a year of development we are ready to release Drupal 4.7.0 to the world. More than five years, 13 major releases, 30+ servicing firms employing 100+ Drupal professionals, 300+ third party modules, and over 55,000+ Drupal powered sites later, Drupal 4.7.0 is finally here and it rocks!

Needless to say, I’m going to be updating this version very quickly, aka as soon as my laptop starts up. Look for the next post to be from Drupal 4.7.0!

JustBlogIt

Sat, 22 Apr 2006 07:18:00 -0400

I’m posting this from a Firefox extension called JustBlogIt. You can find it here. It puts a new item in your right-click menu and let’s you blog links and pages that you find. Only problem is, that function doesn’t work with Drupal. I’m sure it’s supposed to, but I’m not sure exactly how Drupal works, so all I can get is the page to post content.

Enable ‘Hibernation’ Support In Ubuntu

Fri, 21 Apr 2006 11:46:14 -0400

I’ve been trying to get my laptop to hibernate on and off for about a year now. Recently I found a great tutorial for Ubuntu, and other similar distros, that makes it really easy to do.

It took me about 10 minutes to get set up, minus the kernel compilation.

Here’s the tutorial that I used.

Later,
Jon Howe

uTorrent RSS

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 10:12:14 -0400

Adding a feed

Click on the RSS button, then click Add. Paste in the feed URL and hit OK. If you want to name the feed, simply type the name in front of the URL, like so:
TV Feed|http://somesite.com/rss.xml (NO SPACE BEFORE OR AFTER THE | )

Note that the RSS Downloader will NOT consume any extra resources if you have no feeds present/enabled. Some feeds do not give direct links to the .torrent files (most notably Mininova) and as such won’t work, but you can use the MiniRSS feed fixer to modify those feeds to work properly. For Mininova’s feeds, you can use MiniRSS.org

AJAX Based MySql Live Search

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 18:02:25 -0400

This is a little something that I made up this afternoon at school.

It’s an implementation of a search app with out a celing. In other words , there’s no submit button. With each keystoke that you type, the query get’s more accurate.

If you just want to check it out (with source, and an example) then Click Here
The code is commented pretty well.

If you want a little explanation read on.

How to get Logitech mice to work in Ubuntu

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 10:25:24 -0400

Most Logitech mice are connected via USB, and I have not tested this with PS/2 mice.

Open xorg.conf

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Now find the section that says something like:

Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Mouse" Driver "mouse" Option "CorePointer" Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice" Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2" Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" Option "Buttons" "7" EndSection

and comment it out by putting a # symbol in front of each line. It should look like this:

Howto: AJAX Regular Expression Email Verifier

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 23:05:13 -0500

It’s important to do form validation for obvious reasons. This is an implementation of an email checker that uses php regular expressions, and a little bet if pizzaz with asynchronous javascript and xml, or AJAX.

Here’s the example.

A quick rundown of how this works is:

You type in a string
You hit submit
The data is transfered asynchronously (without refreshing the page) to the server
The server checks to see if the email is valid or invalid
If it’s valid it tells you so, as well as if it’s not

The guts of the script are here:
if (eregi("^[a-zA-Z0-9_-.+]+@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+.[a-zA-Z0-9-_.]+$",$email)) { //return confirmation that it worked } else { //return that it didn't work }

Howto: Set Up Your Own Snort Intrusion Detection System with a Database Backend

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 11:04:10 -0500

Okay, truth told, I’m completely bored, so I’m going to write a quick tutorial on how to install and set up the Snort IDS on a Debian Sarge System (although it should work on other distros as well).

Download and Install Snort
apt-get install snort-mysql

Enter values in the following screen, but forget about the part about the database
cd /usr/share/doc/snort-mysql
mysqladmin -u -p create
zcat create_mysql.gz | mysql -u -p

HOWTO: Create a Logging Redirection Page using PHP and MYSql

Tue, 28 Mar 2006 22:13:46 -0500

Since I’ve already been on the topic of doing small beginner PHP tutorials, here’s another one. This one is pretty self explanitory.

You can see it here.

Basically what this does is let you enter a domain or page or whatever and it redirects you to the page. On top of just redirecting you, it logs all of the redirections along with the request date, and requester ip address.

If you have a need for this, you’ll most likely know how to implement it. If not, feel free, as always, to email me (howe -dot- jon -at- gmail -dot- com), and I’d be happy to help you out to the best of my abilities.

Howto: PHP Secure Download Script

Sat, 25 Mar 2006 08:10:14 -0500

I’ve been wanting to make a script in PHP that handles downloads for a while. Last night I was bored, so I made one.

DISCLAIMER:
This is a very basic example, but if you have any use for this, I’m sure that you can figure out how to use it. If not, I’ll probably work more with it in the future anyways.

This system works with two PHP files.

If you just want to see the script work, go Here.

Howto: Get a Movie from a DVD to your Sony Clie (and probably other PDA’s as well)

Wed, 08 Mar 2006 07:56:10 -0500

I’ll try to make this as simple as possible.

I’m going to assume that you’re using Linux (and that you are not a complete noob at it) for this tutorial. I will assume that you’re using a Sony Clie.

Here’s an overview of what we’re going to do:

Rip dvd using DVD:Rip
Convert ripped movie into a clie compatible format
Download and install TCPMP (free media player)
(optional) Install Memory Stick Pro fix
Copy Movie to the Memory Stick

Step 1: Download and Install Files
apt-get install dvdrip
apt-get install pilot-link
Download TCMP (for palm)
Download all attachments

Hacking the Linksys WRT54G

Mon, 27 Feb 2006 07:19:02 -0500

Recently, my Dad purchased the Linksys WRT54G. If you follow tech news, you probably know that more or less, the device (as well as at least one other Linksys device) was hacked.

All that I have so far is a couple of links, here they are:

Seattle Wireless
Shaneo
I-hacked article (good)
Openwrt
Hyperwrt
Wifi-Box
Ewrt
Sveasoft

The last one looks the most promising.

I’ll be working on this over spring break (next week), so keep an eye out for a little ‘howto’ on this.

Don’t let your daemons die

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 21:30:03 -0500

Okay, let’s pretend that this isn’t the first time that I’ve posted in about a month. School really has been crazy. I haven’t really even had time to do anything new or cool lately. Tonight though, I’m putting school aside.

I’ve been having some problems with one of the daemons on one of my server’s randomly dying on me, and it got to the point that I couldn’t bear it anymore, I had to find a solution.

Howto: Kernel Building in Debian Sarge (3.1)

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 03:36:37 -0500

I’ve tried and tried to build my own custom kernel over the past year or so, usually only to stop in frustration because of some small part of the process not working.

This is all different now.

I found out that using the took make-kpkg makes things way easier. In fact I configured, compiled, and installed kernel 2.6.15 in about 30 minutes including the time that it took me to build it.

Word Of the Day: Uber

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 21:22:58 -0500

I love the word uber, but before today I didn’t know how cool the word really is.

From wikipedia:

The word

Argh

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 05:50:02 -0500

This semester is going to be crazy.

I just got done with my first morning class in more than a half of a year and I thought that I was going to die. I didn’t really care about the fact that it was a morning class, it was more about the class itself.

My 9:30 class on Mondays and Wednesdays is Intro to Logic. The class seemed like it would be a good choice (plus it was required for my degree), but I didn’t think that it would be as boring as it was today.

Great Iptables Tool

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 20:36:41 -0500

I’ve been messing around with iptables a bit more than usual the past week or so. Through this process, I decided that it wasn’t worth it for me to keep creating / tweaking all of my rules by hand. So.. I found an Excellent (with a capital ‘E’) frontend to iptables.

For me the frontend had to meet some strict requirements.

It must have a curses graphical user interface
It must be easy to use

Something called Jay’s Iptables Fits these requirements perfectly.

Convert RPM to Deb + News

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 04:57:10 -0500

I found a few cool things this morning.

The first being a way to install a rpm file in Debian. You do this using the alien command (apt-get install alien).

To convert a package from an rpm to a deb run the following command:
alias --to-deb

To just install a rpm use the following command:
alias -i

It's that easy.

Also, I was looking at some stories on the front page of Digg, and found a Great New Library for use with Google Maps. It has the features of the one that I was messing around with earlier (I forgot the name of it). It even includes the features that I had to add inot the other library.

How To Cache Apt Packages On A Network Using Apt-Cacher

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 18:06:41 -0500

If you’ve got more than one computer running Debian that packages are downloaded through apt, then apt-cacher should help you a lot.

Apt-cacher is actually a cgi script that is run by apache. Using apt-cacher is very easy, and installing it is even easier.

Step 1: Install apt-cacher.
(Run this on the proxy computer)

apt-get install apt-cacher

Enter the webpage : http://localhost/apt-cacher
to see that the proxy is running.

Step 2: Backup and Convert Clients sources.list.
(Do this on the computers that you want to access the cache.)

Okay…

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 12:48:00 -0500

I did get something good out of this whole fiasco. When I think of it, this blog being down for a day or so is a small price to pay for the amount of knowledge that I gained relating to setting up apache, mysql, and php… Over and Over Again.

Let me know if there are problems that you see.

I’m pretty sure that mail is all screwed up because I have no mail server, or at least I hope that I don’t (I uninstalled it).

Holy Smokes Batman!!

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 09:47:28 -0500

Well that was close.

As you can probably tell, my server’s been down for about a day. A day during which almost all of my time was spent getting this server back up.

I decided to switch from Redhat based Centos 4.1 to Debian Sarge (3.1). The operating system install was extremely easy as well as the *first round* of server app installs.

I have to finish up getting the rest of this site working, but I’ll definitely post more later.

How to Use the Tor Network for Application Anonymity

Mon, 02 Jan 2006 01:54:21 -0500

The Tor Network uses something called Onion Routing. Tor’s functionality is pretty simple. You run a daemon on a computer on your network (the tor client) and it connects to a server inside the tor network. Once your transmitted packets are inside the tor network they are routed through the different servers in a way so that no server knows the complete path that a packet takes. On top of this, all transmission inside the tor network is encrypted in order to prevent Man in the Middle Attacks.

How to Set up a Complete Transparent Filtering Proxy

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 01:50:51 -0500

This tutorial works with squid versions < 2.6

Many companies find proxy servers useful for a number of reasons. For example, if a company has fairly low bandwidth and needs a cheap way to streamline the distribution of frequently accessed content, a proxy server, such as squid will help a lot. Another use of a proxy server in the business world is for what I like to call, “Employee Management”. In other words, this is for companies that want to see what their employees are viewing on the internet. They can also be used by companies that have less than perfect infrastructures and need to have a way to take one connection to the internet and spread it to many computers.

Craaaazy Stuff

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 10:33:54 -0500

So last night I decided to take windows off of my laptop. This probably should have been easy. However, when is anything ever easy? When I woke up this morning I found out that in the middle of the night, during my net-install, the network cord came unplugged.

Apparently when you unplug the network cable during a Debian Netinstall the installer stops downloading the remaining packages and sets up what you have.

How to Script the Unattended Retrieval of Remote Files using SCP

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 17:22:52 -0500

In one of my previous posts I told how to create a package that’s contents is dumped from the database, archived, encrypted, and put into a public directory.

I also mentioned that a potential security flaw on this system was that someone with enough time and processing power could decrypt your package and get all of it’s contents.

I thought about this and decided that I wanted a better way. So, I found a way to script an unattended / secure connection between the remote computer and the client computer using SCP and SSH keys.

Wow

Sun, 18 Dec 2005 08:32:33 -0500

So, as most people know, the Xbox360 was recently released. With this came the hope to upgrade from the Xbox to the newer version.

I’m not much of a gamer anymore, but I did always want an Xbox, (mainly for the opportunity to mod it). So, I went onto Ebay and found an Xbox in perfect working condition for under 100 dollars and purchased it.

We’ll see what happens with the modding part, because the Mod chip that I want to get runs around 75 bucks for a solder-less connection. I’m pretty sure that I could solder one on myself, but I don’t want to take the chance of messing up the first console that I’ve ever owned.

Chkconfig like program in Debian

Fri, 16 Dec 2005 08:05:46 -0500

I started out in Linux using Fedora, which is Redhat based. One of the indespensible tools that I used was called chkconfig. Basically what chkconfig does in Redhat based systems is allow the user to control what daemons start at boot time. This is useful for starting that annoying daemon that you always need or stopping the pesky one that always bothers you.

I used this a ton, and then I switched to Debian, and my whole world turned upside down. (some exaggeration intended)

How to Back up a MYSql Database for Simple Offsite Storage

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 13:04:54 -0500

For those of you who have been reading this blog for a while you that in the past I’ve had some problems keeping this server up and running for any amount of time.

This got old because every time that my server died, I’d loose all of my blog posts, which stinks because there’s usually a ton of them.

To combat this ever threatning possibility, I decided to write a bash script for linus that does a few things:

How to Mount a Samba share to your Computer in Linux

Wed, 14 Dec 2005 09:48:01 -0500

This is something that I’ve been wanting to do for some time. It’s just this morning that I actually decided to do it. It’s pretty simple.

This small tutorial is based upon the assumption that you already have a samba share set up. However, if you don’t, then keep posted, because I’ll talk about that in a later tutorial. Also, It’s based upon the assumption that you have the samba client and sambafs installed. In debian all that you have to do to install this is type in the following line:
apt-get install smbfs smbclient

Two Things

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 00:33:34 -0500

First thing:

I just got Google adsense setup here. My contract forbids me from asking you to click on the links, so don’t click on the links if you don’t want to. Just know, I’m a poor college student and clicking a link is easy : ).

Second thing:

You HAVE to check out Pandora. It’s part of the Music Genome project, which was created to analyze music. I know, I know, sounds boring so far doesn’t it.

Problems when running apt-get on Debian

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 22:27:57 -0500

I’ve been having some problems using apt-get lately which led me to doing an apt-get dist-upgrade.

Smart me found this command on the internet and decided to use it. It worked just fine, except for the fact that when I restarted my computer the graphical display manager that I use didn’t start.

Here’s the steps that I took to diagnose the problem.

I tried to start gdm instead of kdm by editing'/etc/X11/default-display-manager'. This file contains the path to your display manager, for me it was '/usr/bin/kdm'
I tried changing that to '/usr/bin/gdm' and I received an X server error saying that my chosen X server (XFree86) was not found.I thought that this was a little funny because I didn’t think that I used XFree86, but Xorg instead.
So, I looked at the file '/etc/X11/X', which is a symbolic link (which is like a shortcut in windows) and found out that in the upgrade it changed the link to point to a nonexistent file.
After that I changed the link to point to '/usr/bin/X11/Xorg' and voila, kdm started up just fine.More Later,
Jon Howe

How to Create a PDF Document from PHP

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 01:22:58 -0500

In this project that I’ve been messing with, I’ve come across the need to convert dynamic PHP output to a PDF.

Suprisingly, this is a pretty easy process thanks to DomPDF.

Boy is this ever hard.

Check it out below!
(Reminder – you’re going to need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader for this to work, seeing as how thi s is a PDf generator. You probably already have it, but in case you don’t, here it is.

Registration Now Open to Everyone

Sat, 03 Dec 2005 14:37:00 -0500

I just opened up registration to everyone that wants to join the site. There will be some member specific content / features coming soon, so register now and be notified when new features are available.

Later,
Jon Howe

Useful Web Tool from Microsoft

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 22:16:21 -0500

I’ve been working on a couple of new projects that are really javascript intensive, and have been banging my head because of problems with getting scripts working in all browsers.

The odds of me finding a tool to help by Microsoft of all companies is astounding to me, because of my feelings towards them.

I found a tool, which works only in internet explorer (Located Here) that is helping me out a lot.

eyeOS

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 20:34:35 -0500

EyeOS is amazing. You have to see it for yourself.

http://eyeos.gstutor.com/

Username: demo, Password: demo

I wished that this day would never come

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 13:12:54 -0500

A friend of mine finally convinced me to make a (dum dum dum) myspace account. So far I hate it. There’s no point for me to use it except for the fact that it’s a good way to meet people. Random people that is.

Today some random chick asked me to add her to my friends list, or however you say that.. I was like, “uh, okay”. Whatever, I guess that’s what it’s for.

Things I’ve learned

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 19:12:54 -0500

My last two days have been for lack of a better word, educational.

I know that I’ve been raving about how Hula is so awesome, and it truly is. A few days ago however, I found a new mail server called Zimbra. Zimbra is Seriously Awesome. It’s got a ton of AJAX built in. I can’t say how awesome it “looked”. Okay, enough on how great it is.

Zimbra looked good enough that I decided to install it on my personal server, which this blog runs on as well. When I actually installed it I went through the normal installation procedure, and started up the server. I saw how sweet the admin interface was, and then decided to post here how awesome it is.

Website Progress

Wed, 09 Nov 2005 07:58:12 -0500

The website that I mentioned earlier is almost done, all that has to be done is make a minor addition to it, which should be done by Friday.

Next week I’ll be doing some pretty heavy quality testing to make sure that everything works as it should. After that I’ll have a link up for you to check it out, and a temporary account for you to use.

I’m really liking web design / programming. I actually have another project in mind already. I really can’t talk about it, but here’s a hint and a request for help: “Does anyone know an aircraft pilot?”.

Hula is Shaping up to be Awesome

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 20:05:17 -0500

I upate hula one time per week from the Subversion tree. You can find instructions on how to do this in linux at The Hula Blog.

Each time that I update my source code using subversion I get updated versions of the new web prototypes. I put them here so that you can see them.

They’re not going to work completely yet because of the fact that they’re just prototypes.

More Later,
Jon Howe

I’m gonna miss the good ol’ days

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 14:11:16 -0500

What old days you might ask. My answer to that would be the days where windows was under the crosshairs of virus writers and worm writers.

While it wasn’t always completely one sided, things do seem to be changing a little bit.

See CNET’s Article.

Later.
Jon Howe

News / Ideas

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 08:12:54 -0500

I decided after reading all of chapter 2 and part of chapter 3 in my AJAX book that I need to learn Javascript better before I go further with AJAX, because It’s based on Javascript. Fortunately I have a really good Javascript book that I’m about 1/8’th of the way done with.

As for news…

I’m working on a ton of features daily on this site that I’m making (which I could still use some testers (Email me) for. One feature that’s been annoying me, as I’ve been trying to implement it is the functionality to have the site remember someone after they log out.

Notification to Everyone that reads this

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 03:10:58 -0500

From now on, everyone is to call the thing that has the buttons that they use with their right hand to control a cursor on a computer a “clicky clicky”.

It’s a way better name… no seriously.

later,
Jon Howe

New Idea

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 22:53:07 -0500

I just got a new book on Ajax, which is an exploding method of creating code using a combination of Javascript, CSS, DOM, and xhtmlrequest.

That’s a bunch of technical junk I guess. The main point is that it allows you to do really cool things on a webpage without refreshing the whole page.

I’m going to try to read a chapter in it each day, if not one day then every two days, and post comments and maybe code examples (if I feel creative) as well.

Happy Halloween

Mon, 31 Oct 2005 15:18:28 -0500

Happy Halloween!

yeah, happy halloween. That’s all I got

Peace,
Jon Howe

Web Design

Mon, 31 Oct 2005 15:10:52 -0500

So over the past few months I’ve been working on a website for someone. The website’s going to be used sort of as a utility website for employees at car dealerships around Michigan.

I haven’t mentioned a lot about it, because it’s not quite ready yet, and it’s a bit secretive at this point.

However, it is coming along pretty well at this point. The user interface is done (for the most part), and a new site design is being made by someone that is very good at making site designs. All that has to happen is a calculation has to be transferred from one language into the language that the site is in.

Argh

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 09:04:54 -0400

Once again, it’s early, and I’m up.

This time I’m going to Lansing with the family to see my Grandparents on my Mom’s side.

The MP3 Player’s ready to go for the car ride, now I just have to stay awake at the restaraunt.

More later,
Jon Howe

Great weekend so far

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 23:19:09 -0400

This weekend has been pretty productive for me.

So far I’ve done two things that have been daunting for me to complete in the past:

Install Nvidia Driver for linux
Get TwinView (dual monitor as one display) support working as well.

Now all that I have to do is find a way to let the cord for the second monitor stretch to my computer from my desk.

I have to get up at 8 tomorrow, so I need to get to bed.

New Toy

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 13:55:18 -0400

So a few days ago my motherboard died, which stunk. Fortunately I have a laptop where I can do schoolwork, but that still doesn’t mean that I didn’t need to get a replacement motherboard.

So I went to Newegg.com and bought a decent Asus one.

I’m using Debian GNU/Linux as my primary operating system, and before installing the new motherboard I was Sure (just like in Windows) that I’d have to reinstall the operating system in order for it to load.

All Hope Is Lost!! / News

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 07:49:51 -0400

Gmail is down! What am I to do. I’m lost.

Other than that…

It’s really early, and I’m up, thanks to the fact that I went to bed, well, really early. I have a speech due on Thursday at 5:45 PM that I have to get done. My goal is to knock most of that out today.

I’ve been using this free open source email server that is really nice called Hula-Project. Novell Helped out the Hula-project by releasing a ton of it’s source code for the projects use. While the project isn’t in a full release state yet, the beginnings of it (which I have been running with no problem for months) have been working fine.

News

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 19:12:51 -0400

Okay, so I decided that doing a “command of the day” every Monday is a little bit boring. I’ll find some commands every once in a while that I find interesting.

About the Podcast:
Everything is set to start recording except one thing. We don’t have a time that we can get together. So, we are still interested in doing it, it’s just a little hard right now.

More Later,
Jon Howe

Command of the week #4

Mon, 03 Oct 2005 21:43:53 -0400

This week’s command is: uname

This command is used to list out miscellaneous information about your system.
The syntax is as follows: uname [OPTION]...

I usually use this to find out exactly what kernel release I’m using. (no, I’m not geeky enough to memorize each kernel that I use)

Here’s the usage (taken from the console with modification):
-a, --all print all information, in the following order: -s, --kernel-name print the kernel name (for me this prints Linux) -n, --nodename print the hostname of your computer -r, --kernel-release print the kernel release number -v, --kernel-version print the kernel version -m, --machine print the machine hardware name (for me this prints i686) -o, --operating-system print the operating system --help display this help and exit --version output version information and exit

Great alternative to AIM Express

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 18:39:37 -0400

If you’re ever on campus and “need” to use chat with someone please restrain yourself from using AIM Express and use Meebo instead. It is a great web based solution that uses AJAX.

Check It Out!
More Later,
Jon Howe

The Greatest Technical Definition of All Time. Period.

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 16:43:57 -0400

This is awesome, Check it out. w00t!

Command of the week #3

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 16:30:15 -0400

This week’s command is: useradd.

This command is used to add new users to your linux system. The syntax is as follows:
useradd [options] [user]

The following was taken from a great site for learning about linux commands(ss64.com) and will further explain the command:

OPTIONS
-c comment Comment field.

-d dir Home directory.
The default is to use user as the directory name
under the home directory specified with the -D option.

Quote of the Day

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 22:18:03 -0400

“The child who eats too many marbles doesn’t grow up to have children of his own.”

High Resolution Picture of Hurricane Rita

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 10:40:44 -0400

Wow, this is crazy. Here it is

New Podcast Coming Soon

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 11:36:28 -0400

Kyle and I are going to be starting a podcast in the near future called Cit3.

We’ll be talking about anything related to the previous week.

More about this later,
Jon Howe

Command of the week #2

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 21:01:14 -0400

This week’s command is: alias

This command is great. In short it allows you to create Pseudo commands.

For example, on the server that this site runs on (my server), I regularly need to check to see what connections my computer has initiated, and what services they’re through. I do this using the linux command netstat using the following command line string: “netstat -pan | grep tcp“. Since I’m not doing this blog on netstat I will not explain that to you. If you have any questions, just comment on this post below and either me(Jon) or Kyle will attempt to explain it to you.

Command of the week #1.5

Sun, 18 Sep 2005 23:46:52 -0400

Alright, I told you that I’d be posting another quickie on screen so here it is.

There’s not much more to talk about that’s relevant, except for one piece.

Restoring from saved sessions:
In order to view the saved sessions enter screen -r. you should be presented with a list of available sessions.
To restore a session enter the following command: screen -r SESSION_NAME.

That’s pretty much all that you need to know.

International Talk Like A Pirate Day

Fri, 16 Sep 2005 00:01:21 -0400

The guys at The Original Talk Like A Pirate Day Site have created thier own holiday. Talk like a pirate on Monday, September 19. This’ll be my first year taking part in it, and I’m sure I’ll have fun. Who knows… you might too.

Kyle Smith

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 23:37:10 -0400

A friend of mine is going to be posting stuff up here periodically. His name’s Kyle Smith. He’s a smart guy, and should make some good contributions to the site.

Gallery 2.0 is Released!

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 12:53:50 -0400

From The Gallery Website

“We are incredibly pleased to announce the release of Gallery 2.0! Over three years of design and development have gone into creating the best online photo management product possible. Gallery 2.0 is the natural successor to Gallery 1, and we hope that you like what you see. Don’t wait, download Gallery 2 now!”

I just installed it, and it was a breeze, I should have a link up here in a little bit.

Command of the week #1

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 20:55:32 -0400

This week’s command is: screen

I actually just found this command recently. It’s a great little treasure that expands the use of unix in a huge way. Let me explain.

For those of you who don’t know, Unix uses a CLI (or Command Line Interface), meaning that there are no “windows” or “X” boxes to close the windows, it’s all handeled by the keyboard and text on the screen.

Multitasking is critical with computers, and until recently, I’ve been cheating by opening up separate windows in my SSH (or Secure Shell) client. This can be a little bit tiring because you have to connect to the server each time you make a new window.

New tradition

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 20:50:58 -0400

A new JonHoweOnline.com tradition is being formed. Every Monday, I’ll be introducing a new *nix command.

Feel free to leave me comments about the commands. Maybe you think that you know a better way to do something, maybe you think that this command stinks. Let me know!

Later,
Jon Howe