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, […]
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 […]
The legend of the unicorn started with the rhinocerous
Long ago I was puzzled at references to unicorns in the Bible, and after thinking about it for a while, decided that the descriptions that accompanied unicorns -- a massive, powerful creature that was shaped like a bull and associated with the tribe of Ephraim -- made more sense applied to the […]
Pterodactyl "logged out due to Outdated server" with Nukkit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 However, it failed quickly and you got this message: "logged out due to Outdated server." You look in the logs for more information, and that's all the logs show, also: "logged out due to Outdated server."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 […]
The Ordinary Guy
I originally wrote this for a particular person to read, but in a style which looked like it was for everyone. He is from an older generation who prefers to teach rather than to listen. We have known each other for decades. I know from long experience that if I wrote to him directly, as I do in most […]
All fractions are one fraction
I call my weblog "Rough Drafts" even though some of the entries are fairly well polished, published after weeks or even months of careful writing and editing before release. But in other entries, I write wild stream-of-consciousness gagompoofery like this. This one is so rough it's right […]
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 […]
Infinity is the backside of zero; they are the same thing
Got it. Been working on this one for a while, I've seen it in glimpses over the years, but it just fell into place. Infinity is the backside of zero. Just like a quarter has a heads and a tails, this thing I've been calling "the origin" for a long time has a heads and a tails. This idea is […]
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 […]
Important insight into Power and how it operates outside of Logic
Years ago I was impressed by the power of Law to transform me. I was impressed because I was sincerely changing my nature and behaviors due to the way I had encountered Law and Order (the justice side of it), and wanted to ensure that I did not encounter Law in that way before. I began a long series […]
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: […]