the foremind

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.

January 8, 2017October 4, 2015 by Andrew Fore

Editorial Note: Apparently Comcast really would prefer that people not use the term data cap when referring to the limitations being placed on their customers data usage and would much rather prefer that we use the term data usage plan or data threshold, however, I don’t really care. 🙂

Dear Comcast,

I would like to go on record as saying that you suck.  I recognize that you are a for profit company and that you would like to make a profit on the services that you provide.  I even think that having your company make a profit is a good thing because that enables you to pay your employees so that they can put food on their tables and afford to pay the fees for their children to participate in Little League baseball and other such childhood activities.

Your data usage cap system is bogus.  According to the data available on your own website you have eight (8) different trial markets where you have rolled out data caps since 2012:

• August 1, 2012: Nashville, Tennessee – 300GB cap
• October 1, 2012: Tucson, Arizona – 3 tiers (300GB, 350GB, 600GB)
• August 22, 2013: Fresno, California – Economy Plus option added
• September 1, 2013: Savannah, Georgia; Central Kentucky; Jackson, Mississippi – 300GB
• October 1, 2013: Mobile, Alabama; Knoxville, Tennessee.
• November 1, 2013: Huntsville, Alabama; Augusta, Georgia; Tupelo, Mississippi; Charleston, South Carolina; Memphis, Tennessee – 300GB cap
• December 1, 2013: Atlanta, Georgia; Maine – 300GB cap
• October 1, 2015: Fort Lauderdale, the Keys and Miami, Florida – 300GB cap plus $30 option for increasing to  unlimited

In fact, your page on this even refers to these as “trial start dates” which to a reasonably minded person would imply that they have an end date as well, however to the best of my knowledge (as well as the comments made by a customer support representative) there is no plan to end these trials OR any plan to actually collapse them into a single cohesive plan that applies to your entire service.

Read moreDear Comcast: You Suck

Categories Uncategorized Tags comcast, General, Personal, Uncategorized, usage cap 2 Comments

I recently rebuilt my Plex Media Server box as a CentOS 7 VM running on Hyper-V on a Windows Server 2012 setup.

When I installed the rpm and started the service I found that I was unable to load the interface on my desktop. I knew that it was running because I installed netstat and I was able to see the port was open for traffic and I was also able to load the interface locally in lynx on the server.

Read moreCreating a firewalld service for Plex Media Server

As the new year broke upon us just over two weeks ago, I found myself wondering what resolutions I should make to improve myself during the next twelve months.  In the past I have made resolutions about inconsequential things like reading more books or taking more photos.  I even tried to participate in a photo a day and managed to make it through two months before giving up.

Read moreStarting anew in 2015 – a resolution

There is an adage that you should vote with your wallet when you are unhappy with a particular business or their practices.  Do we do this as much as we should?  Probably not.

Taking this to heart,  I have decided that I will try to apply this to the usage of my electronics and gadget stuff.  So the first thing I chose to do was to switch my domain registration from using NameCheap to using Hover.  There were several usage reasons, like support for the TOTP/HOTP system for two-factor authentication instead of relying on SMS messages.

But there are some other reasons, like the support for causes that I feel are worthwhile.  Here are just a few that Hover is a patron of:

• She++
• Ladies Learning Code
• Revision Path

So if you own a domain or two, or you work somewhere that does, think about switching your registration to Hover and help support not only your account’s security but also some great organizations.

Gratuitous Recommendation Link: https://hover.com/Ems0HmPv

Full disclosure: I work at Web.com and they are the parent company of Register.com and Networksolutions.com, two really large domain registration companies, but I still prefer Hover.

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.

While logging into one of the Linux jump boxes at work today, it occurred to me that while I recently got notified about my password expiration from our Active Directory farm, I had no idea when my Linux password would expire or what the password life was.

To find out this information you can easily use the chage command.

Here is what the output looks like:

[code language=”bash”][[email protected] ~]$ chage -l user Last password change : Apr 09, 2015 Password expires : Jul 08, 2015 Password inactive : never Account expires : never Minimum number of days between password change : 1 Maximum number of days between password change : 90 Number of days of warning before password expires : 7

[/code]

It may seem like such a simple thing to do, but knowing when your password expires can be a lifesaver on occasion.

In my day job as a Systems Engineer I frequently find myself switching between different UNIX and Linux distributions.  While many of the commands exist on both sides of the aisle, I often find vast differences in the command line parameters that can be consumed by a given command when used in, for example, Linux vs Solaris.

Recently I came upon this again with the need to easily ferret out the majority consumer of drive space on a Solaris 10 system.  While we did have the xpg4 specification support available, the du command was still missing my favorite option “max-depth”.

In Linux I use this to limit the output to only the current directory level so that I don’t have to face to possibility of wading through a tremendously large listing of sub-directories to find the largest directory in the level I am in.  Unfortunately, in Solaris, even with xpg4, the du command doesn’t have this option, so my solution was to pipe the results through egrep and use that to filter out the sub-directories.

Here is some example output from a RedHat Linux 5.11 server:

[code language=”bash” gutter=”false”]
[[email protected] var]# du -h 8.0K ./games 8.0K ./run/saslauthd 8.0K ./run/lvm 8.0K ./run/setrans 8.0K ./run/ppp 8.0K ./run/snmpd 4.0K ./run/mysqld 8.0K ./run/pm 8.0K ./run/dbus 8.0K ./run/nscd 8.0K ./run/console 8.0K ./run/sudo 8.0K ./run/netreport 176K ./run 8.0K ./yp/binding 24K ./yp 8.0K ./lib/games 8.0K ./lib/mysql 4.0K ./lib/nfs/statd/sm.bak 8.0K ./lib/nfs/statd/sm 24K ./lib/nfs/statd 8.0K ./lib/nfs/v4recovery 0 ./lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs/statd 0 ./lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs/portmap 0 ./lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs/nfs/clntf 0 ./lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs/nfs/clnt5 0 ./lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs/nfs/clnt0 0 ./lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs/nfs 0 ./lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs/mount 0 ./lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs/lockd 0 ./lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs 40K ./lib/nfs 8.0K ./lib/dhclient 8.0K ./lib/iscsi/isns

[/code]

Here is the same example ouput from the RedHat server using the max-depth option:

[code language=”bash” gutter=”false”]
[[email protected] var]# du -h –max-depth=1 8.0K ./games 176K ./run 24K ./yp 22M ./lib 32K ./empty 1.5G ./log 12K ./account 236K ./opt 24K ./db 8.0K ./nis 2.9M ./tmp 8.0K ./tmp-webmanagement 40K ./lock 8.0K ./preserve 8.0K ./racoon 16K ./lost+found 1.4M ./spool 8.0K ./net-snmp 83M ./cache 8.0K ./local 1.6G .

[/code]

Here is the command example run without my egrep mod in Solaris 10:

[code language=”bash” gutter=”false”]
[[email protected] log]# /usr/xpg4/bin/du -h 25K ./webconsole/console 26K ./webconsole 1K ./pool 1K ./swupas 2K ./ilomconfig 1K ./current/ras1_sfsuperbatchb 1K ./current/od1_atl4sfsuperbatchb 4.3G ./current/ras1_atl4sfsbatchb 2.1G ./current/od1_atl4sfsbatchb 560K ./current/avs 2K ./current/ebaps/output 9.3M ./current/ebaps 4.0M ./current/psh 3.1M ./current/autoresponder 5K ./current/fdms_download 29K ./current/fdms_server 109K ./current/fmt 5K ./current/paris/output 653K ./current/paris 1K ./current/od1_sfsuperbatchb 28K ./current/ccTemplateLoader 633K ./current/ccTemplateLoaderLegacy 15M ./current/whinvoices 1K ./current/appmonitor.prod.netsol.com 132M ./current/chase 6.6G ./current 160K ./archive/ccTemplateLoader 1K ./archive/od1_atl4sfsuperbatchb 4.9M ./archive/avs 1K ./archive/ebaps/output 26M ./archive/ebaps 881M ./archive/psh 1014M ./archive/autoresponder 1K ./archive/fdms_download 6.8M ./archive/fdms_server 21M ./archive/paris 1K ./archive/ccTemplateLoaderLegacy 4.1G ./archive/ras1_atl4sfsbatchb 3.1G ./archive/od1_atl4sfsbatchb 5.9G ./archive/chase 102M ./archive/whinvoices 15G ./archive 22G .

[/code]

And here is the improved command output using my egrep mod on the same Solaris server:

[code language=”bash” gutter=”false”]
[[email protected] log]# /usr/xpg4/bin/du -hx | egrep -v ‘.*/.*/.*’ 26K ./webconsole 1K ./pool 1K ./swupas 2K ./ilomconfig 6.6G ./current 15G ./archive 22G .

[/code]

October 5, 2015 by Andrew Fore

One of the tools that I use on a regular basis to test network connectivity updates is the “z” option of netcat.  Apparently when RedHat rolled out the latest version of their distribution of RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) they decided to move to using the nmap-ncat package instead of the nc package.  The command options a very different.

So when attempting to test single port like I would have under previous releases I now use the following syntax:

# echo | nc -w1 $host $port >/dev/null 2>&1 ;echo $?

If the result that is returned is a zero then you have successfully connected to the remote host on the desired port. This also applies to CentOS 7 since it is a “clone” or copyleft port of the RHEL7 binaries.

Categories Uncategorized Tags CentOS, Linux, Tips n Tricks, Uncategorized 1 Comment January 8, 2017October 4, 2015 by Andrew Fore

Editorial Note: Apparently Comcast really would prefer that people not use the term data cap when referring to the limitations being placed on their customers data usage and would much rather prefer that we use the term data usage plan or data threshold, however, I don’t really care. 🙂

Dear Comcast,

I would like to go on record as saying that you suck.  I recognize that you are a for profit company and that you would like to make a profit on the services that you provide.  I even think that having your company make a profit is a good thing because that enables you to pay your employees so that they can put food on their tables and afford to pay the fees for their children to participate in Little League baseball and other such childhood activities.

Your data usage cap system is bogus.  According to the data available on your own website you have eight (8) different trial markets where you have rolled out data caps since 2012:

• August 1, 2012: Nashville, Tennessee – 300GB cap
• October 1, 2012: Tucson, Arizona – 3 tiers (300GB, 350GB, 600GB)
• August 22, 2013: Fresno, California – Economy Plus option added
• September 1, 2013: Savannah, Georgia; Central Kentucky; Jackson, Mississippi – 300GB
• October 1, 2013: Mobile, Alabama; Knoxville, Tennessee.
• November 1, 2013: Huntsville, Alabama; Augusta, Georgia; Tupelo, Mississippi; Charleston, South Carolina; Memphis, Tennessee – 300GB cap
• December 1, 2013: Atlanta, Georgia; Maine – 300GB cap
• October 1, 2015: Fort Lauderdale, the Keys and Miami, Florida – 300GB cap plus $30 option for increasing to  unlimited

In fact, your page on this even refers to these as “trial start dates” which to a reasonably minded person would imply that they have an end date as well, however to the best of my knowledge (as well as the comments made by a customer support representative) there is no plan to end these trials OR any plan to actually collapse them into a single cohesive plan that applies to your entire service.

Read moreDear Comcast: You Suck

Categories Uncategorized Tags comcast, General, Personal, Uncategorized, usage cap 2 Comments

March 2, 2015 by Andrew Fore

If you are a Safari user then you are likely used to the “reader mode” which disables all the extra graphical stuff and focuses the view on the content of the article.  Thanks to a tip from Google Plus user Francois Beaufort, here’s how to enable it on the desktop (in Windows at the very least, I haven’t tried in any other OS).

If you’re on desktop, playing with it is as easy as running chrome with the –enable-dom-distiller switch. Once it’s done, you’ll notice a new “Distill page” menu item.

Hopefully this will make it to mainstream with a nice icon.

Categories Uncategorized Tags Google, Tips n Tricks, Uncategorized Leave a comment

October 5, 2015 by Andrew Fore

One of the tools that I use on a regular basis to test network connectivity updates is the “z” option of netcat.  Apparently when RedHat rolled out the latest version of their distribution of RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) they decided to move to using the nmap-ncat package instead of the nc package.  The command options a very different.

So when attempting to test single port like I would have under previous releases I now use the following syntax:

# echo | nc -w1 $host $port >/dev/null 2>&1 ;echo $?

If the result that is returned is a zero then you have successfully connected to the remote host on the desired port. This also applies to CentOS 7 since it is a “clone” or copyleft port of the RHEL7 binaries.

Categories Uncategorized Tags CentOS, Linux, Tips n Tricks, Uncategorized 1 Comment