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Things I’ve Learned About Myself This Year
Since I usually wrap my year up on the 31st and make my plans for the coming year on the 1st, I’ve been thinking about this past year. Know Thyself is a common saying, so I think I should take a somewhat critical look at me. So what have I discovered about myself this year?
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Adding a Windows Computer to an Openldap-Samba Primary Domain Controller
For a number of years, I’ve used a linux computer running openldap and samba as the primary domain controller for my windows computers. This works great in that we can have a single sign-on for all of our windows and linux computers and use the same account for logins to websites. I’ve had an old piece of paper in my office with the changes that are needed on Windows to be able to get it to join this pdc. Thought I’d finally put them online in case something ever happens to my paper. (#2 below is really the only required step, but I always do all of them.)
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Mariadb (Mysql) Setup
I wrote these instructions years ago, but couldn’t find them the other day. So I’m updating a few things and reposting here.
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Filtering with procmailrc
I have an email account that I forward to a gmail account so that I can use google’s spam filtering. One thing that google does is limit the size of mail messages to 25mb. If someone sends me a mail message with an attachment greater than 25mb, google will bounce it back to my server, which will then forward it to google, who will then bounce it back to me… you get the picture. I had this happen today and while nothing crashed, it did slow my server to a crawl. So I thought that I’d put a rule in my .procmailrc file before the forward to the gmail account that moves the large file to a local mailbox. This is easy to do, I’d just add a section like this:
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Random Thoughts
It’s an early Sunday morning and I’m relaxing with a cup of coffee when I thought I’d post some random thoughts I’ve been having.
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Delete a command from the history
If I run a command that, maybe shows a password in it, I’d like to delete that command from my command history. Say I this shows when I run history:
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Sewing Machines
I took the sewing machine that was given to me in to get tuned up. The repairman called and said it needed a lot of work and that it would cost around $250-$300. For an old sewing machine that I didn’t like all that much, it was too much money. So I let them keep it for whatever parts they could salvage from it. I don’t sew a lot, but it is a tool that I’d like to have. So I’ve been researching sewing machines.
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Yearly Oatmeal Update
As the weather gets cooler, I change to eating oatmeal for breakfast. I didn’t grow up eating oatmeal, so I’ve been trying to teach myself how to cook it. I like a very creamy oatmeal, often how I get at a restaurant. However, when I made it at home, my oatmeal wasn’t nearly as good. Now, after a few years of making it, I feel like I have the perfect recipe for me.
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Temp Files in RHEL7
I had an RHEL7 system that would not start mariadb server on boot. I could reinstall the server rpm and then it would work fine, but it would not start after a reboot. So I finally had some time to figure out what’s going on.
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Birthday Project Result
I took my book out of the press this morning. It’s not perfect, but it’s not at all bad for my first attempt.
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Birthday Project Part 2
My post yesterday wasn’t accurate. I hadn’t yet finished my text block. I still had to put the cover pages on it and the reinforcing paper. Before that though, I had to glue the binding. I made a book press out of a couple of pieces of wood and some clamps.
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Birthday Project
I’m on my annual birthday vacation. Just took three days this year instead of the whole week. And instead of taking a class somewhere, I decided to try to teach myself how to bind a book. Technically, I should say I’m learning how to do this from YouTube videos. First up, I folded and cut a bunch of paper. Then I had to sew them into a text block. I followed the video below:
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Certificate Notes
Every so often I have to do something with certificates. It’s infrequently enough that I always have to re-lookup all the commands because I don’t remember the exact syntax. Also, for a long time, I simply used self-signed certificates because they did the job for me. However, now that there are very inexpensive certificates, I sometimes use them. Anyway, here are my notes:
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The credentials are correct…
I had a problem where one user could not login to our windows server 2012 computer. The error message that I got was:
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El Capitan NFS Mount
First create the directory /Volumes/sharedirectory
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Frustration!
I thought that I would take today and try to finish the curtains that I’m making for my bedroom doors. My mom gave me a new iron, which works fantastically well. I also got an ironing board, which also makes ironing so much easier. So I was making great progress with ironing and sewing the side seams. Then, I ran out of thread on my bobbin. No problem, I thought. I learned how to thread the bobbin a while back and even made a youtube video of it. So I thread the bobbin and get back to work. But I don’t get back to work. For reasons I cannot determine, the machine is not moving the material forward. If I press the reverse button, it goes back with no problem. But it won’t go forward. So I screw around with it for a while. What did I do? No idea, but the material starts to move forward slowly. (Reverse goes backwards much quicker than the material is going forward.) So I try again, but things still aren’t right, as the thread is bunching on the bottom. I remember the rule that thread problems on the top of the seam are usually due to the bobbin and problems on the bottom are usually due to the needle. So I rethread the needle and it’s just not working correctly. By and large, I have a decent amount of patience, but this drained ALL of it. I can guarantee by neighbors heard the slew of obscenties I spewed. I then decided to buy a new sewing machine and started researching them online. This gave me some time for my blood pressure to drop and to calm down.
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RHEL7 Kickstart Problem
I’ve been trying to set up an RHEL7 kickstart script for our computers and was getting a bunch of errors about PackageKit.
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The Spice Rack
My brother-in-law requested a spice rack for his kitchen. And my brother sent me this link (https://www.amazon.com/Seville-Classics-3-Tier-Expandable-Organizer/dp/B001E2864K) to see if I could copy it. I knew that the rack had to hold 31 jars of spices and that each jar was basically 2 1/4″ in diameter and 3″ tall. So I figured four shelves were needed and the overall width of it should be 20 inches. I also had some maple boards in my garage that were old shelves from my condo. I figured I could split them on my table saw (which turned out to be difficult) and then cut out the pieces I needed. I’m very happy that I could use wood I already had for this, since I wasted a lot of the board when I couldn’t split it easily or evenly. I just used glue to hold everything together because the wood was pretty thin and I thought screws or nails would split it.
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Simple Rsync
I always have to look this up, but a simple rsync command is:
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El Capitan Simple DOS Format
The disk utility in El Capitan looks to be much more limited than it used to be in older versions of mac os x. So I need to use the command line to do a lot of things now. First off is a simple format of a new disk as an plain dos disk.
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RHEL7 Systemd (Startup) Script
I have an RHEL7 system that needs to start an lmgrd license file for some autodesk software. And since RHEL7 now uses systemd, I have to change my old sysinit scripts to work here. So here’s what I did.
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Been A While
My summer has been pretty crazy with a big work conference that is finally over. My life is now my own again. Yay! I’ve been very behind in doing my monthly checking, but that’s ok. The good news is that I don’t have to go back to work for over a week. So I’m trying to do a bunch of projects around the house.
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May Check-In
May was a good month. I biked on 25 days and drove on 16. Four of the driving days included a trip to Nashville, which was fun. I did the Tour de Nash, which was my introduction to
NashVegasNashville. Also had my longest ride, when I did 40 miles on Bike the Drive, including the ride to the drive. I biked 312 miles for the month, which made it a very good month. As for driving, my odometer reads 37599, which means I drove my car for 621 miles in the month. But I took my Mom’s car to Nashville, so I have to add the 1068 miles for that trip. So my total in the car was 1689. That’s quite a lot, but it was worth it for the trip. -
RedHat Improvements
One of the students asked me about installing python2.7 on a redhat 6 system. Since I know the operating system depends on a particular version of python, I was immediately thinking about just upgrading the system to RHEL7, which would have the version of python required. But, happily, I’ve found that RedHat has provided a way to upgrade important systems. It has created a new channel called “RedHat Software Collections”. The beauty of these is that you can still use the regular package manager and that they won’t overwrite or conflict with system files. You need to enable the channel and install “scl-utils and scl-utils-build”. Then, the command to switch/see collections is scl. As an example,
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April in Review
Since the weather today is very rainy, I know I’m not going anywhere. Figured I’d take a look at April.