Had an annoying issue today. For MechWarrior Online, I use Nvidia Control Panel to span my three monitors into one virtual one. Well today I wanted to turn that off and I couldn’t open the damn thing.
Updating the driver through Geforce experience did not resolve it. I had to uninstall the driver within Device Manager and let Windows automatically get it again and that reset the displays back to default and also actually solved the inability to launch the Nvidia Control Panel.
x11 logo
I have a home server I call a NAS but it also does some other stuff. Occasionally I find the need to do some GUI things, and I don’t want to be bothered with a physical keyboard and mouse as that’s quite inconvenient due to the physical setup. I require use of the real graphics card for this, so, using virtual desktops is not an option, so to that end I will use x11vnc since it shares existing X displays.
I suppose there is a more elegant solution to this problem but this is fine for me. I am running Debian 10, with the LXDE desktop environment. Bog standard Debian desktop install.
I’m going to make lightdm log me in my non-root user automatically:
[email protected]:~# nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm.confAdd your user under Seat:*
[Seat:*]
autologin-user= MadRush~/.xsessionrc runs stuff as soon as you are logged in to X. It’s a perfect spot to make x11vnc start up:
[email protected]:~$ cat .xsessionrc
/usr/bin/x11vnc -forever -display :0 -auth guess -rfbauth /home/MadRush/.vnc/passwd & disownOkay so next time you log in, x11vnc will be started. And -forever means it will stay open after you disconnect. Going forward lightdm will automatically log you in, et voila, there’s your persistent x11vnc session. Restart lightdm:
[email protected]:~# systemctl restart lightdmGood to go! Now I can log in at the physical console if I want, and then pick up where I left off should I want to use VNC instead.
I don’t very much like Evince or other FOSS PDF readers on Linux. I do however like using Foxit on windows. They do actually provide packages for Linux packages but there is a long standing rendering bug where everything is super stretched out vertically. There does not seem to be an solution to the bug in sight. However, while perusing the support forums someone mentioned they had good success using the Windows version in Wine. Ok! Fine.
I want this to be separate from the Wine root in my home directory so it is self contained and can be copied from one machine to another. I’m lazy.
mkdir -p /opt/foxitwine/wineroot
cd /opt/foxitwine/
<wget your foxit installer .exe in here>
WINEPREFIX=/opt/foxitwine/wineroot wine FoxitReader97_Setup_Prom_IS.exeNow install Foxit Reader, I put it in c:\FoxitReader for brevity.
Thing is, you want this to integrate nicely with your Linux desktop, so, here’s a FoxitReaderWine.desktop file:
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Foxit Reader Wine
Comment=View pdf documents
Keywords=pdf;ppdf;
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Application;Office;Viewer;X-Red-Hat-Base;
MimeType=application/pdf;application/ppdf;
Icon=FoxitReader
Exec=/usr/bin/env bash -c "printf 'z:%%q\\n' %F | WINEPREFIX='/opt/foxitwine/wineroot' xargs wine 'C:\\FoxitReader\\FoxitReader.exe'"I was having an issue with getting the file argument successfully passed to wine so I mined this discussion for a handy solution.
mv FoxitReaderWine.desktop /usr/share/applications/All done.
Sometimes on Linux systems for one reason or another it is not practical to use the built-in iptables-services or iptables-persistent to handle your firewall rules. For example, cPanel/WHM manages its own firewall rule set and does not care what is in the normal iptables rules file.
A very straight forward solution to this is run a script in cron to check if your rules exist presently and if not, add them.
#!/bin/bash
# firewall.sh
# This script is run with cron to make sure iptables rules to block Portmap are present
function addrules {
iptables -I INPUT -m tcp -p tcp --dport 111 -j DROP -m comment --comment "Portmapper Vulnerability"
iptables -I INPUT -m udp -p udp --dport 111 -j DROP -m comment --comment "Portmapper Vulnerability"
}
numrulesfound=$(iptables -nL |grep -c "Portmapper Vulnerability")
if [ $numrulesfound -eq 0 ]; then
echo "Portmapper iptables rules NOT found, adding"
addrules
elif [ $numrulesfound -gt 0 ]; then
echo "$numrulesfound Portmapper iptables rules found, exiting"
fi
And some kind of cron to run it periodically:
0 * * * * /root/firewall.sh > /dev/null 2>&1Run netplwiz and uncheck “Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer”
It will ask you for your current password, then you are done.
Now to prevent Windows from asking for a password when you come back from suspend, search for ‘sign-in’ > set “If you’ve been away, when should Windows require you to sign in again?” to ‘Never’
MariaDB logo
For those of you who work with MySQL on CentOS or RedHat servers on a regular basis, running out of room for large MySQL databases on the root partition is pretty common. The default options in the OS installer suggest a 30GB root partition which has probably been the default value for at least ten years. Normally, this is easy to remedy. However, I was trying this on a server with MariaDB …
Trying this both via editing my.cnf and by simply a symlink produces failure:
Sep 14 16:49:06 id27131.1wpo.com mysqld[22796]: 2017-09-14 16:49:06 140313610287360 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld (mysqld 10.1.26-MariaDB) starting as process 22796 …
Sep 14 16:49:06 id27131.1wpo.com mysqld[22796]: 2017-09-14 16:49:06 140313610287360 [Warning] Can’t create test file /var/lib/mysql/id27131.lower-test64 ID=15680 PROTO=UDP SPT=53 DPT=60246 LEN=192 UID=25 GID=25
Looks like it may be due to a bug with mariadb!
A tutorial on DO says you need to specify the socket for the MySQL client.. i didnt even try that as mysqld fails to start!
Seems like this would have to be done by changing the variable basedir not datadir, I have yet to try that.
Chicony Close Up
I bought my first ErgoDox from a coworker. Bringing a keyboard back and forth to work is a pain in the ass, so I built another one.
I used to have what I am pretty sure was a Chicony 5581.
Chicony 5581 Keyboard
For whatever reason some years back, during the height of my take-shit-apart-without-a-concrete-goal-in-mind phase, I lost the top half of the case, some components of the track ball, and some keycaps. Well, turns out this sucker used Cherry MX Blue switches. They feel quite a bit different from the low mile switches in my aluminum-acrylic-sandwich bodied ErgoDox I use at work. I’m not sure if the MX blues from ’88 are equivalent to modern days ones. Anyway I figured I would put those to use eventually.
Naked Chicony Keyboard
Chicony Controller
Chicony Close Up
Chicony Printed Circuit Board Back
Chicony Printed Circuit Board Back Detail
Weller Soldering Iron
There have been several ways to order ErgoDox keyboards either completely assembled or as a kit. Currently you can get an assembled ErgoDox from ergodox-ez.com but starting at $270 its awfully expensive. Well, I have these key switches just waiting for a purpose, and key switches make up a large amount of the price of any mechanical keyboard. Also, I already had a set of keycaps which aren’t included in kits anyway, so, instead of a kit I went ahead and ordered a pair of PCBs from mechanicalkeyboards.com, a teensy from PJRC and other miscellaneous bits from DigiKey.
It took a while and more than a little elbow grease to harvest the switches. If you have not done something like this it involves jamming a screw driver under the switch while alternating between which leads you hit with a soldering iron. The trusty ol’ Weller I inherited from my dad’s days of television repair got the job done, love that thing.
ErgoDox Printed Circuit Board
While the keycaps from the Chicony are doubleshot, they do not suit the ErgoDox well as they are sculpted, not flat DSA, which does not facilitate customizing your layout. I did end up using a different set of non-DSA keycaps for the alpha which looked better matched with blank DSA caps I had for the modifier keys.
ErgoDox Teensy Controller
ErgoDox 3D Printed Assembly in Progress 1
ErgoDox 3D Printed Assembly in Progress Close Up
ErgoDox 3D Printed Assembled 2
ErgoDox 3D Printed Assembled 4
ErgoDox 3D Printed Assembled 3
Looking at shell scripts or just about anything without highlighting is painful. I use less a lot to page through long stuff, so why not have some color?
sudo apt install source-highlight
then add the following to your .bashrc:
export LESSOPEN="| /usr/share/source-highlight/src-hilite-lesspipe.sh %s"
export LESS=" -R "
This is modified from a script on GitHub. That script is specific to CentOS
Select from multiple Java versions
Extenuating circumstances require me to run more than one version of Java JRE for work. Instead of using packages from the distro, I got the .tar.gz’s right from Oracle. I had to manually add the plugin to Firefox. Then, I extracted both JRE into /opt/java, added /opt/java to my path and made symlinks:
[email protected]:/opt/java$ ls -l
total 8
lrwxrwxrwx 1 carl carl 20 Jul 1 15:01 java -> jre1.7.0_80/bin/java
lrwxrwxrwx 1 carl carl 20 Jul 7 16:05 java7-java -> jre1.7.0_80/bin/java
lrwxrwxrwx 1 carl carl 22 Jul 7 16:49 java7-javaws -> jre1.7.0_80/bin/javaws
lrwxrwxrwx 1 carl carl 20 Jul 19 14:52 java8-java -> jre1.8.0_92/bin/java
lrwxrwxrwx 1 carl carl 22 Jul 7 16:06 java8-javaws -> jre1.8.0_92/bin/javaws
drwxr-xr-x 6 carl carl 4096 Apr 10 2015 jre1.7.0_80
drwxr-xr-x 6 carl carl 4096 Apr 1 00:17 jre1.8.0_92
I wrote a little helper script which I use as the default application in Firefox for this, using zenity (actually I use Palemoon, but same difference).
#!/bin/bash
command=$(zenity --list --text "Is linux.byexamples.com helpful?" --radiolist \
--column "Pick" --column "Opinion" TRUE /opt/java/java8-javaws FALSE /opt/java/java7-javaws );
$command $1
Java Selector
Password Safe logo
Once again here is how to verify and install Password safe. This is an update of an earlier post. Considering this software is guarding some of your most important secrets I see it worthwhile to verify the GnuPG signature. OS this time is Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr (Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela).
Password safe
To verify the signature we need GnuPG.
$ sudo apt-get install gnupg
$ gpg –import pwsafe.key
gpg: key 5CCF8BB3: public key “Rony Shapiro (PasswordSafe Signing Key) <[email protected]>” imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg: imported: 1 (RSA: 1)
gpg: no ultimately trusted keys found
iiii. verify the key fingerprint against what is listed at the bottom of https://pwsafe.org/contact.php
$ gpg –fingerprint
/home/mrdesk/.gnupg/pubring.gpg
——————————-
pub 2048R/5CCF8BB3 2011-02-10
Key fingerprint = A703 C132 8EAB C7B2 0175 3BA3 9194 6451 5CCF 8BB3
uid Rony Shapiro (PasswordSafe Signing Key) <[email protected]>
sub 2048R/04B638E7 2011-02-10
$ gpg –verify passwordsafe-ubuntu-0.97BETA.amd64.deb.sig gpg: Signature made Fri 09 Oct 2015 05:21:50 AM EDT using RSA key ID 5CCF8BB3
gpg: Good signature from “Rony Shapiro (PasswordSafe Signing Key) <[email protected]>”
gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg: There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
Primary key fingerprint: A703 C132 8EAB C7B2 0175 3BA3 9194 6451 5CCF 8BB3
Notice the fingerprint matches the one we verified earlier listed on http://pwsafe.org/contact.shtml — ok good!
$ sudo dpkg -i passwordsafe-ubuntu-0.97BETA.amd64.deb
$ sudo apt-get -f install
Done! To verify your .deb has been installed:
$ dpkg –get-selections | grep passwordsafe
passwordsafe install
You can launch the password safe gui either by
$ pwsafe &
or by finding ‘Password Safe’ it in your launcher menu.
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