Docker, giving it a shot.

So years ago when the name Docker started circulating I thought it was stupid... such BS.
Did I give it 2 minutes?  Nope.  A real head in sand moment if I must say.  FF to today.. I am accessing a full Team license to Pluralsight via $boss at $work and I stumble across the Docker course.
Ok.. fine.
So I plow through the intro and my ears are perked. If I were a dog, my tail would be at 12 o'clock.

So I have this Mac Mini at home that un recently was my Plex media server, well the thunderbolt nas I used as my BE storage up and died. So I loaded docker-ce and went to town.

Right now I've got containers for Pi-hole and Portainer.  I've always wondered how much of an impact pi-hole would make in a house with 5 internet users so it's up and going.  Then portainer because it was recommended by an acquaintance in IRC and a mention from the Googs.

So far pi-hole is eating an impressive 44mb of ram and portainer 7.54mb.  <Borat "very niice">  I'm impressed, honestly. I'm now searching for other legit container uses here at home.. I want more.

AMD Radeon Adrenalin drivers, Code 43 in Device Manager. -SOLVED

So I'm setting up a new rig for my oldest daughter, she bought herself an Oculus Rift (Lucky ass!) Not like I haven't been wanting VR since it was a pipe dream! lol.

Anyway so she needs a new rig to power her new toy, she's running on an I7-3770, 8gigs of ram, a 500gb SSD and a GeForce 570Ti.  It's served her well so far however it's not good enough.

So anyway I'm setting her up with an HP Z620 workstation, powered by a Xeon E5-2520 6 core, 16gigs of RDDR3, another 500 gig SSD and an RX 570. 
So this is a fresh Win10 Pro install right?  I get it home and it's fully updated and go to install the most recent Radeon drivers.  I download 18.21.x, the installer routine completes fine, I reboot only to find a Code 43 in Device Manager.
What the hell.
I won't bore you with the details because chances are in your found my site you've already tried numerous things on the Googles.

I installed the atikmdag-patcher.. originally intended to remove the resolution and refresh limitations from older Crimson drivers.  Located here: atikmdag-patcher

I don't know why.
I don't understand how.
It makes zero sense to me but This. Shit. Worked.

Ran this .exe, it says it patched a few things and a reboot later and BOOM! Windows is happy.. 3DMARK11 is happy... I'm happy.

HP Elitebook x360 1030 G2 + Ubuntu 18.04

So I forgot my Asus at home today.. and I'm too lazy to make the 40 minute round trip to go get it so I decided to grab up the nearest laptop and load Linux on it. Turns out the nearest laptop was an HP Elitebook x360 1030 G2.. the Ultra book version.

Thing runs Windows pretty damn good, it can only run Linux better!  So because my go-to OS for the past few years has been Fedora, I decided to run what any newcomer would.. Ubuntu!

Anyway long story short I installed Ubuntu 18.04 KDE version.. laptop booted perfectly.  So far everything works including the touch screen. But I have a pair of 17' LCD's, external keyboard and mouse on my desk.  So I grabbed an HP USB-C Universal dock.. plugged it in and nothing. No display, no USB, nothing at all.

Installed the DisplayPort drivers from here: DisplayLink for Ubuntu, rebooted and BOOM. Everything on teh dock worked. Ethernet, Sound, Display, USB.. all of it.

I gotta say Ubuntu surprised me on this one, pleasantly surprised.

HP Elitebook 840 G4, Forced power reset.

So recently we ran into an issue with an EB 840 G4 that refused to power up. The user returned one Monday morning and it just would not power up, we tried a new dock, new power adapter all to no avail.

My assistant today made the call into HP support and long, story short.. she had him hold down the Mute and Power buttons for about 20 seconds. Damn thing fired right up..ran check disk and allowed him to successfulyl login.

Obviously the unit is suspect so we're running a day or two of diagnostics but wow yeah.. who would have  thought the Mute and Power combo?

Sage 100, Business Insights Explorer windows open blank

So we ran into this here at work.. multiple users were able to login and open this specific view.  It's been working for a handful of users, all but this one.

So we verified AD group membership, verified.
Sage permissions.. verified.
Uninstalled/reinstalled Sage.. yup.

Even went so far as to replace the laptop with a brand new, freshly imaged unit.  Same damn thing.


So after righting Sage's support technicians, and I mean literally fighting them. My co-worker spent a solid 2.34 hours on the phone with them over the past 3 days of which a good 1.3 hours was on hold. Transferred multiple times by multiple people and finally we're told to try changing the UI from Old to New.

What do you know.. that stupid work around actually worked.  And what's more it's documented in a KB that none of us could find.  So here it is for you people so you don' spin your wheels for days like we did.


*Credit goes to Sage engineers for this

Business Insights Explorer Views appear blank. No data rows show, nothing appears on screen

Products

Sage 100

Description

All Business Insights, Explorer, Views appear blank. No data rows show, nothing appears on screen. Pane sections of the window are outlined, but no line detail appear, and buttons are disabled (grayed out) and cannot be selected in Sage 100

Note: This also affects all application modules' Explore menu views as well.

Resolution

Possible Workaround:

• In Sage 100 2016 or 2017, switch to the Classic Desktop view (or if already using Classic, switch to the Standard Desktop view), then back again.
• Note: For more information, see the Related Resources section below on changing the Desktop view in Sage 100 2016

Related resources

How to change the Desktop view between Classic or Standard in Sage 100 2016

Additional information

Alternate Workaround:

1. Via File Explorer (Windows Explorer), browse to the Workstation user's "My Documents" folder
• Note: This is usually something like "C:\Users\<Windows login>\Documents"
2. Rename the "Sage 100" folder
• Example: Rename to "xSage 100"
3. Log in to Sage 100
4. Select Standard Mode
• Note: A new "Sage 100" folder will be created in the Workstation user's "My Documents" folder
5. Open Business Insights, Explorer menu, Views and make sure they are now working
6. Log out of Sage 100
7. If favorites were created (existed prior):

• Via File Explorer (Windows Explorer), access the renamed ("xSage 100") folder
• Copy the favorites.json file to the newly created "Sage 100" folder

Category

Customization

User interface

changes to on screen elements, buttons, fields, widgets, and custom APIs.

Entitlement

Open

ID:78517Last modified:10-12-20171507850203447  

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Outlook 2013/2016 Meetings in room resources replace subject with organizers name...

Ran into this today.. last time was a number of years ago so I had forgotten about it.  Anyway you create a room resource mailbox in Exchange right? I 'assign' it to a conference room so users can schedule meetings and keep some semblance of order right?
Except first user opens their personal calendar, creates a meeting object, selects your new room as the location, types a descriptive subject line and send it on.
The room accepts, and adds the meeting to it's calendar except it's deleted teh subject and replaced the text with the users name.  WTH?

While I do not understand the reasoning.. this is by default.  Logon to your Exchange server, open the Management shell and type the following:

Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity <RESOURCEMAILBOX> -DeleteSubject $False -AddOrganizerToSubject $False 

I don't normally listen to podcasts...

But when I do it's from Red Hat.

I stumbled across this series on Reddit last week, I've listened to 4 so far and I really like it.  Maybe you will too.

https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes

The series starts off in the 80s/90s back during the OS wars, and the beginning of Linux.  My era, and I remember a number of things mentioned.

If you are interested in IT on an industry scale then you will enjoy this.

Unable to consolidate guest, Vcenter 5.5U3

Forgive me but this was a week ago so I don;t have copies of the actual error messages.

So I logged into Vcenter last Monday and found two of my guests needed to have their snapshots consolidated.  Except looking under Snapshot manager neither guest had any listed!

So long story short: I contacted Vmware support and learned that since we use Veeam to backup our vm guests.. that Veeam proxy machines actually mount the VMDK's of my target guests as RO then backs them up.  Well turns out that for whatever reason one of my proxies did not un-mount a couple of guests VMDK files once the backup job was complete.

So if you run into this where you tell a guest to consolidate snapshots and it fails, *AND* you use Veeam then check your proxy machines to verify they have no disks mounted that do not normally belong to it.

It's been quite a while

So it's been a while since I last posted here. It's easy sometimes to forget this site and why I started this blog in the first place.

So I am a manager now! An IT Manager for a manufacturer back here in the great state of Michigan. Granted it's not Montana but nowhere except Montana is.. Montana.

I miss MT a lot! Like as much as one would miss a beloved pet or a dead family member. Seriously.  There is no place like the 406. Why did I leave you might ask?  It's expensive as hell!

For what I paid for the house and land here in Michigan I would have gotten a 3/2 inside city limits on a city lot. No thank you ma'am.


Anyway the jobs going ok.. there's a few things that are concerning, a few things that make me wonder "What did I get into?".  I have high hopes but I'm not stupid and I will hedge my bets if at all possible.

Speaking of Michigan man the weather this summer has been brutal. Like Mississippi type of brutal. Humid and hot.. sticky, the likes of which we haven't seen in 10 years.  It definitely makes us question the move and why we didn't finally go to Alaska.

Exchange 2013: A Reboot is Required...

So today while installing the management tools on my localhost I ran into this issue of the repeating reboot request. The url linked in the install window specifically mentions how it's unsafe to try to work around this issue by modifying registry entries... oh really? lol.

Located here:

Computer\HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager

I deleted the DWORD value PendingFileRenameOperations, then hit re-try on the installer and boom.  Done.

Grep returning if results were found or not

Today I needed a one-liner like this to help with with an Ansible playbook, storing here for posterity:

rpm -qa | grep -q "rhn" && echo 'is installed' || echo 'not installed'

Ansible: Part Three

So at work I'm tasked with hardening the new Wildfly environment which consists of 1xdev, 2xuat and 4xprod servers.

I *had* plans on using this as an opportunity to pound our some Python but after a learned recommendation from a friend in IRC I went the Ansible route and boy am I glad I did!
I can't quite recall what happened last year when I tried and failed twice.. but yesterday I had a simple ping command working and hitting all 7 servers within an hour's time.  Last night I banged out half a dozen cursory playbooks within 4 hours and today I've got a working couple of playbooks that are furthering me to my goal of World Domina.. err automating the things.

SCP files thru multiple proxy hosts

I realize this might be old-hat for quite a few but I just learned it and this will save me so bloody much time!

While there are multiple ways of doing this.. including editing your .ssh/config file to include a similar reference I am choosing the full CLI method.

So first off make sure netcat (nc) is installed on all hosts.  Then craft a string as such:

scp -o ProxyCommand="ssh first_host nc second_host 22" /local/path/to/file user@target_host:/dest/path


So what I have done here is to ssh proxy through host1, to host2 then scp'd from host2 to target_host.  Which in my case was exactly what I needed since this new Java environment requires me to jump through two proxies to reach my target.

Like I said I know this is old stuff to a large percentage of you Unix/Linux admins but hopefully this will help someone.

Dynamically naming Konsole tabs

So at work I use Fedora 27, and I administer quite a number of Linux servers.. So since I run the Plasma desktop environment (DE) I use the terminal emulator Konsole.  The Konsole window uses tabs.. much like modern internet browsers to help you multitask instead multiple full windows.

So anyway when you open Konsole the opening tab is named with, by default, username and current directory. If you SSH into a remote host the tab name changes to username and remote host.. which is very cool.  However if you further SSH into another host from the first the tab name remains the same as it was.  Which.. for me anyway leads to mass confusion if you have more than a couple tabs open.

So one of the fine folks in teh Fedora User mailing list tossed me a bone today.. I inquired about being able to change the tab name based on remote hostname past the first remote host.  Here's what he gave me:

    chpwd() {
        [[ -t 1 ]] || return
        case $TERM in
            sun-cmd) print -Pn "\e]l%~\e\\"
            ;;
            *xterm*|rxvt|(dt|k|E)term) print -Pn "\e]2;[%m] %~\a"
            ;;
            vt220) print -Pn "\e]2;[%m] %~\a"
            ;;
        esac
    }

    chpwd

So.. I'll admit that I do not quite understand the % or print syntax as of yet.. however adding this tidbit to the end of my .zshrc file then within Konsole changing the tab and remote tab fields to %w did exactly what I wanted to do and more.
The more part meaning that now my tab names also include the username@hostname but also the full path where I am at currently in that remote host.  Honestly its too much info for a small pane.  But it's a damned fine start!

So it's been a while..

Been quite a while, actually, since my last post. Been busier than ever really, with work and home stuff and doing all I can to get out and enjoy Montana.

Back during the summer and fall I try to get out and hike once a week.. whether its Mt. Helena or just out in the woods around the Wickes mine.   Also got to hunt this year, which is always a good time.  Got my first Montana whitetail this year too! (or well technically last year but yeah)



Driving down an unnamed road, because yeah like I'm going to give out my secret hunting spots.. A truck leaving a driveway had the passenger hanging out of the window pointing up and across the road.  I swivel my head to see this big 8 point standing there looking all majestic like.  So TL;DR I was able to sneak within 50 yards and popped him.  Single shot, through and through lungs. He ran maybe 20 yards and fell. The last day of season, the last 20 minutes of daylight :)

Sadly though I did not get to get him with a new scope I got for christmas:



A no-name Amazon purchase, 6-24x52mm.. you can really reach out and see your target.  Mounted on the Ruger American LH bolt-action in a stainless 30-06 package, it was the All Weather model.  And being perfectly honest, I went for the stainless after seeing Glenn Villenue on Life Below Zero's rifle.

Anyway I do have some pictures to post here from the places I've hiked thus far.. so damn beautiful here.  I love it.