The Babe in the Barn

It’s been a quiet, difficult Christmas for many of us. So, I guess we can relate to Mary & Joseph, who after a tiring journey gave birth to a special baby boy in a barn. Hidden in the hay lay the helper of the whole world.

Cares about our life, security, health, and welfare have been heightened. In the chaos, let's remember the birth of Jesus Christ, his agony here on Earth, and the treasure He gave us all. And just as the shepherds who heard and experienced that night’s news could not contain their excitement, so let us also pick up our phones, write letters, send e-mails and text messages, and knock at our friends’ doors.

Set aside your worries and come to Bethlehem. Turn from evil and find victory in this child in the manger. Release your fear of death and grasp hold of eternal life. Your home may be locked down but fling open the doors of your heart for this precious guest.

Distributel Smart rg SR505N UDP Tunnelblick OpenVPN

A while back I was trying to connect to a VPN. The setup worked well for other users, and worked well in other networks other than at home. However, at home, I would connect, and experience a brief period of connectivity of a few seconds at most. The connection would remain but all the requests would basically fail after that.
After a bit of searching I found that I needed to change the MTU setting on my router/modem. I browsed to the router administrative interface, then to Advanced Setup, then to WAN, and for each listing there I clicked Edit and updated MTU size from 1452 to 1492, clicked Next 3 times, and then clicked Apply/Save. It worked! I figured it out due to this fine forum.

echo $POSIXLY_CORRECT

Who knows what $POSIXLY_CORRECT actually does, but it cost me an hour of time today. I needed to use process substitution <() with openssl to use a string as the input instead of a file. The command worked in my zsh console, but move it to the script, and poof! I was greeted with this error: syntax error near unexpected token `('. Apparently this can happen if $POSIXLY_CORRECT is enabled (set to "Y"), but that shouldn't happen in bash (I had the line #!/bin/bash at the start of my file).

It seems that because I was calling my bash file like this: "sh script.sh" it didn't work. I had to call "bash script.sh". Then $POSIXLY_CORRECT was not set and I was good to go.

Upgrading GitLab from 6.7.4 (2f5b6e1) to 7.11

I bit of fun with this particular install (which is has come to be an expectation in regards to installing or updating GitLab:

1. We found out that the update removed the ability to change the target merge branch, once a merge request is created. More: https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/7105 
2. Towards the end of the install, the instructions actually disappeared and I could only find the 7.12 instructions. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/update/6.x-or-7.x-to-7.12.md (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/update/6.x-or-7.x-to-7.11.md)
3. In step 3, (sudo -u git -H git checkout 7-12-stable),we had to stash in order to checkout: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/220
4. There was an error in step 4,(sudo apt-get install nodejs), which I barely noticed, and I had to install nodejs a little differently on debian: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installing-Node.js-via-package-manager
5.  I accidently followed mysql instructions in step 5, (sudo -u git -H bundle install --without development test postgres --deployment),  and immediately realized it, then ran the postgres instructions. "Gems in the groups development, test, postgres and aws were not installed." Unfortunately, it saved the --without setting and excluded postgresql as well. That led to another error later on in the install. You can fix this by deleting the bundle I believe. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17871229/rails-application-doesnt-recognize-postgres-gem http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4118055/rails-bundler-doesnt-install-gems-inside-a-group
6. I got the error: unicorn.pid not writable directory for pid=/home/git/gitlab/tmp/pids/unicorn.pid not writable, but I just needed to chown that as it belonged to root.
7. HTTP Push failed (SSH Push was fine), due to having the another ruby version. I changed a symlink to fix it: ln -fs /usr/local/bin/ruby /usr/bin/ruby https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlab-shell/issues/223 https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlab-shell/issues/211

1TB HDD turns to 31MB

The other day I transferred a bunch of files using Mageia to a drive which I believe was partitioned and formatted in Windows 8.1. A few days later, I noticed that Windows was reporting the drive to be 31MB in size. After a bit of research, I learned that there are some hidden areas on drives named HPA and DCO.

Of course, linux provided some handy tools to solve this issue. Using

hdparm -N /dev/sdb

I noted that HPA was enabled and only a fraction of the available sectors were indicated as available in max sectors. So, I set the max sectors equal to the available sectors using

hdparm -N p78165360 /dev/sdx

Please note that the numbers and drive identifiers are samples only (my drive didn't contain 78165360 sectors and I'm not sure it was sdb).

Credit is due to this post.

Business Intelligence

I thought I would share my unsettling experience with Business Intelligence in Visual Studio.

When I first decided to install Business Intelligence templates, it was for Visual Studio 2012. At that time, I initially failed to have those templates installed correctly. After realizing that updates weren't applied, I was able to activate these templates.

Eventually I was interested in running these templates through Visual Studio 2013. I found out that the templates came out months after Visual Studio 2012 did, and that it would be the same for Visual Studio 2013. After a long wait, the templates came out. However, a few days later the templates were pulled back due some issues that were found.

After waiting for more than a month, the templates are finally out once again: http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=42313

First Time: Roots Wordpress Theme Development

Bootstrap provides some powerful assistance when it comes to styling and responsive layouts. Combine this with the ease of developing a user-friendly and featured system with WordPress and the result is Roots.

 

A first experience with Roots

Roots provides a few directions on how to get started which I'm currently working through. The first thing you notice is that this is installed like many other themes. First you need to install WordPress by creating a database and running its installer. Using Apache I can create a virtual host:

Listen 8081

<VirtualHost *:8081>
 DocumentRoot /var/www/html3
</VirtualHost>  

Now that path on my Linux system is available at http://127.0.0.1:8081, or http://localhost:8081. After installing 'node.js' and grunt, I can drag the Roots theme into the WordPress templates folder, after which I can install the template from the administrator panel. Of course, I edited 'style.css' to reflect that this site was to be authored by myself.

Once I had activated the Roots theme, none of the default CSS styling was appearing. At first I thought I had run into a common Roots problem which was widely discussed on a few forums. My Apache logs showed that 404 Not Found errors were being generated for JavaScript and CSS files. My '.htaccess' file in the WordPress root folder indicated that certain URL paths should be rewritten to route to other paths on the webserver. It seemed these rewrites weren't occurring, so I thought perhaps mod_rewrite was missing from Apache. A quick phpinfo() found that Apache had rewrite as a loaded module.

To make a long story short I had to update my Apache virtual host configuration file and restart the server:

Listen 8081

<VirtualHost *:8081>
 DocumentRoot /var/www/html3
 <Directory /var/www/html3>
  AllowOverride All
 </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

I'll update this as I continue my peek into Roots.

Credit is due to: Online syntax highlighting