Skip to content

{ Category Archives } Computers

Cable Modem problems resolved, I hope

I have been having a problem with my cable modem losing signal strength and then either regaining it, or being unable to establish connection and rebooting automatically for a while now. It has been very frustrating. I could see errors like these in the Cable Modem’s logs at http://192.168.100.1 (most Cable Modems have a local-only […]

A personal message about the importance of backing up your data

Woo hoo! Time Machine to the rescue. My personal laptop, work laptop, and Dreamhost shell account all auto-sync a few personal data files of very useful data between them… This morning I corrupted one instance and that corruption was synchronized, wiping out all the work in all three locations… Thankfully I have two redundant backup […]

Microsoft Surface Studio, impressive!

Microsoft announced a new desktop computer yesterday, and I confess I usually am in the habit of ignoring Microsoft announcements because they typically offer nothing I am interested in; but yesterday’s announcement is stunning and ground breaking. The new Surface Studio is the first Microsoft product I actually want since Photosynth launched in 2008… Microsoft […]

Firefox 49.0.2 update – beware…

So apparently the new Firefox update (49.0.2) overwrites your cert8.db file – for many people that does not matter; but if you have a lot of self-signed certs and internal to your company certificates to trust this is a catastrophe unless you backed up your cert8.db or can get another from your corporate IT folks. […]

The importance of good examples in coding and configuration files

My employer has chosen to use DataDog for some of it’s monitoring, and I have been having a really hard time getting simple process monitoring to work reliably. Turns out that the process.yaml file syntax used by DataDog agents is very dependent on Python language psutil calls, and there is quite a difference between single […]

Tagged ,

Dispicable and predatory practices by corporations (Microsoft)

This is nauseating… https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/67367/upgradegate-microsofts-upgrade-deceptions-undermining-windows-10 I was annoyed by Apple’s pushy iOS 9.3.2 upgrade pressure; but this is way beyond anything Apple has done so far…

Tagged , , ,

Adding a MediaWiki to BananaPi

In previous post I covered how to stand up CentOS 7 on BananaPi: https://blog.scottnolan.org/2016/03/16/bananapi-server-running-centos-7-linux/ This is how to add Apache, PHP, MariaDB and MediaWiki to a BananaPi. Install a bunch of software: yum -y install httpd php php-mysql php-gd php-xml mariadb-server mariadb First, set up the database: systemctl start mariadb mysql_secure_installation disable anonymous users enforce […]

Caching BIND name server on BananaPi

I previously covered how to install CentOS 7 Linux and NTPD on BananaPi here: https://blog.scottnolan.org/2016/03/16/bananapi-server-running-centos-7-linux/ This post is how to install BIND name server for caching DNS on BananaPi. Install and enable the BIND software: yum -y install bind bind-chroot systemctl enable named.service Go get a root hints file: yum -y install wget wget –user=ftp […]

BananaPi server running CentOS 7 Linux

I enjoy tinkering with small, energy-efficient servers. My latest toy is a LeMaker BananaPi (RaspberryPi clone, but with eSATA and gigabit ethernet). Grab a CentOS 7 for ARM image from http://mirror.centos.org/altarch/7/isos/armhfp/, mine happens to be CentOS-Userland-7-armv7hl-Minimal-1511-BananaPi.img Stuff that onto an SD card (mine is 16GB, but this should work even smaller) using dd commands. Insert […]

Splunk Forwarder on BananaPi

I have been tinkering with a nifty little RaspberryPi clone made by Lemaker and called BananaPi (basically a RaspberryPi model B with 1 gigabyte memory, eSATA connector, and gigabit ethernet). It’s the size of a deck of playing cards in it’s clear acrylic case, and runs CentOS 7 Linux server operating system. I have it […]