Andrew Fore

Lately I have been dipping my toe into the pool of home automation and smarthome technologies.  While I have been interested in having a smarthome ever since I watched my first few episodes of the SyFy channel show Eureka.  My interest was advanced even more by Google I/O 2016 and the demo of Google Assistant.

So a few months ago I ventured into this new world of technology (new for me at least) cautiously by purchasing a pair of the LIFX White 800 smart bulbs that were on sale at Walmart due to the release of the LIFX Generation 3 A19.

I found that the Android app was very easy to configure, and that I could easily add the light bulbs to multiple Android devices.  I was disappointed to find that they were not immediately compatible Siri on my wife’s iPhone due to the lack of a suitable homekit bridge/hub.  This was remedied easily enough by configuring the open-source NodeJS server homebridge and a plugin (homebridge-lifx-lan or homebridge-lifx)  to connect the light bulbs to the Apple Home application.

Adding the lightbulbs to the LIFX app on my Pixel was fairly straight forward and went off without a hitch.

I have found the light bulbs easy enough to manage.  The hue range and brightness are quite suitable for the application, namely the nightstand lights in the master bedroom and I would definitely recommend these to anyone that doesn’t have a need for more than just white led light bulbs.

I recently re-built my work laptop to run openSUSE due to continual crashes of GNOME Shell on my Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 spin.  One of the apps that we use at work is Atlassian’s HipChat client.  HipChat has an artifactory repo where you can download the rpm bundle for use on CentOS, openSUSE, Fedora, etc.  After installing the client I was presented with a blank screen on launching the app.

I tried the flag to disable the GPU support, as I had seen that as one solution for a few Ubuntu users, but that wasn’t the solution.

What I was seeing in the logs turned out to not be an issue with the GPU, but an issue with the built-in version of Qt5.  It turns out that there is a bug with respect to running 32-bit sandboxed apps on a 64-bit OS.

/qwebengine/qtwebengine/src/3rdparty/chromium/sandbox/linux/seccomp-bpf-helpers/sigsys_handlers.cc:**CRASHING**:seccomp-bpf failure in syscall 0281

The solution is to add the following value to the arguments passed in on line 4 of the QtWebEngineProcess file located in the /opt/HipChat4/bin directory of the HipChat install:

--disable-seccomp-filter-sandbox

Thanks to the Arch Linux user falstaff_ch for putting this in a comment on the Arch Linux AUR entry page.

If you ran across my previous post about disabling the Proxmox no subscription pop-up, you might also be wondering why you get an alert on the console regarding the scheduled update job.  The reason that this shows up is that the apt-get update job returns an error code for one of the Proxmox Enterprise repos.

The fix is relatively simple, just reconfigure your sources.list.d contents to not have the pve-enterprise repo, but instead to have the pve-no-subscription repos enabled instead.  The wiki has a nice article on the various package repos used for Proxmox.

Please note that the entry for the pve-no-subscription repo merges the sources.list and the sources.list.d file into one.

During the installation and setup of my new Solaris 11 Automated Installer host, I ran into a situation where even though I was specifying both the origin to remove AND the origin to add, the OS refused to allow me to perform both options in the same command.  While you should be able do this, I ended up having to remove the default system configured publisher and then adding the new local IPS repository as the publisher.

This is what the default publisher was configured for:

[email protected]:~# pkg publisher PUBLISHER TYPE STATUS P LOCATION solaris origin online F http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release/ [email protected]:~# pkg publisher solaris

            Publisher: solaris
                Alias: 
           Origin URI: http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release/
              SSL Key: None
             SSL Cert: None
          Client UUID: 
      Catalog Updated: October  6, 2015 02:41:00 PM 
              Enabled: Yes

Here is the command that was part of the Oracle guide How to Get Started Customizing and Configuring Systems Using the Automated Installer in Oracle Solaris 11.1 which didn’t work for me:

[email protected]:~# pkg set-publisher –G '*' -g http://10.202.46.80 solaris
pkg set-publisher: only one publisher name may be specified
Usage:
        pkg set-publisher [-Ped] [-k ssl_key] [-c ssl_cert]
            [-g origin_to_add|--add-origin=origin_to_add ...]
            [-G origin_to_remove|--remove-origin=origin_to_remove ...]
            [-m mirror_to_add|--add-mirror=mirror_to_add ...]
            [-M mirror_to_remove|--remove-mirror=mirror_to_remove ...]
            [-p repo_uri] [--enable] [--disable] [--no-refresh]
            [--reset-uuid] [--non-sticky] [--sticky]
            [--search-after=publisher]
            [--search-before=publisher]
            [--search-first]
            [--approve-ca-cert=path_to_CA]
            [--revoke-ca-cert=hash_of_CA_to_revoke]
            [--unset-ca-cert=hash_of_CA_to_unset]
            [--set-property name_of_property=value]
            [--add-property-value name_of_property=value_to_add]
            [--remove-property-value name_of_property=value_to_remove]
            [--unset-property name_of_property_to_delete]
            [--proxy proxy to use]
            [publisher]

I tried several different variations of the one line command, however I was met with the same lack of success. In order to achieve the desired result where the local IPS repository was set up for publisher name solaris I had to do an unset of the existing repo and then a set to configure my new repo.

[email protected]:~# pkg unset-publisher solaris Updating package cache 1/1 [email protected]:~# pkg publisher PUBLISHER TYPE STATUS P LOCATION [email protected]:~# pkg set-publisher -g http:// solaris [email protected]:~# pkg publisher PUBLISHER TYPE STATUS P LOCATION solaris origin online F http:/// [email protected]:~# pkg publisher solaris

            Publisher: solaris
                Alias: 
           Origin URI: http:///
              SSL Key: None
             SSL Cert: None
          Client UUID: 
      Catalog Updated: October  6, 2015 07:45:07 PM 
              Enabled: Yes

According to the FileZilla FAQ:

FileZilla is free open-source software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License free of charge.
Basically this means that everyone, including corporate entities, can use FileZilla, including but not limited to private, educational and commercial use.

When you install it you have to opt out of at least one, if not two, bundling offers.  While many installers provide you the opportunity to install a bundled offer, I really think that if you are releasing the software as open-source under the GPL, then you should embrace the spirit of the license and make the included bundles opt-in.  And why you are at it, maybe you could add a section to the FAQ on what the funds for the bundles and the website sponsors are used for.

If you have just installed the most recent release of the virtualization platform Proxmox, you might have noticed the that steps to disable the subscription pop-up dialog have changed, well, other than actually purchasing a subscription, I suppose.  I have chosen to not purchase a subscription for the same reason I don’t have one for VMware’s vSphere Hypervisor, I am not running this in a production setting that requires paid support or premium features. The following steps will disable the subscription pop-up.

Backup the javascript file

The pop-up contents, and whether or not are displayed, are controlled by a function in a javascript file.  The first step should always be to make a backup, just in case Murphy rings your doorbell.

[email protected]:~# cd /usr/share/pve-manager/js/ [email protected]:/usr/share/pve-manager/js# cp -p pvemanagerlib.js pvemanagerlib.js_backup

Edit the javascript file

Open the pvemanagerlib.js file in your favorite editor.  If this is a vanilla, unmodified installation, skip to line 850.  If this is not the first time that you have edited the file, search for the first occurrence of the following snippet, which will be in the function that we need to alter:

gettext('No valid subscription')

The text of the check for the function should be altered so that the conditional for the check reads as follows:

before

if (data.status !== 'Active') {

after

if (false) {

Notes

As I stated in the original paragraph, the specifics apply to v. 5.1-3 and that the location of the file has changed from previous versions.  A good way to find the file is to use the locate command, which you will have to install first:

[email protected]:~# apt-get update Ign:1 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stretch InRelease Get:2 http://security.debian.org stretch/updates InRelease [94.3 kB] Get:3 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stretch Release [118 kB] Get:4 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stretch Release.gpg [2,434 B] Get:5 http://security.debian.org stretch/updates/main amd64 Packages [374 kB] Get:6 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stretch/main amd64 Packages [7,122 kB] Get:7 http://security.debian.org stretch/updates/main Translation-en [165 kB] Get:8 http://security.debian.org stretch/updates/contrib amd64 Packages [1,776 B] Get:9 http://security.debian.org stretch/updates/contrib Translation-en [1,759 B]  [email protected]:~# apt-get install mlocate Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following NEW packages will be installed: mlocate 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 85 not upgraded. Need to get 96.5 kB of archives. After this operation, 495 kB of additional disk space will be used. Get:1 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stretch/main amd64 mlocate amd64 0.26-2 [96.5 kB] Fetched 96.5 kB in 0s (315 kB/s) Selecting previously unselected package mlocate. (Reading database ... 40185 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack .../mlocate_0.26-2_amd64.deb ... Unpacking mlocate (0.26-2) ... Setting up mlocate (0.26-2) ... update-alternatives: using /usr/bin/mlocate to provide /usr/bin/locate (locate) in auto mode Adding group `mlocate' (GID 115) ... Done. Processing triggers for man-db (2.7.6.1-2) ... [email protected]:~# updatedb [email protected]:~# locate pvemanagerlib.js
/usr/share/pve-manager/js/pvemanagerlib.js
/usr/share/pve-manager/js/pvemanagerlib.js_backup

As you can see the mlocate package makes finding the file so much easier.

Recently I acquired an EdgeRouter X from Ubiquiti Networks to handle the routing and firewall functions of my home network.  This was prompted by a desire to separate each of my network functions to individual components and to get a better piece of equipment than the run-of-the-mill Comcast rental gear.

After configuring the equiment and updating to the latest firmware, I decided to also configure my network DNS to flow through OpenDNS instead of Comcast DNS.  This also allowed me to configure content filtering so that my grandchildren wouldn’t accidentally get shuffled into some crazy website instead of Disney Junior.

The steps to configure this are not quit as simple as on some other setups.  OpenDNS didn’t have any instructions on this and sent inquiring users to the Ubiquiti Community Forums.  Here is the method that I used:

Step One – Open main system configuration

In the main windows of the web interface for the EdgeRouter X, click on the System button towards the bottom left of the window. This will bring up the main system configuration screen.

Step Two – Configure the System Name Server values

Add the first OpenDNS IP address in the visible field.  Click the Add New button to add a second field, then enter the second OpenDNS IP address into that field.  Scroll down to the bottom of the System settings and click the Save button.

Step Three – Login to the command line interface

In the upper right section of the admin interface, click on the CLI button to open a window to the command line interface (aka cli).  When the window opens, login using the same username and password you use for the web interface (Security Tip: please take the time to change the password from the default…)

Step Four – Update the DNS Fowarding

After logging into the cli, you need to enter the following commands:

configure
set service dns forwarding system
commit
save
exit
exit

What this does is to alter the functionality of the built-in DNS forwarding service to use the system name server values instead of the values from your ISP source (in my case an Arris SB6190 cable modem connected to Comcast).

After you have completed the above steps, then you can easily control the content filtering on your network using the OpenDNS tools.

At work we use Atlassian JIRA as our  ticket system internally between the various teams.  I have various widget setup to watch predefined JIRA filters on my dashboard, however I wanted to be able to sort the widget content by multiple columns.

By default the filter only sorts on a single column, however you can add a second sort by using Atlassian query language syntax like so:

assignee = afore AND resolution = Unresolved ORDER BY priority DESC, updatedDate DESC

example of the filter after applying the new sort order

Today I embarked on my voyage to refurbish and restore to working order all my unused technology gadgets that I have let gather dust in my closet.  The first of these is my HP ENVY 8 Note Windows Tablet.

I purchased this quite some time ago when I was using Windows Mobile 10 for a phone platform and converted most everything in my personal arsenal over to Windows land.

At some point I installed Ubuntu on the tablet as well as Arch Linux on it, but today I wanted to restore it back to it’s original OS.  Thanks to Smays Micro USB Ethernet Adapter and USB hub combo, I was able to connect a USB keyboard, mouse and USB thumb drive to it in order to perform a normal clean install of Windows 10 onto the tablet.

After installing all the available OS updates and the available app updates from the Microsoft Store the tablet is as good as new, in fact it actually works better than the original installs, which is likely a testament to the continued development by the coders at MS.

Today when attempting to figure out why Google Hangouts would not start on my Mac after the application was re-enabled due to a permissions change, I noticed a large number of messages like the following:

6/10/15 10:20:14.000 AM kernel[0]: Google Chrome He (map: 0xffffff804da160f0) triggered DYLD shared region unnest for map: 0xffffff804da160f0, region 0x7fff99a00000->0x7fff99c00000. While not abnormal for debuggers, this increases system memory footprint until the target exits.

After some research I found that this is a reported issue in the bug tracker for Chromium.  At first I thought that maybe this was the cause of the problem I was having but that turned out to not be the case, simply removing the Hangouts app in Chrome and re-adding it fixed my issue.  However, the sheer number of these errors makes the log a bit unwieldy.  It turns out that there is a way to hide all these messages (thanks to the commenter in the Chromium bug thread!):

[code language=”bash” light=”true”]sudo sysctl -w vm.shared_region_unnest_logging=0[/code]

While it doesn’t help at all with Chrome’s memory issues or other UI issues on Mac OS X, it is rather nice to hide all those spurious messages from the system log.