I was pleased to find this blog entry with a handy list of all the shortcut aliases you'd ever need for gandi's webmail approach. It also has a nice explanation of the issue, but as I will never use an email starting with a number, I was able to half the list. Here it is, 676 items, which is 26x26, […]
Coding and Techy Stuff
This "Coding and Techy Stuff" category is here because peripatetically I make a living as a software engineer. This is where I put anything related to coding and technology, and sometimes just unrelated information such as you might find posted on ycombinator's always-intellectually-curious Hacker News.
Chroot sftp-only SSH user into home folder safely in Ubuntu
This seemingly-useful link on askubuntu did not work as I wanted, and neither did a few other similar sites. Trying to make it easy for the end user took longer than the 5 minutes I had available, so I'm posting the correct way to do it here for future use. The key missing ingredient was provided in […]
Pterodactyl "logged out due to Outdated server" with Nukkit
You tried to connect to your own Nukkit server running on Pteradactyl. However, it failed quickly and you got this message: "logged out due to Outdated server." You look in the logs for more information, and that's all the logs show, also: "logged out due to Outdated server." So […]
Got the Black Screen within Gnome in a new FreeBSD on VirtualBox?
I found a fix for that here. I wrote about it here: Configuration for FreeBSD inside VirtualBox with Gnome3, sudo, nano, and bash, including avoiding the black screen Here's the TL;DR answer in a screenshot: […]
Configuration for FreeBSD inside VirtualBox with Gnome3, sudo, nano, and bash, including avoiding the black screen
Coming into FreeBSD anew from the Linux world. I'm happy with it as a server, no changes needed. I like the much-more-secure ambiance. But now experimenting with it as a desktop, I've already decided I like sudo, bash, and nano better than su, sh, and ee. And I want Gnome. At this point, I've […]
Fix VirtualBox icon app name in Gnome Favorites/Activities menu on Linux
(I sometimes craft my headlines to be search-engine-friendly, which is why they sometimes look odd in person). If you have multiple VirtualBox images running in Ubuntu or similar Debian-based flavors of Linux, you know it can be frustrating to switch between the different images using the favorites […]
Install Ubuntu Server .deb package without starting service using dpkg --unpack
On Debian flavors like Ubuntu, apt and dpkg default to starting a service as soon as it is installed. This is almost always a good idea, but I ran into the strange problem that the service was misconfigured. Starting it was not a good thing. Stopping and re-configuring it after it started was not […]
Use Network Manager to handle 'device not managed' or 'unmanaged' issue in Ubuntu for SecurityOnion at Digital Ocean
An out-of-the-box install of Ubuntu 18.04.5 at Digital Ocean will not work for a SecurityOnion installation, because of the way cloud-init is managing the network. Security Onion prefers NetworkManager to manage the network. Cloud-init is required by Digital Ocean for deployment of a custom image. […]
Use fdisk and parted to resize a 100Gb custom image of Ubuntu for Digital Ocean to prepare for a 320Gb SecurityOnion install
Digital Ocean cannot deploy a Custom Image larger than 100Gb. Security Onion requires 200Gb to install. To workaround the Digital Ocean limitation, create a 100Gb custom image of Ubuntu, configured with only three partitions: /boot, /, and /tmp. (Leaving out /nsm and swap requirements for the […]
Install and whitelabel Grafana with a custom grafana_icon.svg and a few other minor changes
Grafana is an amazing application, one of the most active open source projects in the world, and they are firmly committed to the Free Software / Open Source way of doing things. You should know up front that the following information enables a feature (whitelabel) which is part of the Enterprise […]
How to configure Ubuntu via /etc/network/interfaces using ifupdown managed by Network Manager for Security Onion
That headline is a mouthful, so let's break it down: How to configure Ubuntu via /etc/network/interfaces using ifupdown managed by Network Manager for Security Onion In more simple terms I would prefer this headline: "How to configure Ubuntu with ifupdown for Security Onion," but it turns […]
Placing Apache reverse proxy in front of Security Onion
Security Onion prefers to think that it's talking to the world, not a proxy. But you can do it. It took me awhile to get this working because I was also trying to get Apache Basic Authentication working. Alas, Security Onion is so complex that I was only able to get Authentication working smoothly […]
What to do when qemu-guest-agent on CentOS does not work after installing with yum
After installing qemu-guest-agent with yum, which was easy enough with sudo yum install qemu-guest-agent I did not see IP information in the proxmox host, so I knew it was not yet working. I tried several things, none of them worked. First I tried looking at the status. Got an error indicating the […]
Kill a Proxmox VM that won't quit with a one-liner using the pve node's command prompt
I was using the handy information at Proxmox can’t stop VM – How we fix it! (bobcares.com) for a while. They have a two-line approach which does the job, but displays the (very) long command line for starting a proxmox VM on the screen while doing so. To me, facing a wall of text while searching for […]
Fix Shellinabox "rhostsrsaauthentication" and "rsaauthentication" errors
ShellInABox is a tidy little app that works well, but when you configure it to connect via SSH directly instead of using its internal shell, it throws up a couple minor errors when logging in: command-line line 0: unsupported option "rhostsrsaauthentication" command-line line 0: […]
Installing ShellInABox on Debian, Ubuntu, Devuan, etc and configuring for white-on-black GUI
You can install shellinabox with your Debian-flavored package manager with a single command: sudo apt install shellinabox White text on black screen The default setting is a white screen with black text. You can right-click to switch it, but if you're like me you'll want to set it to black screen […]
Configure one-time-password (a.k.a. 2FA or MFA) in Apache using mod_authn_otp and FreeOTP
I did this on a Devuan system, which is basically Ubuntu without systemd. This not a well-known distro, so your mileage may vary, but I think it will all work as described on vanilla Ubuntu or similar Debian-based flavors. At the end of this article is a list of URLs I used while putting this all […]
Configure one-time-password (a.k.a. 2FA or MFA) in SSH using libpam-oath and FreeOTP
I did this on a Devuan system, which is basically Ubuntu without systemd. This not a well-known distro, so your mileage may vary, but I think it will all work as described on vanilla Ubuntu or similar Debian-based flavors. At the end of this article is a list of URLs I used while putting this all […]
Installing Mx Linux or Ubuntu, Debian, etc. on MacBook Air
I was oddly not able to find quick hits on this topic when I searched, so I finally just tried it, and it worked so easily I was quite surprised. As a long-time attempter-of-things-so-new-that-they-often-fail, I remember when it was a hassle to install Linux on Mac. For years it was frustrating. I […]
Accessing OPNSense Web UI running within Proxmox on the WAN interface by disabling reply-to
After I migrated from pfSense to OPNSense for my firewall embedded within a Proxmox lab, I was stumped for two days looking for this obscure setting. It was a problem right out of the box: After I got the interfaces configured and assigned static IPs for the two network interfaces, I tried and tried […]