QMail (Considered to be the most secure Mail server out there whose modified version is running on Google – Gmail.com and Mail Yahoo! and Yandex EMail (SMTP) servers, nowadays has been highly neglected and considered obsolete thus most people prefer to use postfix SMTP or EXIM but still if you happen to be running a number of qmail old rack Mail servers (running a bunch of Email addresses and Virtual Domains straight on the filesystem – very handy by the way for administration much better than when you have a Qmail Mail server configured to store its Mailboxes within MySQL / PostgreSQL or other Database server – because simple vpopmail configured to play nice with Qmail and store all user emails directly on Filesystem (though considered more insecure the email correspondence can be easily red, if the server is hacked it is much better managable for a small and mid-sized mailserver) or have inherited them from another sys admin and you wonder how to redirect a single Mailbox:

(under domain lets say domain's email  my-server1.com should forward to to SMTP domain my-server-whatever2.com (e.g. your-email-username@server-whatever1.com is supposed to forward to your-email-username2@server-whatever2.com).
To achieve it create new file called .qmail

Under the Qmail or VirtualDomain location for example:

/var/qmail/mailnames/myserver1.com/username/.qmail

e.g
 

root@qmail-server:~# vim /var/qmail/mailnames/myserver1.com/your-email-username/.qmail
&your-email-username@server-whatever1.com
your-email-username@example1.com
/home/vpopmail/domains/server-whatever2.com/your-email-username/Maildir/

!!! NOTE N.B. !!! the last slash / after Maildir (…Maildir/) is important to be there otherwise mail will not get delivered
That's all now send a test email, just to make sure redirection works properly, assuming the .qmail file is created by root, by default the file permissions will be with privileges root:root.

Note
 

That shouldn't be a problem at all. That's all now enjoy emails being dropped out to the second mail

The post Qmail redirect mail to another one and keep local Mailbox copy with .qmail file – Easy Set up email forwarding Qmail appeared first on ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary.

If you happen to be system administrating an old computers with some 512 Megabytes of RAM or 1 Gigabyte of Memory with preinstalled some archaic version of GNU / Linux distro such as Slackware, Calderra Linux,  Debian / Ubuntu / Fedora etc. and there is suddenly need to use this PCs with a decent graphical email client for its existing GUI environment LXDE / XFCE / WindowMaker / Mate etc. then Mozilla Thunderbird

Definitely won't be the client of choice especially if you have to add 5 or 10 email accounts (with a few hundred of emails laying on the remote mail server) to be periodically fetched via POP3 or IMAP protocol.

Of course there is always the option to just use a simple Text Email clients such as Fetchmail, PINE or MUTT and unload the PCs memory and CPU with the simplistic text interface however as most people are totally unacquainted with Linux console or terminal, for most that won't be the option of choice.
 

• So what is the best solution for a lightweight Graphical Email Client for Linux for Old Computers ?

!!! Say Hello to Sylpheed CLAWS EMail Desktop client !!!

linux:~# apt-cache show claws-mail|grep -i descrip -A 3 -B 1
Breaks: claws-mail-extra-plugins (<< 3.9.1-1)
Description-en: Fast, lightweight and user-friendly GTK+2 based email client
 Claws Mail is a powerful and full-featured mail client formerly called
 Sylpheed-Claws. It is also extensible using loadable plugins, which can
 provide support for additional features, like other storage formats,
 feed reader, calendar management, mail filtering, etc.
Description-md5: f9d9f85803d938ab3d5fbc85f90e263a
Multi-Arch: foreign
Homepage: http://www.claws-mail.org
Section: mail
—

A. Installing Claws Email on Debian Linux distribution
 

Assuming you need to install claws on Debian based Linux distributions;

debian:~# apt-get install –yes claws-mail

…

B. Installing Claws on Fedora Linux distribution

For older Fedora Linux:
 

[root@fedora ~:]# yum install claws-mail
…

On a newer Fedora Linux installations (for those who are already used to Claws and migrate to a newer computer with a fresh Fedora install)
 

[root@fedora ~:]# dhf install claws-mail
…

Note that newer versions of Fedora Linux the default yum package manager has been substituted for the newer and (said to be more) advanced dhf
 

C. Installing Claws email on Slackware Linux

Claws Mail is also available as a (Tar XZ – That's a slackware highly compressed .tar.gz equivallent which saves a lot of space for its packages), to install on slack get the package from the CD / DVD or download from internet and:

darkstar:~# installpkg claws-mail*.txz

By the way Claws mail might be also the email client of choice (for those who don't have to be bound by the slavery of Office 365 / Microsoft Office and transporters and Active Domain Controller Directory with Outlook Express.

Even on old Computers with Microsoft Windows Claws email (which has also a Windows 32 Bit Port) might be among the best options for those who value their computer resources and interface simplicity and hence want to save memory and CPU load.

That is it,  try and enjoy Sylpheed Claws !

The post A lightweight Email Client Graphical client for old computers with Linux (Claws) appeared first on ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary.

Those interested in People Reading or holding a Management position position job inside some Small or Mid sized corporation could benefit greatly of a Book called
What Every Body is Saying

What Every Body is Saing is written by an ex-FBI Agent (JOE NAVANNO), probablythere are no actually ex-FBI agents, but that's a topic for another post.

The book is quick to read, especially if you follow the pictures of Body postures shown with their little description below.
Many of the Body Languages so commonly adopted by multitudes of people, thanks to the American of the Culture world-wide are being practiced
in some degree in mostly all people you might know (mostly unconsciously) …

What Every Body is Saying could be of a great help to people who want to make through in life and for Start-up company CEOs, Human Resource Managers, or anyone who want to better learn to communicate and Influence People.

Even in a normal family relations, being able to properly identify the Body Language of your Wife or kids would seriously benefit you and if you keep attention (focus) would reveal there short term-plans.

Adopting some of the suggested body languages in the book would definitely help you improve how people perceive you and practising some so called "Confident postures" could even boost your Confidence levels dramatically both when you're alone or when you are in a group of people or A Company Team Meeting.

Reading the Person Body language is of a great help also to understand the approximate Emotional / Spiritual state the person in front of you is and even if applied proparly could help you make the person or group of people be positively influenced to change from a negative to positive mindset
or when working on a project, could help you dramatically to make the people work more efficiently and boost their motivation / mood about the things, they have to someday do anyways.

The reader has to know of course that most of the mentioned body language cues are generalizations and in order to find out the exact messages being sent on non-verbal communication level depends on a multiple factors and many of the Body languages talked might be in a modified form and even some could be totally different from any of the described of the book.

However the observation practice (at least mine) shows that at least 60-70% of the described Body Language postures are adopted and used by mostly anyone out there.
To check the validity of the things described in the books just sit somewhere in a park or in a bar / caffeteria and watch carefully how people interact, you will be surprised how many things are being communicated non-verbally and how often the lack of one of the two, or two have severe communication issues, just because they couldn't synchronize their body language or lack the ability to read the other interlocutor's processed and communicated intentions.

The book when red at least for me was a wide eyes opener and even though as a Christian, I've always been doubting that any-generalization model trying to frame up people is very untrue and trying to influence people with your Body Language is bad sinful (kinda of satanic) practice, realizing that even Christians does communicate and do use body language (because they're conditioned by the society they lived in), that means that improving your Body Language to be more convincing in mostly anti-christian society we live can do you good favour to be adequate in society, or at least you can be aware of the existence of the Body Language and its meaning.

By the way, many of the models and gestures as translated described as a behaviour body interpretations are perhaps highly used nowadays by Agents across all the major Secret Services agencies such as CIA, MI6, KGB, Mussad etc.

This kind of things are learned in most business universities nowadays, but the way the Body Reading / Influencing knowledge is communicated in Business universities is a disaster, because it is usually compiled by Professors who alone are not expert or haven't been advanced enough in body language.
Thus even like that if you read the book, I'm sure you will benefit and perhaps reread it at least a couple of times in the coming years …

A summary of the book goes like this:

1. It starts with a short story on how the author get acquainted to the knowledge of body language and his personal life events

The author Joe Navarro was an emigrant from Cuba to US as the age of 8, because the author inability to speak English at all, his best way to understand what the other was saying or communicating in the first few years in US was to observe closely what the person in front was communicating non-verbally and makes guesses, what that could be.
His family and grandmother also played a key role to help him learn the craft of Body Language reaading.

Growing up and graduating college in the age of Baby Boomers, Joe Navarro was hired in FBI where he spend the following years as an agent specializing in Counter Intelligence
and behavior assessment.

2. It continues as the knowledge on Body interprations is being served in a very stuffed manner

The 3 key things to remember out of the book goes like that:

    A. At least 60% of what you say is not coming out of your mouth.
    B. There’s one more option next to fight or flight responce our brain does automatically
    C. To become a master at reading body language, you have to develop situational awareness.

The book claims that people tend to be stuck into 3 main states (as a result of the evolutionary development of species (Creationists and Christian fundamentalists could argue seriously here ) , whenever facing a difficult situation these are:

• Freeze
• Fight
• Flight

To sum up if you're looking for new ways to improve your current relationships with people and build a new ones, the book would definitely help you tremendously.
I've found the book in a PDF format with few simple searches online so those who can't afford it could also download it from the internet (at least as of time of writting this article).
A lot of the exampled Body confidence / influence postures described in the book you will find on mostly any Kids Cartoon and Internet top shows and in mostly everybody from TED Talks show and mostly all Youtube educational videos and podcasterers.

That's all Folks, Enjoy reading!

The post What Every Body is Saying – one of Best books on Body Language ever written appeared first on ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary.

Nowdays communiacation between people in different generation is worsening exponentially and as a consequence of the digitalization the real (physical) contact between people is exponentially dropping and this is a fact everyone could realize.

Even in people and more Eastern or sunny countries where traditionally the direct contact has always been of a crucial importance is declining seriously, the social networks such as Facebok, Vkontakte (The Russian space Equivallent of Facebook) – if you have VK and want to add me there My profile there is here , Viber calls, WhatsApp, Instagram, SnapChat and all these are leading people into micro prisons narrowing their worldview up to the box (jail) each of this companies has created for people, just because you don't own the data you communicate over this channels and your data is being used for a severy complicated computerized researches on how you tend to think, how you tend to communicate, what are your triggering keywords and your general mental (mind) structures and cues. Privacy of all of these is also very low as many of this digital medias are designed with the malicious features to serve as a spy networks for end people. Not to mention often data collected about you is being sold to a third party agencies which collect all the time data about product preferences, buying behavior, life style etc.

People who refuse to become part of this electronic prisons built by Megalomaniacs (or Evil Geniuses as Richard Stallman uses to call them), just to name a few Mr. Zack Zuckerberg, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs (let him Rest in Peace), Elon Musk are being pushed into the Outside Zone., The more conservative and less exposed to technology older people or youngsters who value more their freedom and privacy, are slowly starting to being separated from the Digitalization and being looked upon like a little crazies who are psychologically sick.
In my opinion two major "camps", are being built, one of the people who doesn't have the skill or money to keep in track with latest technology advancements, these are usually people with lower education different thinking people, people with strong religious convictions, or burn out people who are overloaded by technology's chaotic ways as well as personalities trying to live as less dependent from society and social systems and are mindfully rejecting or limiting the technology use as much as they can.

The boom of Smart Mobile Phones (and the aggressive campaigns of Mobile operators for everyone to own some kind of Smart Phones be it Android, IPhone, BlackBerry etc.) and the imposed on society Digitalization of society by MultiCorporation companies is in my opinion, no doubt a planned process with a clear goals that people's reality is being more and more controlled and spied on not to mention that it is fully possible to Program People to certain degrees by using computer technology, interfaces, Alarms.

Maybe not much of Citizens has thought over it or realize it but psychologists and peoples in roles within Medias long time are aware of the high role that Social Programming (Social Engineering) historically TV Channels, Radios and Nowadays Internet News / Medias play on disinforming the masses and let them believe an invented stories about wars, problems, famines that doesn't exist to keep them stuck in Fear through Fear Mongering (manipulation techniques). Moreover it is interesting fact that Programming of Human Mind through a slow repeatable processes has been a fact to certain degree and thus with Computers and Mobiles all of us are being programmed subconsciously to things we're not consciously aware (for more on that topic please see my previous article on Color Programming) as well as What is Predictive Programming of Mind (Society) and how it affect us ?

Not to mention the prooven fact that there are psychological mechanisms for making the mind to be addicted to things seen or experienced which are being adopted by Mostly all of large medias on the Internet.

The simplification of access to the Global Net (The Internet) and the unification of (I would say anti-social) web platforms such as Facebook, where mostly all with mid or upper education of people have registrations and are letting you without choice but either to live a lonely life of more or less rejection or join the "company". Those like me who nowadays are abstaining from Facebook and most of modern communication are being cut from the Digitalization slowly.

Through the last 10 – 15  years there has been a serious attempt from Free Software and Hackers to change the game into a more positive and more open frames of communication and give freedom to people with attempts for decentralization of social networks.  Unfortunately it seems we're loosing the Game of Freedom at least in the normal nowadays Highly Filtered and more and more government agencies influenced (not to say controlled) Internet, here I'm excluding from the equation the recent attempts of Alternative thinking hackers (and unfortunately) criminals to build alternative internet spaces such as DarkNet / DeepWeb

As I like to experiment with Free Software in general to explore its business applicability, here is my short results on my experience and yearly research on what is there as a free software that gives you options to build a self hosted social network.

1. GNU Social (known historically as StatusNet)

GNU Social is a kinda of Personal Twitter service top recommended project the project started and seemed to be very promising and I myself some long ago Started an own version of it (s.pc-freak.net) to blog about my daily life obstacles and interesting info I've learned here.

However with time the project StatusNet become GNU Social and my attempts to upgrade it following provided instructions with the GNU Social files were a failure, so I kept the old version of statusnet and abondoned it just to adopt BuddyPress as a way to keep track of my Personal Interests in organized self owned Twitter like service.

2. BuddyPress

– BuddyPress (The distributed Multi user Self Owned Social Network based on WordPress)

–
"Fun & flexible software for online communities, teams, and groups."
This is the official description of the project my own efforts to establish it cost me at least 3 days up to a week just to establish something workable and a couple of more weeks to tailor it to my likings. I was planning to involve other people and build an online social community.
Most of available plugins for BuddyPress for extra-functionality are either old unmaintained or cost you good amount of moneys. I tried allowing Public Members registrations but soon the Network started filling with nasty spammer registrations. The available free plugins for Anti-Spam protection were real pain in the ass so finally I decided to keep the Network closed just to myself.
And create the user registrations manually after a primary email request contact from anyone who wants to own an account. As you could guess, as of time of writting this post, noone is contacting.
Considering SEO side of the network, even though I have around hundred posts with Videos, Music, Books, information and various Life Stuff of importance somehow Google, Yandex and Bing are indexing the pages (only about 350 pages are properly indexed). I tried to research why is that in Google Search console and Recrawl the site a couple of times, none of that didn't give me a very meaningful answers why BuddyPress Social network posted pages by my user are not ending up indexed properly in Search Engines and I don't have the full time to further investigate why is that, so anyone who is more advanced to Search Engine optimization (or better said have the time desite to help)   me with this project is mostly welcome to contact me and we can collaborate and perhaps grow that network.
 

• My own hosted version of BuddyPress custom install with aim to Share my attained knowledge is here.

3. Elgg Social Network

A highly customizable web framework and CMS for building social apps with PHP and MySQL. – however my personal experience with Elgg few years ago just shows, elgg is far from ready for a productive use, and anyone who want to start an Online Social Network has to seriously work with at least of small team of developers and system administrators and testers to make the thing good enough for daily use for the masses. There are some Elgg based social networks out there performing, however the project needs much more work until it is ready for an easy and mass use and anyone who is willing to build a custom social network needs to seriously invest a good amount of money for it to be tailored and maintained properly and the multitued of its bugs to be fixed. 
 

4. Pligg

Is a a Free software social network designed from scratch with the help of many contributors to help you build up your website. This open source social network software can be used  used and helps to lively setup communities, similar to Facebooks.  Anyways for anyone who is willing to invest time and nerves, let him try and understand the project is still far from completeness.

Historically I tried to install Pligg as I was investigating on best options to build a free software based social network in 2015 but though I was aable to bring a workable version the spam problem still persisted and I brought down Pligg install in a couple of days because of its lack of enough functionality plugins and rapid development, as overall my personal experience was that Elgg was a much more grown product ready for use …

5. Oxwall

"Oxwall® is an open source mobile-friendly community website platform that is suitable for brand communities, interest-based social networks, and other online community projects."
Oxwall has been actively developed since 2010 after the team behind it developed plenty of community site projects.
Today Oxwall is a strong project with 3rd party development community.

It uses PHP and MySQL environment for social network development. It comes with a varied range of plugins that helps you personalize with add-ons to add functionality to the website. Its CMS is compatible with both small and large scale networking sites and even with executive websites.
I never personally tried Oxwall.

The development process is done by a  small but dedicated team of 22 peoples which makes the project quite promising, but as the other options availabe for building an self hosted social network community, the project has still a long way to go …

I have never tried to install and use it myself but the site offered demo (you can see it here) seems promising and seems to make Oxwall an adequate competitor to ELGG.

6. AstroSpaces

Claiming to be the world's first open source social networking solution. Coded from scratch, it is highly efficient and very easy to use. As you can imagine its neither the first nor among the ones to easily build you workable solution, but for those who have intention to build something similar to facebook to the masses with the right Finances and Crowd Up raising or Business Angels eventually it can turn into something usuable with a lot of work and the right people

These free software (open source) based social networks are into a workable state, but because the enormous size of such projects and the fact that these projects are being done on a primary voluntееrs with almost little or none financial investitions the projects are moving slowly, have a lot of bugs, have a higher complexity to install and use by an ordinary uneducated people with little to less experience in the fields such as programming or system administration.

6. Mixxt is a social network design company, developing social extranets and intranets. It enables collaboration, communication, and Knowledge management through a single tool. It has a dedicated platform for fast development and enhancement. Develop your site with the help of custom designs, forums, wikis, and photos.

7. XOOPS

(XOOPS) is claiming or aiming to be "a classic tool for evolving from small to big community sites, intra-company web portals, and more. XOOPS has a modular format that can be extended as per needs. The web content management system helps in it. You may start with a blog and further augment it into a social networking website and with more functionality.
The module that is used to build a website with XOOPS is Yogurt. Environments used are MySQL, Linux, PHP, and Apache. But mainly MySQL and PHP are used. YouTube, friend list, pictures, communities, mp3 tracks, wall to post your messages are some of the features of XOOPS.".
Obviously even a little experiments with it shows, that the project has still a long way to go until it is usable enough without much tailoring for production use.

To sum it up, all of the 7 top free software social network projects gives a lot of options for free (if you have a network of dedicated developers with passion who are ready to commit work for free), mostly all of them offered a custom tailored packages with Themes and plugins sold for few hundred of dollars, for those who don't want to make things from scratch. But nomatter that developing a full featured ready to use solution, that is less buggy is amount of at least moderate to big investments.

If you happen to be a person who have an bright idea for the next competitor of Facebook at some time in future, you need to invest a lot and have to build an excellent company team and put the right amount of money / management effort to make the project succeed. However for a small and unpretencious social communities of up to few hundred of users (1000 to 100 000) users or so with the right scaling each of above projects could play well.

If you're interested just like me to build an alternative less-restricted more human rights respecting social network as an alternative to the already overcrowded commercial ones out there please get in contact with me, and perhaps we together can make a change  for better!

The post Best 8 Free Software Alternatives for Building an Own hosted custom Social Networks communities appeared first on ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary.

Those who are employed in the realm of Social or Internet Marketing definitely have to know the existence of at least 4 different conditional stereotypes, these are Baby Boomers and Generation X, Generation Y and Generation Z (Millenials).

According to Socielogist Karl Mannheim (who is among the founding fathers of classical socielogy) – "All members of a generation share a similar collective experience" or in other words people are categorized in generations depending on when they were born.

As stereotypes they're generalization of people born in different periods of time and sharing same or similar traits, because of the age and the conditions they grew up and as they share those general spirit of time and age, they tend to be more or less behaving in a similar ways in the way they think save / spend money or share a common approach choices and attitude towards life.

But before proceeding to the 4 main cohert provisional stereotypes, its worthy to mention how these four common trait generations came to existence with a little bit of pre-history.

The pre WW I and WW II world situation and the First and Second World War played a pivotal role in forming the social conditions necessery for the development of the baby boomers.

* The depression Era people

Born in period: 1912 – 1921 who came at full maturity around 1930-1939 right in the beginning of WW I (all of whom are already deceased) as of 2018 as a cause of the war uncertainty and the chavoc and the war conditions were very conservative, compulsive savers, tried their best to maintain a low debt. They had the mindset (responsibility) to leave some kind of legacy to their children. They were very patriotic, oriented towards work before pleasure, had a great respect for authority and had a strong sense of moral obligation. For all this character traits of this people undoubtfully a key role played the strong belief in God mostly all people had.

The next in line conditional stereotype of people that came to earth are the:

* The World War II Generation
 

Born in year period: 1922 to 1927 who came to a mature age exactly at the terrible years of Second World War.

People of that time were either fighters for or against the Axis Powers or the Central Powers with the common shared goal to fight against the enemy (of course there are multiple of people who were just trying to survive and not taking a side in this meaningless war).

The current amount of people living are estimated to few million of elders worldwide.

As above conditional generations types mentioned are of importance for historical reasons and most of the people belonging to those depression pre WWI and WW II era are dead or just a few millions an overall in un less-consuming age (excluding the medicine consumption which is higher compared to youngsters).

I'll further proceed further with the Baby Boomers, GEN X, Y, Zs who are de-facto the still active members participating to society and economy more or less.

So what are these 4 Stereotypes of Generations that and why are so important for the modern marketers or business manager?

1. BABY BOOMERS also called for a short (Boomers)
 

These are people who have been defined by a birth year range (period) from early to mid 1940s  until 1960 and 1964.

 In Europe and North America, boomers are widely identified with privilege, as many grew up in a time of widespread government subsidies in post-war housing and education, and increasing affluence.

As a group, baby boomers were considered the wealthiest, most active, and most physically fit generation up to the era in which they arrived, and were amongst the first to grow up genuinely expecting the world to improve with time. They were also the generation that received peak levels of income; they could therefore reap the benefits of abundant levels of food, apparel, retirement programs, and sometimes even "midlife crisis" products. The increased consumerism for this generation has been regularly criticized as excessive (and that's for a good reason).

One feature of the boomers was that they have tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before or that has come afterward. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort, and the changes they were bringing about. This rhetoric had an important impact in the self perceptions of the boomers, as well as their tendency to define the world in terms of generations, which was a relatively new phenomenon. The baby boom has been described variously as a "shockwave" and with a methapors such as as "the pig in the python".

2. Generation X / GEN X

Generation X is considered the people born in the following birth year period 1960 forward in time until 1980s. A specific feature in the 60s-80s period was the shifting societal values, perhaps the spring of this generation was also connected to the increasing role and spread of communism in the world.
Sometimes this generation was referred as the "latchkey generation".
The term generation X itself was popularized by largely popularized by Douglas Coupland in his novel 1991 novel Generation X Tales for an Accelerated Culture

A very common trait for Generation X was the reduced adult supervision over kids when compared to previous generations a result of increasing divorce rates and the increased role of one parent children upbringing (in most cases that was the mother) which had to be actively involved as a workforce and lacked physically the time to spend enough time with its children and the increased use of childcare options in one parent families.
They were dubbed the "MTV" (Music Television) generation – that was a hit and most popular music TV in the early 1990s.
The kids representing generation X were described as slackers, cynical and disaffected.

The cultural influences dominating the tastes of the teen masses of that generation was musical genres such as punk music, heavy metal music, grunge and hip-hop and indie films (independent films)  produced outside of the major film studio system.

According to many researches in midtime those generation are described as active, happy and achieving a work-life balance kind of lifestyle.

People belonging to Generation X are described as people with Enterpreneural tendencies.

Just to name a few of the celebrities and successful people who belong to this generation, that's Google's founder Sergey Brinn & Larry Page (born in 1973), Richard Stallman (founder of Free Software movement) as well movie and film producer celebrities such as Georgi Clooney, Lenny Kravitz, Quantin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, David Fincher etc.

According to United Kingdom survey study of 2500+ workers conducted by Workfront, GEN X are found to be among the hardest working employees in today's workforce. They are also ranked high by fellow workers for having a strong work ethics (about 59.5%), being helpful (55.4%) and very skilled (54.5%) of respondents as well marked as the best troubleshooters / problem solvers (41.6%) claimed so.
According to research conducted by Viacom, gen x has a high desire for flexibility and fulfillment at work.

3. Generation Y (Millenials) – GEN Y
 

Following Generation X came on earth Genreation Y the birth period dated for this kids were years are stretchy year period that this generation is described is years 1980s – 1990s to yearly 2000s where birth period of those ppl ends.
This kids are descendants of the Baby Boomers.
In the public this generation is referred as "echo boomers".

The Millenials characteristics are different based on the region of birth, they're famous for the increased familiarity with communication, media and digital technologies.

There upbringing was marked by increase in liberal approach to politics.
The Great recession crisis of the 2000s played a major impact on this generation because it has caused historical high levels of un-employment among youngsters and led to a possible long term economic and social damage to this generation.

Gen Y according are less brand loyal and the speed of the Internet has led the cohort to be similarly flexible and changing in its fashion, style consciousness and where
and how it is communicated with.

As I am born in 1983 me and my generation belongs to Generation Y and even though Bulgaria before 1991 was a Communist regime country, I should agree that I and many of my friends share a very similar behavior and way of thinking to the GEN Y stereotype described, but as I was born in a times of transition and Bulgaria as a Soviet Union Satellite at the time has been lacking behind in fashion and international culture due to the communist regime, me and my generation seem to be sharing a lot of common stereotype characteristics with Generation X such as the punk-rock, metal, hip-hop culture MTV culture and partly because of the GEN X like overall view on life.

Among most famous representative successful people of the Millenials generation are Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder), Prince William (the second in line to the British throne), Kim Jong Un (the leader dictator of North Korea) etc.
 

4. Generation Z ( GEN Z) / iGeneration / Generation Sensible (Post Millenials)
 

Following Millenials generation is GEN Z, demographers and researchers typically set as a starting birth date period of those generation 1990s and mid 2000s. As of time of writting there is still no clear consensus regarding ending birth years.

This is the so called Internet Generation because this generation used the internet and Smart Mobile Phone technology since a very young age, they are very confortable with technology (kinda of wired) and addicted to social media such as Facebook / Twitter / Instagram etc.

 * Summary
 

As a Marketer, Human Resources hiring personal specialist, a CEO or some kind of project / business manager it is a good idea to be aware of these 4 common stereotypes, but as stereotypes and everything theoritized which is mostly everything we count on the one who conducts a marketing survey or trying to sell stuff to any of those generation should be careful not to count 100% on the common traits found among the above 4 major groups and consider the individuality of person. These diversification of stereotypes are mostly valid for the US citizens and Westerners but doesn't fully fit to ex-communist countries or countries of the Soviet union, those countries have a slightly different personality traits of person born in any of the year periods defined, same is more or less true for the poor parts of Africa and India, Vietnam and mostly all of the coomunist countries. It should be said that countries who belonged to the Soviet Union many of which are current Russian Federation Republics have a personality traits that are often mixture of the 4 stereotypes and even have a lot of the traits that were typical for the WW I and WW II generations.

Nomatter the standard error that should always considered when basing a marketing research hypothesis on Generational Marketing (using generational segmentation in marketing best potential customer targets), having a general insight and taking in consideration those stereotypes could seriously help in both marketing as well as HR specific fields like Change Management.

If you're a marketer, I recommend you take a quick look also on following very educative article Generational Makarketing and how to target each of the GEN X, Y, Z and Baby Boomers and what works best for each of them.

Nomatter what just like all Theories, the theory of Boomers and the Generation segmantation is not completely true, but it gives a good soil for reasoning as well definitely helps for people involved in sociology and business.

Comments and feedback on the article are mostly welcome as the topic is very broad and there is much more to be said …

Hope the article was interesting to you ….

What was your Generation like?

The post Baby boomers and Generation X, Y, Z – Generational Marketing and 4 Common personality stereotype traits of people born over the last 60 years appeared first on ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary.

If you have recently upgraded your Debian / Ubuntu / CentOS Linux Server to the latest RPM / DEB packages as part of the upgrade you might have noticed the upgrade of MySQL Community Server  (which was bought by Oracle Corporation few years ago) is automatically upgraded to MariaDB (which is a MySQL fork made by the original developers of MySQL and guaranteed to stay open source. Just to name some of the Notable users include Wikipedia, WordPress.com and Google.).

You might have noticed MariaDB's restart script which is still under /etc/init.d/mysql  won't start and a quick check in /var/log/mysql.err | /var/log/mysql.log
shows errors of /usr/bin/mysqld crashing with errors like:

140502 14:13:05 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled.
InnoDB: Log scan progressed past the checkpoint lsn 108 1057948207
140502 14:13:06  InnoDB: Database was not shut down normally!
InnoDB: Starting crash recovery.
InnoDB: Reading tablespace information from the .ibd files…
InnoDB: Restoring possible half-written data pages from the doublewrite
InnoDB: buffer…
InnoDB: Doing recovery: scanned up to log sequence number 108 1058059648
InnoDB: 1 transaction(s) which must be rolled back or cleaned up
InnoDB: in total 15 row operations to undo
InnoDB: Trx id counter is 0 562485504
140502 14:13:06  InnoDB: Starting an apply batch of log records to the database…
InnoDB: Progress in percents: 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99
InnoDB: Apply batch completed
InnoDB: Starting in background the rollback of uncommitted transactions
140502 14:13:06  InnoDB: Rolling back trx with id 0 562485192, 15 rows to undo
140502 14:13:06  InnoDB: Started; log sequence number 108 1058059648
140502 14:13:06  InnoDB: Assertion failure in thread 1873206128 in file ../../../storage/innobase/fsp/fsp0fsp.c line 1593
InnoDB: Failing assertion: frag_n_used > 0
InnoDB: We intentionally generate a memory trap.
InnoDB: Submit a detailed bug report to http://bugs.mysql.com.
InnoDB: If you get repeated assertion failures or crashes, even
InnoDB: immediately after the mysqld startup, there may be
InnoDB: corruption in the InnoDB tablespace. Please refer to
InnoDB: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/forcing-recovery.html
InnoDB: about forcing recovery.
140502 14:13:06 – mysqld got signal 6 ;
This could be because you hit a bug. It is also possible that this binary
or one of the libraries it was linked against is corrupt, improperly built,
or misconfigured. This error can also be caused by malfunctioning hardware.
We will try our best to scrape up some info that will hopefully help diagnose
the problem, but since we have already crashed, something is definitely wrong
and this may fail.

key_buffer_size=16777216
read_buffer_size=131072
max_used_connections=0
max_threads=151
threads_connected=0
It is possible that mysqld could use up to
key_buffer_size + (read_buffer_size + sort_buffer_size)*max_threads = 345919 K
bytes of memory
Hope that's ok; if not, decrease some variables in the equation.

thd: 0x0
Attempting backtrace. You can use the following information to find out
where mysqld died. If you see no messages after this, something went
terribly wrong…
stack_bottom = (nil) thread_stack 0x30000
140502 14:13:06 [Note] Event Scheduler: Loaded 0 events
140502 14:13:06 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld: ready for connections.
Version: '5.1.41-3ubuntu12.10'  socket: '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock'  port: 3306  (Ubuntu)
/usr/sbin/mysqld(my_print_stacktrace+0x2d) [0xb7579cbd]
/usr/sbin/mysqld(handle_segfault+0x494) [0xb7245854]
[0xb6fc0400]
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6(abort+0x182) [0xb6cc5a82]
/usr/sbin/mysqld(+0x4867e9) [0xb74647e9]
/usr/sbin/mysqld(btr_page_free_low+0x122) [0xb74f1622]
/usr/sbin/mysqld(btr_compress+0x684) [0xb74f4ca4]
/usr/sbin/mysqld(btr_cur_compress_if_useful+0xe7) [0xb74284e7]
/usr/sbin/mysqld(btr_cur_pessimistic_delete+0x332) [0xb7429e72]
/usr/sbin/mysqld(btr_node_ptr_delete+0x82) [0xb74f4012]
/usr/sbin/mysqld(btr_discard_page+0x175) [0xb74f41e5]
/usr/sbin/mysqld(btr_cur_pessimistic_delete+0x3e8) [0xb7429f28]
/usr/sbin/mysqld(+0x526197) [0xb7504197]
/usr/sbin/mysqld(row_undo_ins+0x1b1) [0xb7504771]
/usr/sbin/mysqld(row_undo_step+0x25f) [0xb74c210f]
/usr/sbin/mysqld(que_run_threads+0x58a) [0xb74a31da]
/usr/sbin/mysqld(trx_rollback_or_clean_all_without_sess+0x3e3) [0xb74ded43]
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libpthread.so.0(+0x596e) [0xb6f9f96e]
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6(clone+0x5e) [0xb6d65a4e]
The manual page at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/crashing.html contains
information that should help you find out what is causing the crash.

Any recommendations?
mysql

I hoped to solve the /usr/bin/mysqld segfault error with server reboot as I though the problem is caused by the fact libc library was updated, but even a reboot did not solve it.

I've investigated online for a solution and found following MySQL corruption and recovery article.

The solution outlined there is very simple and comes to adding the line:
 

innodb_force_recovery = 1

to /etc/mysql/my.cnf

Assuming the mysql server is not running before restarting mariadb server.

1. Make a backup (Dump) of all MySQL tables

mysql:~# mysqldump -A > dump.sql

2. Drop all databases which need recovery.
– You can do that from mysql cli or phpmyadmin

3. Stop mysqld.

mysql:~# /etc/init.d/mysql restart

4.  Remove /var/lib/mysql/ib*

mysql:~# rm -rf /var/lib/mysql/ib*

5. Comment out innodb_force_recovery in /etc/mysql/my.cnf

6. Restart mysqld. Look at mysql error log.
If everything is fine and you have problems with broken or missing databases the best thing next is to stop again mariadb and

7. Restore databases from the dump

mysql:~# mysql < dump.sql

The post MySQL crashes after upgrade from MySQL to MariaDB and how to fix it appeared first on ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary.

(LVM) = Logical Volume Manager is a device mapper offering logical volume management for the Linux kernel. Virtually all modern GNU / Linux distributions has support for it and using LVM is used among almost all Hosting Providers on (dedicated) backend physical and Virtual XEN / VMWare etc. servers because it provides the ability to merge a number of disks into virtual volumes (for example you have a number of SSD Hard Drives on a server that are under a separate /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb3 /dev/sdb4 etc. and you want all the HDDs to appear as a single file system this is managed by Linux LVM.

Picture sources Wikipedia

The use of LVM is somewhat similar to RAID 0 disk arrays, where the good about it it allows the removal and addition of hard disks in real time (broken hard disks) on servers to be replaced without service downtime as well as dynamic HDD volume resizal is possible. LVM allows also relatively easy encryption of multiple HDD volumes
with single password.

Discs can be organized in volume groups (so lets say 2 of the server Attached conventional Hard Disks, SCSI or SSDs can be attached to LVM1 and another 3 Hard Drives could be attached to LVM2 group etc.

LVM has been an integral part of Linux kernel since 1998.

lvm is available for install via apt, yum, dhf etc. under a package called lvm2, so to install it on Debian / Ubuntu Fedora Linux (if it is not already installed on the servers with).

– Install LVM2 On Debian / Ubuntu
 

debian:~# apt-get install –yes lvm2

– Install LVM2 on Fedora / CentOS (Redhat RPM based distros)

[root@centos ~]:# yum install -y lvm2

or

[root@fedora ~]:#  dhf install -y lvm2

I. Mounting LVM2 on Linux server after broken DISK change part of a LVM Volume

For example the HDD failed – due to bad sectors and physical HDD head damage damage  – the easiest way to figure that out if the server is running smartd or via a simple HDD test check from BIOS  ( as the ROOT partition is on a LVM it fails to boot properly. You have changed the broken HDD with a brand new and you need to remount the LVM either physically on the server console or remotely via some kind of BIOS KVM interface).

In my experience working for Santrex this was a common sysadmin job, as many of the Virtual Client servers as well as others irons situated in various DataCenters, were occasionally failing to boot and the monitoring system was reporting about the issues and we had to promptly react and bring the servers up.

Here is shortly how we managed to re-mount the LVM after the SSDs / HDDS were substituted:

    1.1. Execute fdisk, vgscan / lvdisplay command

vgscan scans all supported LVM block devices in the system for VGs (Virtual Groups)

    1.2. Next issue vgchange command to activate volume
 

vgchange -ay

   
    1.3. Type lvs command to get information about logical volumes

lvs

   
    1.4. Create a mount point using the mkdir command

      That's because we wanted to check the LVM will get properly mounted on next server reboot).
   
     1.5. Mount an LVM volume using
 

server:~# mount /dev/mapper/DEVICE /path/to/mount_point

     1.6. To check the size of the LVM (mount points, mounted LVM /dev/names sizes and the amount of free space on each of them use)
 

server:~# df -T

The post How to mount LVM partition volume on Linux appeared first on ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary.

Basicly I am against the use of any Cloud type of service but as nowadays Cloud usage is almost inevitable and most of the times you need some kind of service to store and access remotely your Data from multiple devices such as DropBox, Google Drive, iCloud etc. and using some kind of infrastructure to execute high-performance computing is invitable just like the Private Cloud paid services online are booming nowdays, I decided to give a to research and test what is available as a free software in the field of Clouding (your data)

Undoubfully, it is really nice fact that there are Free Software / Open Source alternatives to run your Own personal Cloud to store your data from multiple locations on a single point.

The most popular and leading Cloud Collaboration service (which is OpenSource but unfortunately not under GPLv2 / GPV3 – e.g. not fully free software) is OwnCloud.

ownCloud is a flexible self-hosted PHP and Javascript based web application used for data synchronization and file sharing (where its remote file access capabilites are realized by Sabre/Dav an open source WebDav server.
OwnCloud allows end user to easily Store / Manage files, Calendars, Contacts, To-Do lists (user and group administration via OpenID and LDAP), public URLs can be easily, created, the users can interact with browser-based ODF (Open Document Format) word processor , there is a Bookmarking, URL Shortening service integrated, Gallery RSS Feed and Document Viewer tools such as PDF viewer etc. which makes it a great alternative to the popular Google Drive, iCloud, DropBox etc.

The main advantage of using a self-hosted Cloud is that Your data is hosted and managed by you (on your server and your hard drives) and not by some God knows who third party provider such as the upmentioned.
In other words by using OwnCloud you manage your own data and you don't share it ot on demand with the Security Agencies with CIA, MI6, Mussad … (as it is very likely most of publicly offered Cloud storage services keeps track on the data stored on them).

The other disadvantage of Cloud Computing is that the stored data on such is usually stored on multiple servers and you can never know for sure where your data is physically located, which in my opinion is way worse than the option with Self Hosted Cloud where you know where your data belongs and you can do whatever you want with your data keep it secret / delete it or share it on your demand.

OwnCloud has its clients for most popular Mobile (Smart Phone) platforms – an Android client is available in Google Play Store as well as in Apple iTunes besides the clients available for FreeBSD OS, the GNOME desktop integration package and Raspberry Pi.

For those who are looking for additional advanced features an Enterprise version of OwnCloud is also available aiming business use and included software support.

Assuming you have a homebrew server or have hired a dedidacted or VPS server (such as the Ones we provide) ,Installing OwnCloud on GNU / Linux is a relatively easy
task and it will take no more than 15 minutes to 2 hours of your life.
In that article I am going to give you a specific instructions on how to install on Debian GNU / Linux 9 but installing on RPM based distros is similar and straightfoward process.
 

1. Install MySQL / MariaDB database server backend
 

By default OwnCloud does use SQLite as a backend data storage but as SQLite stores its data in a file and is becoming quickly slow, is generally speaking slowre than relational databases such as MariaDB server (or the now almost becoming obsolete MySQL Community server).
Hence in this article I will explain how to install OwnCloud with MariaDB as a backend.

If you don't have it installed already, e.g. it is a new dedicated server install MariaDB with:
 

server:~# apt-get install –yes mariadb-server

Assuming you're install on a (brand new fresh Linux install – you might want to install also the following set of tools / services).

server:~# systemctl start mariadb
server:~# systemctl enable mariadb
server:~# mysql_secure_installation

mysql_secure_installation – is to finalize and secure MariaDB installation and set the root password.
 

2. Create necessery database and users for OwnCloud to the database server
 

linux:~# mysql -u root -p
MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE owncloud CHARACTER SET utf8;
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON owncloud.* TO 'owncloud'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'owncloud_passwd';
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
MariaDB [(none)]> \q

3. Install Apache + PHP necessery deb packages
 

As of time of writting the article on Debian 9.0 the required packages for a working Apache + PHP install for OwnCloud are as follows.

server:~# apt-get install –yes apache2 mariadb-server libapache2-mod-php7.0 \
openssl php-imagick php7.0-common php7.0-curl php7.0-gd \
php7.0-imap php7.0-intl php7.0-json php7.0-ldap php7.0-mbstring \
php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-mysql php7.0-pgsql php-smbclient php-ssh2 \
php7.0-sqlite3 php7.0-xml php7.0-zip php-redis php-apcu

4. Install Redis to use as a Memory Cache for accelerated / better performance ownCloud service

Redis is an in-memory kept key-value database that is similar to Memcached so OwnCloud could use it to cache stored data files. To install latest redis-server on Debian 9:
 

server:~# apt-get install –yes redis-server

5. Install ownCloud software packages on the server

Unfortunately, default package repositories on Debian 9 does not provide owncloud server packages but only some owncloud-client packages are provided, that's perhaps the packages issued by owncloud does not match debian packages.

As of time of writting this article, the latest available OwnCloud server  version package for Debian is OC 10.

a) Add necessery GPG keys

The repositories to use are provided by owncloud.org, to use them we need to first add the necessery gpg key to verify the binaries have a legit checksum.
 

server:~# wget -qO- https://download.owncloud.org/download/repositories/stable/Debian_9.0/Release.key | sudo apt-key add –

b) Add owncloud.org repositories in separete sources.list file

server:~# echo 'deb https://download.owncloud.org/download/repositories/stable/Debian_9.0/ /' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/owncloud.list

c) Enable https transports for the apt install tool

server:~# apt-get –yes install apt-transport-https

d) Update Debian apt cache list files and install the pack

server:~# apt-get update

server:~# apt-get install –yes owncloud-files

By default owncloud store file location is /var/www/owncloud but on many servers that location is not really appropriate because /var/www might be situated on a hard drive partition whose size is not big enough, if that's the case just move the folder to another partition and create a symbolic link in /var/www/owncloud pointing to it …

6. Create necessery Apache configurations to make your new self-hosted cloud accessible
 

a) Create Apache config file

server:~# vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/owncloud.conf

Alias /owncloud "/var/www/owncloud/"

<Directory /var/www/owncloud/>
Options +FollowSymlinks
AllowOverride All

<IfModule mod_dav.c>
Dav off
</IfModule>

SetEnv HOME /var/www/owncloud
SetEnv HTTP_HOME /var/www/owncloud

</Directory>

b) Enable Mod_Dav (WebDAV) if it is not enabled yet

server:~# ln -sf ../mods-available/dav_fs.conf
server:~# ln -sf ../mods-available/dav_fs.load
server:~# ln -sf ../mods-available/dav.load
server:~# ln -sf ../mods-available/dav_lock.load

c) Set proper permissions for /var/www/owncloud to make upload work properly

chown -R www-data: /var/www/owncloud/

d) Restart Apache WebServer (to make new configuration affective)

server:~# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

7. Finalize  OwnCloud Install
 

Access OwnCloud Web Interface to finish the database creation and set the administrator password for the New Self-Hosted cloud
 

http://Your_server_ip_address/owncloud/

By default the Web interface is accessible in unencrypted (insecure) http:// it is a recommended practice (if you already don't have an HTTPS SSL certificate install for the IP or the domain to install one either a self-signed certificate or even better to use LetsEncrypt CertBot to easily create a valid SSL for free for your domain

Just fill in in your desired user / pass and pass on the database user / password / db name (if required you can set also a different location for the data directory from the default one /var/www/owncloud/data.

Click Finish Setup and That's all folks!

OwnCloud is successfully installed on the server, you can now go and download a Mobile App or Desktop application for whatever OS you're using and start using it as a Dropbox replacement. In a certain moment you might want to consult also the official UserManual documentation as you would probably need further information on how to manage your owncloud.

Enjoy !

The post Install and use personal Own Cloud on Debian Linux for better shared data security – OwnCloud a Free Software replacement for Google Drive appeared first on ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary.

If you're sysadmining a large numbers of shared hosted websites which use Nginx Webserver to interpret PHP scripts and serve HTML, Javascript, CSS … whatever data.

You realize the high amount of risk that comes with a possible successful security breach / hack into a server by a malicious cracker. Compromising Nginx Webserver by an intruder automatically would mean that not only all users web data will get compromised, but the attacker would get an immediate access to other data such as Email or SQL (if the server is running multiple services).

Nowadays it is not so common thing to have a multiple shared websites on the same server together with other services, but historically there are many legacy servers / webservers left which host some 50 or 100+ websites.

Of course the best thing to do is to isolate each and every website into a separate Virtual Container however as this is a lot of work and small and mid-sized companies refuse to spend money on mostly anything this might be not an option for you.

Considering that this might be your case and you're running Nginx either as a Load Balancing, Reverse Proxy server etc. , even though Nginx is considered to be among the most secure webservers out there, there is absolutely no gurantee it would not get hacked and the server wouldn't get rooted by a script kiddie freak that just got in darknet some 0day exploit.

To minimize the impact of a possible Webserver hack it is a good idea to place all websites into Linux Jails.

For those who hear about Linux Jail for a first time,
chroot() jail is a way to isolate a process / processes and its forked children from the rest of the *nix system. It should / could be used only for UNIX processes that aren't running as root (administrator user), because of the fact the superuser could break out (escape) the jail pretty easily.

Jailing processes is a concept that is pretty old that was first time introduced in UNIX version 7 back in the distant year 1979, and it was first implemented into BSD Operating System ver. 4.2 by Bill Joy (a notorious computer scientist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems). Its original use for the creation of so called HoneyPot – a computer security mechanism set to detect, deflect, or, in some manner, counteract attempts at unauthorized use of information systems that appears completely legimit service or part of website whose only goal is to track, isolate, and monitor intruders, a very similar to police string operations (baiting) of the suspect. It is pretty much like а bait set to collect the fish (which in this  case is the possible cracker).

BSD Jails nowadays became very popular as iPhones environment where applications are deployed are inside a customly created chroot jail, the principle is exactly the same as in Linux.

But anyways enough talk, let's create a new jail and deploy set of system binaries for our Nginx installation, here is the things you will need:

1. You need to have set a directory where a copy of /bin/ls /bin/bash /bin/,  /bin/cat … /usr/bin binaries /lib and other base system Linux system binaries copy will reside.

server:~# mkdir -p /usr/local/chroot/nginx

2. You need to create the isolated environment backbone structure /etc/ , /dev, /var/, /usr/, /lib64/ (in case if deploying on 64 bit architecture Operating System).

server:~# export DIR_N=/usr/local/chroot/nginx;
server:~# mkdir -p $DIR_N/etc
server:~# mkdir -p $DIR_N/dev
server:~# mkdir -p $DIR_N/var
server:~# mkdir -p $DIR_N/usr
server:~# mkdir -p $DIR_N/usr/local/nginx
server:~# mkdir -p $DIR_N/tmp
server:~# chmod 1777 $DIR_N/tmp
server:~# mkdir -p $DIR_N/var/tmp
server:~# chmod 1777 $DIR_N/var/tmp
server:~# mkdir -p $DIR_N/lib64
server:~# mkdir -p $DIR_N/usr/local/

3. Create required device files for the new chroot environment

server:~# /bin/mknod -m 0666 $D/dev/null c 1 3
server:~# /bin/mknod -m 0666 $D/dev/random c 1 8
server:~# /bin/mknod -m 0444 $D/dev/urandom c 1 9

mknod COMMAND is used instead of the usual /bin/touch command to create block or character special files.

Once create the permissions of /usr/local/chroot/nginx/{dev/null, dev/random, dev/urandom} have to be look like so:

server:~# ls -l /usr/local/chroot/nginx/dev/{null,random,urandom}
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 3 Aug 17 09:13 /dev/null
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 8 Aug 17 09:13 /dev/random
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 9 Aug 17 09:13 /dev/urandom

4. Install nginx files into the chroot directory (copy all files of current nginx installation into the jail)
 

If your NGINX webserver installation was installed from source to keep it latest
and is installed in lets say, directory location /usr/local/nginx you have to copy /usr/local/nginx to /usr/local/chroot/nginx/usr/local/nginx, i.e:

server:~# /bin/cp -varf /usr/local/nginx/* /usr/local/chroot/nginx/usr/local/nginx

5. Copy necessery Linux system libraries to newly created jail
 

NGINX webserver is compiled to depend on various libraries from Linux system root e.g. /lib/* and /lib64/* therefore in order to the server work inside the chroot-ed environment you need to transfer this libraries to the jail folder /usr/local/chroot/nginx

If you are curious to find out which libraries exactly is nginx binary dependent on run:

server:~# ldd /usr/local/nginx/usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx

        linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffe3e952000)
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007f2b4762c000)
        libcrypt.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcrypt.so.1 (0x00007f2b473f4000)
        libpcre.so.3 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre.so.3 (0x00007f2b47181000)
        libcrypto.so.0.9.8 => /usr/local/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8 (0x00007f2b46ddf000)
        libz.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so.1 (0x00007f2b46bc5000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007f2b46826000)
        /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f2b47849000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0x00007f2b46622000)

The best way is to copy only the libraries in the list from ldd command for best security, like so:

server: ~# cp -rpf /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libthread.so.0 /usr/local/chroot/nginx/lib/*
server: ~# cp -rpf library chroot_location
…
etc.

However if you're in a hurry (not a recommended practice) and you don't care for maximum security anyways (you don't worry the jail could be exploited from some of the many lib files not used by nginx and you don't  about HDD space), you can also copy whole /lib into the jail, like so:

server: ~# cp -rpf /lib/ /usr/local/chroot/nginx/usr/local/nginx/lib

NOTE! Once again copy whole /lib directory is a very bad practice but for a time pushing activities sometimes you can do it …

6. Copy /etc/ some base files and ld.so.conf.d , prelink.conf.d directories to jail environment
 

server:~# cp -rfv /etc/{group,prelink.cache,services,adjtime,shells,gshadow,shadow,hosts.deny,localtime,nsswitch.conf,nscd.conf,prelink.conf,protocols,hosts,passwd,ld.so.cache,ld.so.conf,resolv.conf,host.conf}  \
/usr/local/chroot/nginx/usr/local/nginx/etc

server:~# cp -avr /etc/{ld.so.conf.d,prelink.conf.d} /usr/local/chroot/nginx/nginx/etc

7. Copy HTML, CSS, Javascript websites data from the root directory to the chrooted nginx environment

server:~# nice -n 10 cp -rpf /usr/local/websites/ /usr/local/chroot/nginx/usr/local/

This could be really long if the websites are multiple gigabytes and million of files, but anyways the nice command should reduce a little bit the load on the server it is best practice to set some kind of temporary server maintenance page to show on the websites index in order to prevent the accessing server clients to not have interrupts (that's especially the case on older 7200 / 7400 RPM non-SSD HDDs.)
 

8. Stop old Nginx server outside of Chroot environment and start the new one inside the jail

a) Stop old nginx server

Either stop the old nginx using it start / stop / restart script inside /etc/init.d/nginx (if you have such installed) or directly kill the running webserver with:

server:~# killall -9 nginx

b) Test the chrooted nginx installation is correct and ready to run inside the chroot environment

server:~# /usr/sbin/chroot /usr/local/chroot/nginx /usr/local/nginx/nginx/sbin/nginx -t
server:~# /usr/sbin/chroot /usr/local/chroot/nginx /usr/local/nginx/nginx/sbin/nginx

c) Restart the chrooted nginx webserver – when necessery later

server:~# /usr/sbin/chroot /nginx /usr/local/chroot/nginx/sbin/nginx -s reload

d) Edit the chrooted nginx conf

If you need to edit nginx configuration, be aware that the chrooted NGINX will read its configuration from /usr/local/chroot/nginx/nginx/etc/conf/nginx.conf (i'm saying that if you by mistake forget and try to edit the old config that is usually under /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf

The post Nginx increase security by putting websites into Linux jails howto appeared first on ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary.

As I'm currently looking for ways to maximize my incomes without taking participation in 5 days week 8 hours schedule in a Big Corporation office job (which prooved for me to be a terrible slavery) I decided to give Free Lancing a try once again. 
Historically I have registrations in some of the most popular Free Lancing services Web platforms such as freelancer.com and upwork.com.
But none of them really was easy enough to handle as applying and winning a project there is usually a lot of headbanging into the walls and the platforms are full of clients that are looking for free lancers for short-term projects the work selection there required too much work, often projects offered there are seriously under-paid and its really hard to negotiate with many of the clients as they're unprofessional in the fields they're working (don't get me wrong I'm not saying many people are not very successful with this platforms, and that the platforms are not providing work for me I only say it is not really something to my liking …

In the mean time if you happen to read this article and looking for a High Quality Empoyee Cheap System Administrator or automation developmer, an IT counseling FreeLancer or a Ultra cheap WebHosting service in the European Union, I'll be very happy if you become my client.

Anyways … further on I decided to further experiment a little bit with other Free Lancing platforms (suggested by a friend Mitko Ivanov who helped me a lot with things and is continuing to help me over the last year ).

So following his kind suggestion I already tried one of the popular FreeLancing freeeup.com which is looking only for a best specialists into the fields of Marketing, Development, System Administration etc. but even though I tried hard with them the guys decided I am not matching there criteria for a the best 1% of all the people in the field of IT so my application for the platform was rejected twice over the last 1 month and a half.

Another similar new platform for free lancing that looks promising that I've learned about is toptal.com (there site Slogan is Hire FreeLance Talent from the Top 3%) so I went there and registered.

I had hit a road block there too as it seems, there website registration form was not tested enough with non-Windows operating systems with Mozilla Firefox and as it happens that I am using Debian GNU / Linux for my Desktop their drop-down menus was not working, just like some of the form on their website regular expression checks failed.

I've contacted the guys to inform them about their problems (and they kindly advised) I just give a try a registration with different browser (i.e. Google Chrome) which I immediately did and registratoin there was finally a success.
I have to say the new user application form registration of toptal also annoyed me with the stupid requirement to provide a picture in 1000px x 1000px but as this freelancing platform is still new and has way to go until it is established name in the field of freelancing such as upwork.com and I warmly excuse them.

Once registerered for them the user has to schedule an entry interview just like it goes with a standard company interview with a kind of Human Resources (HR) specialist and I guess some technical guys in order to evaluate on your value (Ha-Ha, someone else to determine your value is already crazy but all crazy employees do it still, of course I don't care as I well know that my value is much more than what they put on me).
The online interview once scheduled has to be done in a Web Meeting (Online Rooms) Platform called BlueJeans similar to Cisco WebEx (that is today heavily used in Corporate world in companies such as Hewlett Packard where we used it heavily, IBM, Concentrix etc.) and others Zoom, JoinMe GotoMeeting, HighFive.

As you could guess BlueJeans (which is by the way a Cloud based meeting software – yackes !) is planned to work mainly on Windows and Mac OS Operating Systems and even though there is a BlueJeans Linux version the provided binary is only for RedHat based linuxes in the RPM binary package format, so in order for me to participate in the scheduled meeting, I either had to port the package and install it on my Debian (what triggeted me to write this article or) use a Virtual Machine such as VirtualBox or VMWare running some kind of Windows OS such as Windows 8 / 10 etc.

Even though I have a Windows 10 OS testbed in a Virtualbox container, I preferred to not use it for BlueJeans and do it the hard way and install BlueJeans on my Debian 9.5 Stretch Linux.

That appeared to be a relatively easy process, so below is how I did it:

1. Download alien convertion (tool) that allows you to convert RPM -> deb, Slackware -> Deb and Linux Standard Base (LDB) packages to deb package format

noah:~# apt-get install –yes alien
…

2. Download latest BlueJeans version from BlueJeans website
 

As of time of writting this article the download link for bluejeans online conferencing software is here

noah:~# wget https://swdl.bluejeans.com/desktop/linux/1.36/1.36.9/bluejeans-1.36.9.x86_64.rpm
…

3. Convert bluejeans rpm package with alien

noah:~# alien –to-deb bluejeans-*.rpm
 

Warning: Skipping conversion of scripts in package bluejeans: postinst postrm preinst prerm
Warning: Use the –scripts parameter to include the scripts.
bluejeans_1.36.9-2_amd64.deb generated
root@jericho:/home/hipo/Свалени# dpkg -i bluejeans_*.deb
Selecting previously unselected package bluejeans.
(Reading database … 516203 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack bluejeans_1.36.9-2_amd64.deb …
Unpacking bluejeans (1.36.9-2) …
Setting up bluejeans (1.36.9-2) …

4. Install the deb package as usual with dpkg tool

noah: ~# dpkg -i bluejeans_*.deb

By default BlueJeans were installed under directory /opt/bluejeans

noah:~# ls -al /opt/bluejeans/bluejeans-bin
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 72423392 Jun 14 02:31 /opt/bluejeans/bluejeans-bin*

5. Fix missing library links if such are present in order to make BlueJeans workable

Historically I have dealt with many Linux programs that are provided only in RPM package format and I knew that often once an RPM is converted to DEB with alien due to the package dependency differences on Redhats (CentOS / Fedora etc.) there are problems with missing libraries.

This time this was the case as well, so as usual right after install I did a check up with ldd (print shared object dependencies Linux command) to find out about missing libraries and one library appeared missing.

noah:~# ldd /opt/bluejeans/bluejeans-bin
    linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007fffa2182000)
    librt.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/librt.so.1 (0x00007fae95f5e000)
    libdl.so.2 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0x00007fae95d5a000)
    libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 (0x00007fae95718000)
    libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 (0x00007fae95463000)
    libatk-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libatk-1.0.so.0 (0x00007fae9523d000)
    libpangocairo-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpangocairo-1.0.so.0 (0x00007fae95030000)
    libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 (0x00007fae94e0c000)
    libcairo.so.2 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcairo.so.2 (0x00007fae94aef000)
    libpango-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpango-1.0.so.0 (0x00007fae948aa000)
    libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfreetype.so.6 (0x00007fae945f5000)
    libfontconfig.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfontconfig.so.1 (0x00007fae943b2000)
    libgobject-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgobject-2.0.so.0 (0x00007fae9415e000)
    libglib-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libglib-2.0.so.0 (0x00007fae93e48000)
    libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6 (0x00007fae93b0a000)
    libXi.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXi.so.6 (0x00007fae938fa000)
    libnss3.so => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss3.so (0x00007fae935b1000)
    libnssutil3.so => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnssutil3.so (0x00007fae93381000)
    libsmime3.so => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libsmime3.so (0x00007fae93154000)
    libplc4.so => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libplc4.so (0x00007fae92f4f000)
    libnspr4.so => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnspr4.so (0x00007fae92d10000)
    libgconf-2.so.4 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgconf-2.so.4 (0x00007fae92adf000)
    libexpat.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libexpat.so.1 (0x00007fae928ad000)
    libXext.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXext.so.6 (0x00007fae9269b000)
    libXfixes.so.3 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXfixes.so.3 (0x00007fae92495000)
    libXrender.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXrender.so.1 (0x00007fae9228b000)
    libXcomposite.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXcomposite.so.1 (0x00007fae92088000)
    libasound.so.2 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libasound.so.2 (0x00007fae91d8a000)
    libXdamage.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXdamage.so.1 (0x00007fae91b87000)
    libXtst.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXtst.so.6 (0x00007fae91981000)
    libpthread.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007fae91763000)
    libcap.so.2 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcap.so.2 (0x00007fae9155d000)
    libudev.so.0 => not found
    libdbus-1.so.3 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdbus-1.so.3 (0x00007fae9130c000)
    libnotify.so.4 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnotify.so.4 (0x00007fae91104000)
    libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 (0x00007fae90d85000)
    libm.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0x00007fae909f2000)
    libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007fae907db000)
    libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007fae90421000)
    /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007fae96166000)
    libgmodule-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgmodule-2.0.so.0 (0x00007fae9021d000)
    libgio-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgio-2.0.so.0 (0x00007fae8fe7f000)
    libpangoft2-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpangoft2-1.0.so.0 (0x00007fae8fc6a000)
    libfribidi.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfribidi.so.0 (0x00007fae8fa53000)
    libXinerama.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXinerama.so.1 (0x00007fae8f850000)
    libXrandr.so.2 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXrandr.so.2 (0x00007fae8f645000)
    libXcursor.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXcursor.so.1 (0x00007fae8f43b000)
    libpng16.so.16 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpng16.so.16 (0x00007fae8f208000)
    libz.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so.1 (0x00007fae8efea000)
    libpixman-1.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpixman-1.so.0 (0x00007fae8ed44000)
    libxcb-shm.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxcb-shm.so.0 (0x00007fae8eb41000)
    libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxcb.so.1 (0x00007fae8e919000)
    libxcb-render.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxcb-render.so.0 (0x00007fae8e70b000)
    libthai.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libthai.so.0 (0x00007fae8e501000)
    libuuid.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libuuid.so.1 (0x00007fae8e2fa000)
    libffi.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libffi.so.6 (0x00007fae8e0f1000)
    libpcre.so.3 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre.so.3 (0x00007fae8de7f000)
    libplds4.so => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libplds4.so (0x00007fae8dc7b000)
    libgthread-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgthread-2.0.so.0 (0x00007fae8da79000)
    libdbus-glib-1.so.2 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdbus-glib-1.so.2 (0x00007fae8d851000)
    libsystemd.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libsystemd.so.0 (0x00007fae8d5c9000)
    libselinux.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libselinux.so.1 (0x00007fae8d3a1000)
    libresolv.so.2 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libresolv.so.2 (0x00007fae8d18a000)
    libmount.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libmount.so.1 (0x00007fae8cf31000)
    libharfbuzz.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libharfbuzz.so.0 (0x00007fae8cc81000)
    libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXau.so.6 (0x00007fae8ca7d000)
    libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXdmcp.so.6 (0x00007fae8c877000)
    libdatrie.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdatrie.so.1 (0x00007fae8c66f000)
    liblzma.so.5 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/liblzma.so.5 (0x00007fae8c449000)
    liblz4.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/liblz4.so.1 (0x00007fae8c22c000)
    libgcrypt.so.20 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcrypt.so.20 (0x00007fae8bf10000)
    libblkid.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libblkid.so.1 (0x00007fae8bcc1000)
    libgraphite2.so.3 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgraphite2.so.3 (0x00007fae8ba94000)
    libbsd.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libbsd.so.0 (0x00007fae8b87d000)
    libgpg-error.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgpg-error.so.0 (0x00007fae8b65d000)

As I am on my notebook with Debian 9 and on Debian / Ubuntus and other Linuxes udevd daemon and connected libraries are long time existing, it was obvious the problems to dependencies are because of missing library links (or library version inconsistencies).

To find out what kind of libudev.so* are present I used slocate package (locate) command.

noah:~# locate libudev.so
/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1
/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1.6.10
/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so
/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1
/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1.6.10

Obviously the missing library libudev.so.0 was present under a different name so I give a try to just create a new symbolic link from libudev.so.1 to libudev.so.0 hoping that the libudev library version Blue Jeans was compiled against did not have a missing binary objects from the ones installed on my OS.

noah:~# ln -sf /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.0

noah:~# ldd /opt/bluejeans/bluejeans-bin |grep -i 'not found'

Above command did not return any missing libraries, so I went further and executed it.

6. Go start BlueJeans and register a user or use the anonymous login to be ready for the scheduled online meting

… And, Guess, what it works!
 

noah:~# /opt/bluejeans/bluejeans-bin

To make it easy to remember to later start the binary under a familiar name, I've also created a link into

noah:~# ln -sf /opt/bluejeans/bluejeans-bin /usr/bin/bluejeans
 

noah:~#  sudo su – hipo
hipo@noah:~$ /usr/bin/bluejeans

The post How to install BlueJeans Video calls, sharing, Conference software on Debian / Ubuntu Linux – Convert RPM to DEB package with alien howto appeared first on ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary.

1. Back in the normal computer old Sys Admin days before the new Age of Computing (the Cloud HELL)

I've been in the system (server) administration business for more than 15 years. We started as kids dreaming about managing big Data Centers having ultimate control over servers data and services and in a sense the beginning of the 2000s looked like the system adminsitration will be among the most promising and profitable professions for the coming 30 years or so.

The amount of servers installed were booming, the Domain Registrantrant Ballon (Dot-Com Bubble) and the appearing need for everyone to have and run a website with the connected hardware and software (OS) needs made the sysadmin of the time like a precious asset for a company and business …

Many companies (small and mid-sized) still did not have a separate role for sys admin, but hired some crazy IT enthusiast that was doing a lot of the sysadm job for them.

It was wild years of freedom for the common IT specialist with a server software install / update / maintenance background.

The complexity level to install configure or tune for performance a (UNIX) like server be it GNU / Linux or FreeBSD or farm of servers was also high and there was little documentation than today and a lot of custom tweaks (scripts) to develop to make things working and system administration job was way more custom than today.
In other words the sys admin was a digital artist just like the UI / Web designer or the common programmer (who was way more advanced and hack, thought oriented) than todays "coders" most of which knows no damn thing but are a great Human Robots serving the functionos of ("Google Search for some ind of Programming language code" then "Copy" and "Paste" into a buggy module / script / application function) and then of course as a result you have a large clumsy (softwares) programs which eat a lot of Server resources (often crash – that's especially true for Java based applications) in the background and get respawned (which does severely load the servers CPUs / Memory) but as the end user is not aware of that it is considered a job finely done.

2. The IT Computing and SysAdmin / Programmer Jobs offered today

In other words nowadays computing is becoming a mess, just like a system is complicating it becomes more prone to failures, the same happens with modern informatics. The chaos of programming languages code and concepts (especially), the abstracts makes a programming code harder to debug than in the past (of course that depends on the programmer too), but as most programmers are totally lame and doesn't understand even basic Hardware / Electronics concepts but are more of a Code Monkeys (yes I can say today's programmers are not really a programmers but a CODE MONKEYS !).

The result for the avarage sys admin is that the developed software are less and less custom but written in a way (to just run it on a server) and usually the sys admin ends up with less and less options for modification or debug problems of the software. As the tendency of installable services / programs (I am talking about the proprietary ones) are becoming more and more monolithic of nature.
As a consequence that starts making the classical system administration as most of todays softwares can be installed even by a highly trained monkeys (no real sysadm needed) and even if you work as a sysadmin it is very likely you are not involved in interesting job but doing more and more routine and burecracy work (which is hell at least for me – as one of my primary motivators to start a career in the IT field and specifically in the field of System Administration that back in the day the system administrator used to be a more important person for a company as a whole company infrastructure depended on the work of that single Super Man that made possible the Internet Accessibility for office users, made possible Linux / Windows servers to operate fine with a bunch of websites and some crazy softwares and platforms, and even took a periodic maintenance of an Office Workers PCs, not to mention the responsibilities to do the frequent data backups, do a support functions (talk heavily on the phone with customers with issues etc.) and help programmers set-up their crazy testing environments (developed project code) on a testing servers etc.

It was the golden age of system administration … and perhaps a golden age for the ones involved in the field of Computing .. really …

3. What if you end up to be a Jobless System Administrator today? What does current sys admin Job Market Place look like?

Have you listened to Venom (black metal band) song – Welcome to Hell?  … its like that ..

Yes, that's the worst nightmare for most of us sys admins , becoming jobless due to company bankruptcy, dismissal or just a desire for a rest for some time from the over active job to talk over the phone with uneasy and angry customers.
Al this put you you in a very harsh situation, because the Classical System Administartor jobs from the past such as building a Strong Company Firewall with IPTABLES or BSD PF is nowdays done by some pre-purchased router such as:

McAffee, Palo Alto, JuniperSRX 2020, Next Generation (firewall as a service such as Cato Networks), Kaspersky, Fortinet, (if you're lucky pfSense), Comodo Internet Security, Zone Alarm (the possible list of sh*t goes on and on …)

In other words businesses nowadays, prefer to buy a ready solution and most of this solutions even though being configurable, often have a weird interfaces and force the user to use a ready set of firewall rules (policies) rather than building ones from scratch … and most of the softwares can be configured by a normal non sysadmin anyways so mostly or soon the sysadm is not needed.

If in the past you have build things from source or deployed / configured things server by server and each of your servers as a consequence had its kind of own spirit, because of the many custom things placed on it, the current situation with sysadmin job are mass deployments of pre-bundled packages (DevOps – Development Operations – another crazy business non-sense buzzword that describes server scripting automation development) as a DevOps (SysAdmin) which is some kind of Hybdir between a programmer / scripter / db developer / and scripter you have to be eloquent or at least have some basic knowledge in mass deploy tools such as Docker, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, TeamCity, Bamboo, Fabric, Etc.
and to add even more hell to the hell, in most System Administration jobs you perhaps won't manage your own company data even but you will have to deal with third party vendors such as AWS Amazon or store the company important data in some external Cloud Storage service (except if you don't have the option to choose for a custom Own Cloud solution) …

But often this is not enough you have to be more or less aware or have some experience with some SRE (Site Reliability Engineering)

But wait, that's not enough you need to be also a good Team Player communicate to a good number of often lame burecrats / lame progammers / a manager over your head that usually does not know shit about technology / a project manager / some Database guys that oten have a very questionable knowledge in Database programming maintenance .. etc. …  and the worst (in my humbe opinion) is that you have to spend 2, 3 as a mimumum daily in a non-sense meetings over proprietary non-free software program such as Skype For Business or Web Room meeting online such as WebEx with people that have little to know idea about technology or are presenting professionals but have a very questionable amount of knowledge in their field …

To summarize modern SysAdmin jobs, just like all other jobs are slavery but with the difference that in most common daily jobs most people have more freedom and are less dependent for their daily work, than you end up as a New Age of Computing Sys Admin.

Oh yeah and lets not forget the high amounts of STRESS you get daily as a sysadmin that for some is almost 24/7 especially for people who manage a large networks or server infrastructures. Suppose you migrate a Web services, database service, mail server, DNS record etc. and you make a minor mistake so the users can't access the service, guess who will be fired first ?! YOU !!! Even if you don't get hired, you'll be murmored and send for some kind of meaningless training just because you did a mistake (which is very normal, as every human daily days tons of mistakes) …

Another thing is if you're truely dedicated to system administration profession and you spend hours reading and learning new technologies (which in the field of system administration is inevitable) or just doing work from home as a freelancer to get some extra bucks and you don't have to actively sport (Running, Biking, Fitness, Mountaun Riding, whatver …), your Spinal problems and Herniated Discs (Neck or Waist) is to soon knock your door
and stay with you until your death bed.
 

But that's not all of the hurdles, many of the System Administrator like jobs of today require you to have an overview knowledge on Virtualization technologies such as VMWare ESX, VServer … and have a good idea about VPS management and even some employeers require a knowledge in Astrerisk IP PBX (Open Source Communiation Software) or other IP Telelphony software strangie …

Dear sysadmin collegues, my opinion is this kind of requirements are a little bit higher and almost impossible to match (or there are none to any living flesh) that attains all this knowledge or they will ever be.

… But even if you get employeed (and you tricked the HR interviee that you own the SuperMan + Batman + Robocop + You name your favourite movie superhero superpowers and went through the other interview (hell) circles) … finally you get hired and you end up often part of projects that are already seriously messed up from the start or developed in a way that even if succeed in a short term, guarantees a long term failure.

Oh the hirement process is also a lot of enjoyment for the burecracy freak, you have to fill in a number of documents, describing tons of information, provide tons of documents, certifications, talk a number of times on the phones with inadequate Human Resource representative (usually highly brainwashed ppl) "specialist" that knows shit about technology … Then you have to go to a few more selections, interviews further with a technical guy, fill in tests online (maybe not always) and finally talk to a company manager.

All above screening and selection I'm desribing of-course is featuring large corporations (which are among the little) that offers some decent sallaries like 1500 – 1800 EUR (for Eastern Europe) or 3000 – 3500 for rest of Western Europe (if you're a lucky American citizen you might earn up to 10 000 – 11 000 $).
The advantages of the large corporation besides the so-so sallary is the sense of security (that you want be jobless just next year or two from your day 1 in the company).

You can always become a sysadmin in a start-up company but finding such is also nowadays a real pain in the ass and even if you have a 12000+ unique a day visits site such as mine and you offer your sys admin skills for really cheap , you still will have troubles in finding clients / employeer for whom you can practice your skills and make a living as a SysAdmin.

That's pretty weird for me especially with the fact that everyone is tubing that more and more IT specialists are required ..

Anyways assuming you have the "luck" to get hired in a large corporation such as IBM you will have to do a very tedious job, such as either Backup with (IBM Data Protect) or similar software, only do build or deploy new servers, web services, databases or whatever else. E.g. your type of work is likely to be monotonоus and boring and will offer you not much than learning a little bit more about the technology you're already acquainted to ..

Moreover, because in modern IT, human freedom is not really respected … you either comply to the company brainwashing strategies a bulk shit procedures or you get fired, you either become a small wheel in the failing machine (here i mean most large companies you might end up hired nowdays reached its peak state are into a decline) and a logical result is living in constant fear that they might fire you end you might end up jobless or you stand up for what you're in the company and be careless about political correctnes and you quickly get inconvenient, politically incorrect (oh yes I forgot to mention this other craziness if you happen to be employeed you have to be politically correct) and do periodically a stupid exhausting Trainings (I prefer to call them a brainwashing session as most of the trainings are not teaching you anything but just wash your head to comply to shit). But if that Hell is not enough in the large corporation in order to look "normal" you have to partcipate in the Non-Sense Teambuildings, with team mates you have little to know affection (with the very same people you spend 5 days a week, now you have spend 1 /2 more day. every month or so …

So welcome to modern HELL OF system administration, or better to say welcome to the Cult of the large corporation businesses.

4. What are your options if you end up as a poor old school sys admin on the job market?

If you have a long history as a sys admin and computers become too boring for you like my case, you can always think about migrating to a Management position in the field of IT but the unpleasent surprise here is even as a Manager you will probably have to start working for a corporation and have the same depressing atmosphere of people standing in front of their computers (tailor like) all their long with the only difference you will have to speak more with a number of computer addict zoombies (left without much options) that are doing some monkey programming / coding or Services job day after …

Other option you have is to move out of the virtual business at all and get into a real works industry such as getting a Construction job (but believe me such transitions, though I heard of are too painful) and sooner or later you will get back to computing virtual business ..

I have a friend Jose Mathew, whose exit poll from the IT business was to graduate a 2 years post-university course to become a professional Chef (cook) in restaurant but after already few years employeed as a Cook, he is again considering getting back into the IT and paradoxically he wants to enter the niche of Network Administrator (which I forget to mention earlier in that article).

The Network Administrators are among lucky System Administartors job profiles because there job is depending nowadays mostly on their CCNA / CCNP certificate, there experience with network routers such as Juniper, LinkSys, Cisco, Avaya etc.  But the big problem with being one of the guys is that the employment jobs offered are much less than the general Senior or Junior System Administrator (that is more free software Linux based).

The most luckly ones are the Windows System Administrators as the amount of such that are looked up on the market at the moment of writting this article is relatively high. The type of job for Win Sys Admin offered on the market as long as I researched is for Windows Sys Admins that have a good amount of experience / knowledge (with Active Directory) domain controller.

There might be some enjoyment for the Win SysAdmin if you have to develop your own PowerShell scripts or do some kind of automations on a domain controller level and from that perspective this job positions are attractive, but unfortunately that comes at the price for being a totally Microsoft software dependent (junkie).
But in overall it is much easier for the ordinary Win Sys Admin than the Unix one because of the reason Windows Servers and related scripting automation solutions is generally much easier to learn and many of the things you have to make up yourself on a common *NIX OS are already available in Windows in the form of some proprietary extra software you have to buy …
However for people as me who are involved in the UNIX world for the last 15 years, it want be easy to migrate to Windows System Administartor.

In my previous employment Job in Hewlett Packard (and later DXC) I have to do a lot of Windows System Administration jobs and I have to says, that was too easy in general but the downside of deploying some third party software on Windows in case of failure is the debugging on Windows is generally harder task than on Linux / BSD..

Another option if you want to move from the field of System Administarton is to start your own company in either Sys Admin or Programming field or Website building, Website hosting.
That's easy especially if you have a good amount of experience but the problem with this is you need a partner and often finding a partner is a tedious job …
Plus most of the clients you can get for your business are already clients of the Large Sharks corporations and at best you or your company might have to work as a contractor for the uncle SAM corporations ..

Of course as a sysadmin you can always repair computers and could try to start a business of computer (OS) repair niche, but as the competition in the field is enormous and you will have to work like crazy to be able to make a decent living, plus it is very likely that you bankrupt, because of lack of enough clients in need to fix their OS (as most people nowadays have learned on how to install Windows and basic surrounding softwares) …

If you have land like my parents you can try to make a living by growing vegetables like Bio potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, cabbage, onions, garlic and other fruits such as Apples, Pears, Walnuts, Peaches etc.
The bio-fruits growing business though profitable in western societies is way from profitable in Eastern world so if you happen to be in some eastern country and you want to make good moving to the fruit growing / selling business might not make you rich but at least you will have benefits for your health because of the village / land work + you will have a little bit more independence and your mind will be much clearer. If you decide to try a physical work like this, your concentration level will improve as most IT industry people because of the long hours of computer madness jobs slowly start totally loose focus and often the stress of the Computer works impare memory ..

Another option for exit from System Administration industry if you have some little marketing experience or background is to move to become a Marketing or E-Marketing SEO specialist, that's not a bad option but the problem is still you will bundled in a permament marriage with the computer and the sallary you will get would most likely no different from the one you will get as a system administrator.
So just like any other Computer related job in order to keep in shape you either have to go Fitness 2 / 3 times a week or actively sport something, otherwise you might experience a growing decline in health over time (just like you already might have in sys admin field).

To sum up being a sysadmin is very enjoyable fun and bright profession, the only small problem is most true dedicated system administrators are know tend to suffer constant anxiety, hyper activity, have physical health issues, suffer forms of depressions or have mental issues (perhaps because of the inhuman amount of information they have to process daily and the large amounts of hard alcohol vodka, beer etc. consumed as a mean of anti-depressant) …
But it seems other IT specialists I know such as programmers tend to often suffer similar problems. Besides that many of the people involved in sysadmin business or IT have troubles finding decent woman to marry, as they tend to become more or less anti-social (or gradually loose their ability for proper interactivion with human) because of the fact most of their life is being led in the virtual reality online.

But lets be optimistic, perhaps there are many sysadmins who have the luck to have started a normal life in a normal company and managed their life well with family and kids it is just I haven't met them yet

I know this post was quite a lot of rant and I would like to excuse anyone who was bored to read all this mess, but I felt obliged to share about this problem as the things are rushing through my mind for over a two years now and we had quite a discussions with friends / collegues on the realization that the system administration job is loosing its attractivity and that the new age of (cloud) computing is pushing computer science to move towards a bad and dark path which makes the individual both employee and user more dependant and less free  …

The post Classical System Administration is dying – you either say hello to DevOps and SRE or move to programming or other business if you can appeared first on ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary.

If you are a long term computer geek, IT specliast, system administrator a hacker or any type of office worker that spends as a maximum 8 hours / 5 days a week and you do not do some kind of Sports (Running Heavy Lifting, Back or neck Exercises, do Fitness) etc. sooner or later you will start noticing a change in your normal back posture and heavy pain either in back or neck of your body.

The posture you have is in risc and your muscles will slowly start atrophying. It is very likely with years that you will start developing a body muscle strain in the area of neck or back and you will feel tensed / anxious most of the time without a clear reason on what is causing the constant stress you experience.

A heavy and constant anxiety you might develop with the months and years of chair sitting, sedentary lifestyle and staring into the computer screen or spending many hours driving might lead you into sleeping problems a bad blood flow to the brain (if you have neck problems) and other not nice health issues such as ringing in your year / head (tinnitus) and as an impact of all the degeneration of body a change in bone tissues and even brain might happen.
If you're suffering a back spine or neck disease the pain it is about to create daily for you will also impact the level of depression you experience and often it alone could be a cause for depression, because of the violated bodily organs blood flow (especially the brain) …

That's heavy health issues and if you are young you might thing that all this is just an imaginations and it will never happen to you but unfortunately in today's digital age where people tend to spend 10 to 14 hours daily in front of PC notebook / monitor and smartphone or in few hours conversations on the phone, all this with years contributes and sooner or later you will face the terrible reality of suffering from some of the many existing types of Herniated Cervical Disc disease.

So what is Herniated Cervical Disc Disease (shortly explained) ?

Spinal disc herniation, also known as a slipped disc, is a medical condition affecting the spine in which a tear in the outer, fibrous ring of an intervertebral disc allows the soft, central portion to bulge out beyond the damaged outer rings.

The reason to get a herniated cervical disc is usually due to aging a genetical predsposition, constant straining of back due to many hours without physical activity sitting or in bed, traumas, injuries attained during heavy lifing or sports etc.

* What are the symptomps of Herniated Cervical disc ?

The symptoms vary depending of the location of a herniated disc and depends on the soft tissue between the bones that gets involved. Common symptoms however is severe and unrelented neck pain, low back pain, pain in knees or feet, undefined pains in thight etc. … it really depends by the affected region served by affected nerve roots that are irritated or impinged by the herniated material.

Some people suffering from spinal disc herniation is symptoms of numbness, tingling of limbs, overall muscular weakness, paralysis and effection of reflexes, double vision, noise in the head / ears, insomnia and more …

If the herniated disc is in the lumbar region, you will experience scietica (a pain going down the leg from the lower back).

The things becomes even worser and the risk even higher if you're not using a comfortable computer chair at work or home, but you are into the habit to use a laptop or as the girls / women like to do lay on the bed and do stuff on the computer or tablet such as chatting all day long in a social networks such as Facebook or watching movies after a heavy office day.

Just take a look at young people's necks around leaning up and their crooked back posture on the street in bus or metro if you don't believe me and thing and you will be amazed how terrible deformations so many youngsters (teenagers) and even mid age person suffer some early or advanced stage of kyphosis disease (a deformation of the spine / neck) without even realizing it.

Suffering Kyphosis (and the usual surrounding Herniated Disc illness) is a terrible thing to experience and this is a silent killer that is plaguing people worse than any other disease, because the disease is developing relatively slow in time it is few that really catch it in early stage and it usually is tracked once you already suffer with some kind of constant pain in neck / back and a Spinal disc herniation or  you had a pinched nerve somewhere in the body because of some kind of constant compression in between spine bones etc.

The majority of spinal disc herniation cases occur in the lumbar region (95% in L4-L5 or L5-S1 – this is a doctors naming for regions where it occurs). The second most common site is the cervical region (C5-C6, C6-C7). The thoracic region accounts for only 0.15% to 4.0% of cases.

For IT specialists Gamers and mostly and people whose profession includes spending their days sitting in front of the computer screen C5-C6 / C6-C7 regions are very common (something that could contribute additionally for the disease is if you suffer some kind of astigmatism eye disease and because of that you keep your neck constantly even more forward to see better what's on the PC screen)

With age spine and bones are decaying (wearing out) and as a result the spinal cord gets deformated and this is a normal process, we can't change but we can delay it with some daily exerices and work on our bodies so at old age we experience a little better health ..

Well dying is ineveitable anyways .. but why not make your quality of life and overall experience in the body a little bit better and do some exercises that will boost your mood to happiness, improve overall blood flow and either help you recover or protect you against a possible herniated disc problems?

I was to a doctor today for a Manual Therapy session, because I happen to suffer from Herniated Cervical Disc ( neck on C6 and C7) which bringing me a lot of unfortable nervous pressure and messing up with my quality of life.
To deal with my problem I went to see one of the best doctors in the field of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in Bulgaria and perhaps in the World Assen Aleksiev M. D. Phd in Aleksandrovska University Hospital.

Mr Assen Aleksiev is living legend and one of the bright persons as of time of writting this article he is:

1. Physician – specialist and expert in:

• Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (with emphasize on orthopaedic and neurological disorders),

• Manual Medicine (Osteopathy, Chiropractics)

• Clinical Electro-diagnostics, Electromyography and Electro-stimulation.

2. Lecturer., 3. Scientist/researcher., 4. Reviewer of medical literature., 5. Author and co-author of medical literature., 6. Manager., 7. National consultant for Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation 2014.
 

After seeing my case and having a number of cases, just like mine and did some Manual therapy fixing my neck back,  limbs etc.

I will share with you the 4 steps, he said I and anyone has to follow in order to prevent himself from Herniated cervical disc degenerative disease to progress  and in worst case to turn me into a mildly disabled.

Even though this exercises were prescribed as a cure and support mechanism for a herniated disc patient that I turned to be, the good doc. shared with me that this set of 4 steps if followed could prevent not only your spine and waist from experiencing the painful discomfort of herniated disc diasese but could generally strengthen the body functioning and protect you from dying from a future strokes (heart attacks) and a number of other cardiological diseases.

So here are the 4 Golden Exercises (STEPS) that, if practiced regularly  will keep you from spinal curvature, will keep your neck and back in a good motion and help you recover from herniated disc diseases.

1. ALWAYS TIGHTEN YOUR STOMACH WHEN YOU SIT DOWN OR STAND UP !!!

– Make the habit to always tighten your stomach when you sit and stand up, this moves the weight of the body on the muscles instead on the bones. If you sit down or stand up without tightened stomach (because of the gravitation the body weight you have increases doubles if you're 70 kilos the body / bones have to bear a weight of 140 kg or so …). Once, again  tightening the stomach makes the weight be received by your muscles and this saves your bones

2. CHANGE THE POSITION OF THE BODY EVERY 15 MINUTES (FOR EXAMPLE YOU'RE SITTING FOR 15 MINUTES ON A CHAIR STAND UP MOVE YOUR SHOULDER FOR 2 / 3 AND SIT BACK) !!!

– Stand up from your chair or whenever you sit and move around your shoulders

3. ON EVERY HOUR PRACTICE SCHOOL (GYMNASTICS) EXERCISES !!!

– 5 Table push ups (if you're in an office for example in a Focus Corner Room) or outside the office building on a bench or something) – compulsory is to make it with a tightened stomach

Table Push ups (the table angle inclination degree should be at best case about 45 to 60 degree but if it is different angle it is okay as well)

if you are in a place where you can't do a table push-up you can do a wall push up

– Waist Rotation (Exercise) Put your arms on the waist (in a trinagle form), your legs should be a little bit far from each other in a small triangle like form too and turn your whole body left and then right do it 3 to 5 times each side.

– Spinal Stretch Exercise (Place fingers at the base of the spine bend forward and backward then left side and right side slowly! – do it each direction at least 3 to 5 times (e.g. 5 backwards / forward, 5 left and 5 times right)

– The 8 tact exercise is a complex of 4 exercises each on repeated 2 by the (count number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)

1, 2, 3, 4 – Put your heads on the level of the chest (bent them so the elbows point right and left then move  them both right and left to the maximum back and stretch cross shaped your both hands

5, 6 – Standing still move Right hand up and move it backwards as much as you can left hand down and move it backwards as much as possible

7,8 – Reverse the hands, Left hand up and move it backwards to maximum and right hand down and move it backwards to maximum

6,8

4. 3 TIMES A DAY (MORNING, MID DAY AND 1 HOUR BEFORE GO TO BED DO A SET OF 15 MINUTES ACTIVE CARDIO TRAINING EXERCISES) !!!

– This could be 15 minutes of running , jumping, push ups, heavy lifting, biking whatever you like to do but let the heart (pulse) rate be heavy loaded …

5. Hanging on a lever (recommended not by the good doctor but by Dr. Georgiev e.g. hip0 myself)

Just find a lever and hang for about 60 seconds every day

Following this routine of exercises: will not cost you too much of a time daily

a. It is (3×15 minutes cardio) is 45 minutes of exercise (and maybe another 5 to 15 minutes to go to where you practice it) = 60 minutes (1 hour)

b. Each hour 1 minute of exercises (approximately 14 hours is 14 minutes or at worst case if it takes you two minutes to do the complex of exercises 2×14 = 28 minutes.

c. tightening the stomach once learned is 0 seconds and 0 minutes.

d. hanging (if you choose to do this as well) is 60 seconds (1 minute) – going to the lever is another 3 to 5 minutes at worst case (lets say an overall of 6 minutes)

f. change position of the body every 15 minutes (costs you just up to 5 secs) or (14 hours x (4 x 15) = 60 secs) – that means another 14 minutes.

So the overall time for keeping your spine and neck in a good shape is (28 + 14 + 6 + 0 + 60 minutes) = 108 minutes, that is less than 1 hours and 48 minutes at worst scenario a day.

One helpful program in oder to remind you to not forget your exercises schedule if you choose to give it a try is Workrave see here my previous article on how it can help you Preserve health  from computer Caused Strain Injury (RSI).

But the advantages of following this exercise routine would be your:

1. bettered overall health,
2. less noise in head,

3. better digestion,

4. less strain and pain in neck and back,

5. feeling less anxiety and stress,

6. feeling happier (more Serotonin and Dopamine and other liquids that are boosting mood and helping brian work are pumped up more regularly into the brian),

7. a better concentration / focus on things (something most computer specialists and computer related jobs people miss seriously,

8. a better memory and a better sleep + following the standard school gymnastics exercises is much more safe when compared to Fitness,

9. Less Body Mental Fatigue (as most people with Herniated cervical disc suffer from a body fatigue that often affects the mind and creates a mental fatigue)

10. You don't risk to receive a body or muscle trauma that will last for a life time

Well, I hope that article helps someone with a herniated disc out or at least serve as a BIG WARNING and push people involved in IT, Digital Marketing, Programming, Logistics and mostly all professionals who require a long hours of hovering in front of the PC to realize the great dangers all this keeps for their health and get more physical activity daily to protect timely from ending up with a spinal digenerative disease and suffer 'till the end of life.

I will be mostly glad to hear if anyone had a personal experience with herniated disc and any spinal / neck degenerative disease and give me more hints on useful things that help in living a life with a herniated disc disease?

Thanks for reading  !

The post Recovering from Herniated Cervical disc (neck) and spine disease – keeping in good shape your Back and Neck in easy 4 steps Exercises appeared first on ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary.

I am using Oracle VirtualBox virtual machine to experiment with things before I deploy them on my servers. Recently I installed Debian 9 in a hurry (without much taking attention on the configuration options during VM machine creation) and the negative results of my lack of attention came quickly as my Linux Virtualbox guest OS just ran of space a little time after I have installed a Debian Stretch 9 OS into the virtual machine ..

I didn't realized immediately the "No free disk space" error was there because, after installing a few sets of Debian packages (Exim MTA – exim4-damon-heavy .. related etc.) immediately, shutdown the Virtual Machine running (even of this very moment) on my Thinkpad T420 notebook and went to bed.

This morning I switched on the PC booted my notebook and launched the VM to do another set of experiments inside it, however it seemed it failed to load all services printed in text on Linux boot and the GDM3 Greater never appearead on screen- for those who don't know GDM3 is Linux Graphical environment Authentication / Login program.

I have tried a VirtualBox VM Restart,  hoping that the cause of my problems might be VMachine bug (as I'm running the latest stable version of VirtualBox (Virtualbox 5.2) taken from VBox Linux download page . On Next boot weirdly the OS booted until the GDM greater but inputting the password did not load into GNOME but kept repeatedly asking for password.

After another VM restart (shutdown + re-boot), I could eventually login but I got a Low disk space error like in below screenshot

So how to fix the Virtual Debian Install Low Disk Space?

As of today September 4 2018 the way to extend the hard disk, that was prepared originally for the Virtual Machine install you need to give a check inside your Linux home (~/) directory under Virtualbox VMs find the folder that is equivallent to the Virtual Machine (whose Hard Disk Drive) you would like to extend, do a ls command check to identify the exact name of the VDI – [Virtual Desktop Infrastructure] file (in my case, that's is Debian 9.vdi) and use VboxManage modifyhd options command like shown below to resize VM HDD to more gigabytes

1. Resize the Virtualbox VM .VDI file using command line

root@jericho:/home/hipo/VirtualBox VMs/Debian 9# VBoxManage modifyhd 'Debian 9.vdi' –resize 40000
0%…10%…20%…30%…40%…50%…60%…70%…80%…90%…100%

As you see I am resizing my Hard Drive for this Virtual Machine to 40000 = (40 Gigabytes), if you have need / more disk space you might want to set something like 100000 (100GB).

2. Resizing .VDI file (Virtual Machine) using VirtualBox GUI

Click on Global Tools button (located leftside upper side on the screen

Drag the bar Size: to the Hard Drive partition size you want it to be …
 

So far so good, now the image file is resized but the GNU / Linux partition is still being small, so we need to also do repartitioning, once booted into the VM in order to stretch the HDD size to 40 Gigas.

Next install and use gparted Linux tool to add the free space to your root partition, use the gparted

Inside the VM instal the tool with:
 

Inside virtualmachine's in gnome-terminal / xterm etc. depending on the graphical environment used do install with apt-get:

debian:# apt-get install –yes gparted
…

debian~:# gparted

Notice that gparted has to be ran as a root superuser.

Run GParted and create new EXT3 filesystem that is 10GB (the size of the new created partition).

If you have installed Debian to place all partitions under / (root directory /dev/sda1) then the fresh new partition to create should be
/dev/sda3, anyways just look closely in EXT3 and in your case if the partiition is named differently create according to proper partition /dev/ naming.

I'll not run into details on how to create the partition with GParted as the program interface is very self-explanatory, the only thing is to apply the update to create partition and the ext3 filesystem, that's being done
with a green tick:

Next step is to check with fdisk whether, we have ext3 properly created  filesystem as we've done already with GPARTED:

Once we have the partition created with EXT3 filesystem, we're ready to move /usr temporary to other folder, I use usually /root for the move but you can create anywhere a new folder for that and move to there.

To move to /root directory run again in terminal:

debian:~# mv /usr /root
debian:~# mkdir /usr

Note that during the move operations, your Desktop icons will become without (with broken) pictures and the default Debian background picture is to disappear, that's because the GUI environment will soon realize /usr/ libraries that're periodically reloaded in memory are missing and will be unable to reload them as it does in a cycle.

That should take a few minutes, so grab a coffee or if you're a smoker (hope not as smoking kills ), in 5 / 10 minutes time depending on your computer / server configuration, it will be over, so we're ready to create new /usr dir and mount the  new partition:

debian:~# mount /dev/sda3 /usr

Now we check with mount command whether mount is fine:

Now  /dev/sda3 is mounted under /usr  and we have to move back /root/usr directory content back to the newly mounted /usr so we run command:
 

debian:~#  mv /root/usr/* /usr/*

Finally we need to create proper records for the new partition inside /etc/fstab (fstab –FileSystem Tab file – the file which describes instructs the Linux OS what partition to boot where, what)

The post Resize a VirtualBox guest Linux VDI Disk under Linux Host appeared first on ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary.

Happy New Year, Happy New Church Year ! 

On first of September every year the Holy Eastern Orthodox Church to which I belong is celebrating the beginning of a new Church Calendar feast year.

It is a common practice here in Bulgaria (as we are one of the 14 Eastern Orthodox Churches worldwide) it is a tradition to serve holy liturgies across the country and prayers are lifted to heaven for the well being of the Bulgarian nation and the world.

In the past the beginning of the new year was called also the beginning of the indiction.
In the VI-th century at the time of Emperor Justinian The Great in Byzantine Empire was introduce the Cyclical Calendar based calculation of days (based on indictions ) – this is delivered from latin word indictio (meaning announcement).
Indictions were celebrated originally on a cyclical periods of 15 years when the а financial review of the properties (possessions) of citizens  that were taxated.

In the Latin Empire the word indictio has been used to mark the exact amount of taxes owed each year and in this is how with the beginning of the new indiction was beginning the new financial year of the empire according to some historians the origin of indictions system has been originating from Egypt.

The official byzantine calculation of indictions begun at the time of Saint Emperor Constantine on 1st of September year 312 A.D.
Historically it is interesting fact both in the Western and in the Eastern Latin empire March was another time marking a New Year …

On 1st of September in the Church it is accepted to read the Bible chapter where Jesus Christ red in the synagogue the prophecy of Isaiah (Is. 61:1-2) for the occurance of the favorable year of God. The Byzantines see in that reading a reference of the Lord for a celebration of a New Year. 

In the Menologion of Basyl II from the 10th century it is said "From that time, he has granted to us the Christians this feast".

It is interesting fact that in Byzantium this Bible reading was red in the Church by the Patriarch in Hagia Sophia Church Cathedral or another Church where it was common for him to serve Holy Liturgy on that date.

The post Happy New Church Year ! – The Eastern Orthodox Church Year celebrated every 1st of September and some history on the Indiction appeared first on ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary.

Copy / Pasting has become a vital part of our digital lifes, not having it in our days is insane, most of our System Administration jobs / Programmer or Office (Secretary) stuff daily without Copy / Paste is a unthinkable.

Lately I have been playing with Virtual Machines as I need to test some Dev Ops related stuff I install Jenkins write and test scripts and tools inside a VM, for that to happen I needed a working VM and because I am a Free Software supporter my VM of choice is usually Virtualbox. Even though Virtualbox is not the best and most performance efficient Virtual Machine out there for a small tasks and home usage dev / testing it does a great job, I have faced a problem with Copy / Pasting not working in VBox between the VM -> Guest OS, that's why I decided to write this step by step guide to help people who face the same issue.

For people who are starting with Oracle VirtualBox and you just have Created a New Virtual Machine and installed GNU / Linux or FreeBSD one common set back problem you will experience is the the Copy / Paste functionality between the VM Host Machine and the Guest won't be working out of the box. That's pretty much annoying thing and since usually one installs different Virtual Machines with different Operating Systems as a test bed for Software installs on top of various versions of OSes the lack of Copy, Paste functionality which is not there by default makes copy / pasting programming code / commands etc. between your local Desktop notebook or remote  server Machine and the VBox Virtualized Guest mostly unusuable …

Besides that integration (sharing resources / improved VM performance) between the Host (which is for example your Desktop notebook or PC) and the Virtualized Operating system be it some kind of UNIX (FreeBSD) etc. is not optimal until you enable an extra integration between VirtualBox and your (Host OS – that in my case is Debian 9 GNU / Linux but it can be Microsoft Windows XX as well or any other *nix like OS).In order for this Integration between your Host OS and Guest OS and Copy / Paste features between the two to work you need to Enable Guest Additions CD image (Software) that is part of VirtualBox installation on the Host OS and once enabled to mount (Attach the Vbox provided Virtual CD) from within the Guest OS (that in my case is another Debian 9 Stretch Linux that is installed inside the VM) and run a script that will install the necessery VirtualBox software inside the Guest OS Linux.
 

This is done in 3 easy steps:

STEP 1: Enable Vbox (Guest Additions CD Image)

Devices -> Insert Guest Additions CD image

2. Enable Shared Clipboard and Drag and Drop from the Virtual Machine

Devices -> Shared Clipboard -> Bidirectional

Devices -> Drag and Drop -> Bidirectional

3. Install development packages that are required by VBoxLinuxAdditions.run script

a) First thing is to use Virtual Box program interface menu and enable Insert Guest Additions CD Image option (assuming that you have the Linux Guest OS running).

Devices -> Insert Guest Additions CD image

You can do it also from main VirtualBox interface (without having a Virtual machine running) by clicking over the desired Guest OS or pressting CTRL + S key combination

b) Next step is to mount the Virtual CD Guest Additions inside the Guest OS VM

To mount the Virtual content provided by the just ticked VBOX "Insert Guest Additions CD" menu, inside the Guest OS Linux, you have to run simple mount command:

root@debian:~# mount /media/cdrom1
mount: /dev/sr1 is write-protected, mounting read-only

c) Install necessery packages that VBoxLinuxAdditions.run will use

Further on VBoxLinuxAdditions.run (additions script) that adds the integration between the Host operating system and the Guest OS depends on some essential tools necessery for building (compiling) / developing software on Linux, this are:

1.) build-essential – a meta package that will install the following set of packages:

dpkg-dev fakeroot g++ g++-6 libalgorithm-diff-perl libalgorithm-diff-xs-perl libalgorithm-merge-perl libdpkg-perl libfakeroot libfile-fcntllock-perl libstdc++-6-dev

which are necessery for creation .deb packages, compiling code and other various activitions. a) build-essential is a very important Debian based distro package and if you happen to be new to Linux or just starting learning how to develop programs on Linux, you will soon realize you will need it installed across almost all Linux OS hosts you maintain or develop on …

root@debian:~# apt-get install –yes build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) gcc perl make

2.) The linux-headers package in my case that it is is linux-headers-4.9.0-7-amd64 is important as it provides kernel header files that are necessery when compiling and integrating kernel modules VBoxLinuxAdditions.run script depends on it as it builds a kernel module that adds the integration (that enables Copy / Paste and performance inprovements) between the Host VM machine and Guest OS

3.) gcc perl packages this two provides the C compiler and perl scripting programming language interpreter which are also used by VBoxLinuxAdditions.run script.

Now run VBoxLinuxAdditions.run:

As you see in above screenshot the

root@debian:~#
root@debian:/media/cdrom1# sh VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
Verifying archive integrity… All good.
Uncompressing VirtualBox 5.2.18 Guest Additions for Linux……..
VirtualBox Guest Additions installer
Removing installed version 5.2.18 of VirtualBox Guest Additions…
Copying additional installer modules …
Installing additional modules …
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Building the VirtualBox Guest Additions kernel modules.  This may take a while.
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Running kernel modules will not be replaced until the system is restarted
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Starting.

If everything is fine you should get command output like above.

Above are the steps given to follow on current latest Debian Linux 9.5 (Stretch) as a Guest OS (this tutorial should be working also on Ubuntu / Mint and other deb package based distributions for RPM package based Linuxes Fedora / CentOS check out my previous toturial how to enable Linux Guest Virtualbox Addition on Redhat based distos.)

P. S.

What about Mac OS X since it is based on FreeBSD and it includes a lot of GNU licensing programs?

If you wonder whether on Mac OS X you don't need to run guest additions script such as (VBoxLinuxAdditions.run) on Mac Host -> Guest OS integration is done only by enabling the feature from VBox GUI interface via:
 

Devices -> Insert Guest Additions CD Image

What about enabling Copy / Paste on Linux Host VirtualBox hosting a Windows Guest OS?

Enabling Copy / Paste on a Windows Virtual Machine (I wrote about it earlier here), follows the same steps as in this tutorial.
The only difference is instead of running the VBoxLinuxAdditions.sh you have to navigate to the CD from Windows Explorer and run the appropriate .exe file depending on your architecture (X86 or 64 bit), the files to run on the virtual CDROM are one of the 3:

1. VBoxWindowsAdditions-amd64.exe
2. VBoxWindowsAdditions.exe
3. VBoxWindowsAdditions-x86.exe

Follow the click through interface and you will have the Copy / Paste between your Linux -> Windows OS working.

Happy Copy / Pasting !

The post Copy Paste Virtualbox enable between Linux Host and Guest Virtual Machine appeared first on ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary.

If you just hired a cheap VPS with some kind of Linux OS installed or just installed a home Linux test system environment inside a Virtual Machine (such as VirtualBox) on your notebook and you want to read system email reports delivered by services (e.g. track possible errors with the OS) or simply test whether Email relaying is configured properly

and you end up with shell error:

bash: mail: command not found

because mail command is missing and you wonder what Linux package you have to install in order to have the lovely mail / mailx command back on the OS … this article will help you how you can easily solve it by installing the mailx binary file (e.g. install the package providing it depending on the Linux Distribution Operating System you face the problem on.

1.  Install mailx command on Debian / Ubuntu / Mint and other .deb based Linux
 

root@linux:~# apt-get install –yes bsd-mailx
…

An alternative way to install the mailx system binary is to install  mailutils package

which will set up the system with essential mail related programs and set up a light Exim MTA and common server Email surrounding  so you can easily configure default installed Exim Mail Server to serve as an SMTP relay (through dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config) command

root@linux~:# apt-get install mailutils
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information… Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
  exim4-base exim4-config exim4-daemon-light guile-2.0-libs libgsasl7
  libkyotocabinet16v5 libmailutils5 libmariadbclient18 libntlm0
  mailutils-common mysql-common
Suggested packages:
  eximon4 exim4-doc-html | exim4-doc-info spf-tools-perl swaks mailutils-mh
  mailutils-doc
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  exim4-base exim4-config exim4-daemon-light guile-2.0-libs libgsasl7
  libkyotocabinet16v5 libmailutils5 libmariadbclient18 libntlm0 mailutils

root@linux:~# dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

2. Install mailx Linux command on Fedora / CentOS / RHEL e.g. Redhat based distros

On RPM based distrubutions the package name is different from debians to install it there you have to fetch and install current distro mailx .rpm

To install mail command on older CentOS / Redhat 7/6/5 distributions

[root@centos:~]# yum install -y mailx
…

On Fedora 22+ version yum auto-dependency tool was substituted with dnf:

[root@fedora:~]# dnf install -y mailx
…

3. Send Test Email with mail command

root@linux:~# echo "Sample Message Body" | mail -s "Whatever … Message Subject" remote_receiver@remote-server-email-address.com
…

Check the mailbox, you just sent the sample email, hopefully if MTA is relaying correctly and the SMTP relay is properly delivering the email should be at the recipient address.

The post Linux “bash: mail: command not found” error fix – Installing mail cli on Fedora, Debian, CentOS, Ubuntu appeared first on ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary.

Historically Email sending has been very different from what most people use it in the Office, there was no heavy Email clients such as Outlook Express no MX Exchange, no e-mail client capabilities for Calendar and Meetings schedule as it is in most of the modern corporate offices that depend on products such as Office 365 (I would call it a connectedHell 365 days a year !).

There was no free webmail and pop3 / imap providers such as Mail.Yahoo.com, Gmail.com, Hotmail.com, Yandex.com, RediffMail, Mail.com the innumerous lists goes and on.
Nope back in the day emails were doing what they were originally supposed to like the post services in real life simply send and receive messages.

For those who remember that charming times, people used to be using BBS-es (which were basicly a shared set-up home system as a server) or some of the few University Internal Email student accounts or by crazy sysadmins who received their notification and warnings logs about daemon (services) messages via local DMZ-ed network email servers and it was common to read the email directly with mail (mailx) text command or custom written scripts … It was not uncommon also that mailx was used heavily to send notification messages on triggered events from logs. Oh life was simple and clear back then, and even though today the email could be used in a similar fashion by hard-core old school sysadmins and Dev Ops / simple shell scriptings tasks or report cron jobs such usage is already in the deep history.

The number of ways one could send email in text format directly from the GNU / Linux / *BSD server to another remote mail MTA node (assuming it had properly configured Relay server be it Exim or Postifix) were plenty.

In this article I will try to rewind back some of the UNIX history by pinpointing a few of the most common ways, one used to send quick emails directly from a remote server connection terminal or lets say a cheap VPS few cents server, through something like (SSH or Telnet) etc.
 

1. Using the mail command client (part of bsd-mailx on Debian).
 

In my previous article Linux: "bash mail command not found" error fix
I ended the article with a short explanation on how this is done but I will repeat myself one more time here for the sake of clearness of this article.

root@linux:~# echo "Your Sample Message Body" | mail -s "Whatever … Message Subject" remote_receiver@remote-server-email-address.com
…

The mail command will connect to local server TCP PORT 25 on local configured MTA and send via it. If the local MTA is misconfigured or it doesn't have a proper MX / PTR DNS records etc. or not configure as a relay SMTP remote mail will not get delivered. Sent Email should be properly delivered at remote recipient address.

How to send HTML formatted emails using mailx command on Linux console / terminal shell using remote server through SSH ?

Connect to remote SSH server (VPS), dedicated server, home Linux router etc. and run:

root@linux:~# mailx -a 'Content-Type: text/html'
      -s "This is advanced mailx indeed!" < email_content.html
      "first_email_to_send_to@gmail.com, mail_recipient_2@yahoo.com"

email_content.html should be properly formatted (at best w3c standard compliant) HTML.

Here is an example email_content.html (skeleton file)

    To: your_customer@gmail.com
    Subject: This is an HTML message
    From: marketing@your_company.com
    Content-Type: text/html; charset="utf8"

    <html>
    <body>
    <div style="
        background-color:
        #abcdef; width: 300px;
        height: 300px;
        ">
    </div>
Whatever text mixed with valid email HTML tags here.
    </body>
    </html>

Above command sends to two email addresses however if you have a text formatted list of recipients you can easily use that file with a bash shell script for loop and send to multiple addresses red from lets say email_addresses_list.txt .

To further advance the one liner you can also want to provide an email attachment, lets say the file email_archive.rar by using the -A email_archive.rar argument.

root@linux:~# mailx -a 'Content-Type: text/html'
      -s "This is advanced mailx indeed!" -A ~/email_archive.rar < email_content.html
      "first_email_to_send_to@gmail.com, mail_recipient_2@yahoo.com"

For those familiar with Dan Bernstein's Qmail MTA (which even though a bit obsolete is still a Security and Stability Beast across email servers) – mailx command had to be substituted with a custom qmail one in order to be capable to send via qmail MTA daemon.
 

2. Using sendmail command to send email
 

Do you remember that heavy hard to configure MTA monster sendmail ? It was and until this very day is the default Mail Transport Agent for Slackware Linux.

Here is how we were supposed to send mail with it:

[root@sendmail-host ~]# vim email_content_to_be_delivered.txt

Content of file should be something like:

Subject: This Email is sent from UNIX Terminal Email

Hi this Email was typed in a file and send via sendmail console email client
(part of the sendmail mail server)

It is really fun to go back in the pre-history of Mail Content creation

[root@sendmail-host ~]# sendmail -v user_name@remote-mail-domain.com  < /tmp/email_content_to_be_delivered.txt

-v argument provided, will make the communication between the mail server and your mail transfer agent visible.
 

3. Using ssmtp command to send mail
 

ssmtp MTA and its included shell command was used historically as it was pretty straight forward you just launch it on the command line type on one line all your email and subject and ship it (by pressing the CTRL + D key combination).

To give it a try you can do:

root@linux:~# apt-get install ssmtp
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information… Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
  libgnutls-openssl27
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  exim4-base exim4-config exim4-daemon-heavy
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libgnutls-openssl27 ssmtp
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 3 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
Need to get 239 kB of archives.
After this operation, 3,697 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] Y
Get:1 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stretch/main amd64 ssmtp amd64 2.64-8+b2 [54.2 kB]
Get:2 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stretch/main amd64 libgnutls-openssl27 amd64 3.5.8-5+deb9u3 [184 kB]
Fetched 239 kB in 2s (88.5 kB/s)         
Preconfiguring packages …
dpkg: exim4-daemon-heavy: dependency problems, but removing anyway as you requested:
 mailutils depends on default-mta | mail-transport-agent; however:
  Package default-mta is not installed.
  Package mail-transport-agent is not installed.
  Package exim4-daemon-heavy which provides mail-transport-agent is to be removed.

 

(Reading database … 169307 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing exim4-daemon-heavy (4.89-2+deb9u3) …
dpkg: exim4-config: dependency problems, but removing anyway as you requested:
 exim4-base depends on exim4-config (>= 4.82) | exim4-config-2; however:
  Package exim4-config is to be removed.
  Package exim4-config-2 is not installed.
  Package exim4-config which provides exim4-config-2 is to be removed.
 exim4-base depends on exim4-config (>= 4.82) | exim4-config-2; however:
  Package exim4-config is to be removed.
  Package exim4-config-2 is not installed.
  Package exim4-config which provides exim4-config-2 is to be removed.

Removing exim4-config (4.89-2+deb9u3) …
Selecting previously unselected package ssmtp.
(Reading database … 169247 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack …/ssmtp_2.64-8+b2_amd64.deb …
Unpacking ssmtp (2.64-8+b2) …
(Reading database … 169268 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing exim4-base (4.89-2+deb9u3) …
Selecting previously unselected package libgnutls-openssl27:amd64.
(Reading database … 169195 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack …/libgnutls-openssl27_3.5.8-5+deb9u3_amd64.deb …
Unpacking libgnutls-openssl27:amd64 (3.5.8-5+deb9u3) …
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.24-11+deb9u3) …
Setting up libgnutls-openssl27:amd64 (3.5.8-5+deb9u3) …
Setting up ssmtp (2.64-8+b2) …
Processing triggers for man-db (2.7.6.1-2) …
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.24-11+deb9u3) …

As you see from above output local default Debian Linux Exim is removed …

Lets send a simple test email …

hipo@linux:~# ssmtp user@remote-mail-server.com
Subject: Simply Test SSMTP Email
This Email was send just as a test using SSMTP obscure client
via SMTP server.
^d

What is notable about ssmtp is that even though so obsolete today it supports of STARTTLS (email communication encryption) that is done via its config file

/etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf

4. Send Email from terminal using Mutt client
 

Mutt was and still is one of the swiff army of most used console text email clients along with Alpine and Fetchmail to know more about it read here

Mutt supports reading / sending mail from multiple mailboxes and capable of reading IMAP and POP3 mail fetch protocols and was a serious step forward over mailx. Its syntax pretty much resembles mailx cmds.

root@linux:~# mutt -s "Test Email" user@example.com < /dev/null

Send email including attachment a 15 megabytes MySQL backup of Squirrel Webmail

root@linux:~# mutt  -s "This is last backup small sized database" -a /home/backups/backup_db.sql user@remote-mail-server.com < /dev/null

5. Using simple telnet to test and send email (verify existence of email on remote SMTP)
 

As a Mail Server SysAdmin this is one of my best ways to test whether I had a server properly configured and even sometimes for the sake of fun I used it as a hack to send my mail
telnet is and will always be a great tool for doing SMTP issues troubleshooting.
 

It is very useful to test whether a remote SMTP TCP port 25 is opened or a local / remote server firewall prevents connections to MTA.

Below is an example connect and send example using telnet to my local SMTP on pc-freak.net (QMail powered (R) )

root@pcfreak:~# telnet localhost 25
Trying 127.0.0.1…
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 This is Mail Pc-Freak.NET ESMTP
HELO mail.pc-freak.net
250 This is Mail Pc-Freak.NET
MAIL FROM:<hipo@pc-freak.net>
250 ok
RCPT TO:<roots_bg@yahoo.com>
250 ok
DATA
354 go ahead
Subject: This is a test subject

This is just a test mail send through telnet
.
250 ok 1536440787 qp 28058
^]
telnet>

Note that the returned messages are native to qmail, a postfix would return a slightly different content, here is another test example to remote SMTP running sendmail or postfix.

root@pcfreak:~# telnet mail.servername.com 25
Trying 127.0.0.1…
Connected to localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1).
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mail.servername.com ESMTP Sendmail 8.13.8/8.13.8; Tue, 22 Oct 2013 05:05:59 -0400
HELO yahoo.com
250 mail.servername.com Hello mail.servername.com [127.0.0.1], pleased to meet you
mail from: systemexec@gmail.com
250 2.1.0 hipo@pc-freak.net… Sender ok
rcpt to: hip0d@yandex.ru
250 2.1.5 hip0d@yandex.ru… Recipient ok
data
354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself
Hey
This is test email only

 

Thanks
.
250 2.0.0 r9M95xgc014513 Message accepted for delivery
quit
221 2.0.0 mail.servername.com closing connection
Connection closed by foreign host.

It is handy if you want to know whether remote MTA server has a certain Emailbox existing or not with telnet by simply trying to send to a certian email and checking the Email server returned output (note that the message returned depends on the remote MTA version and many qmails are configured to not give information on the initial SMTP handshake but returns instead a MAILER DAEMON failure error sent back to your sender address. Some MX servrers are still vulnerable to this attack yet, historically dreamhost.com. Below attack screenshot is made at the times before dreamhost.com fixed the brute force email issue.

6. Using simple netcat TCP/IP Swiss Army Knife to test and send email in console

Other tool besides telnet of testing remote / local SMTP is netcat tool (for reading and writting data across TCP and UDP connections).

The way to do it is analogous but since netcat is not present on most Linux OSes by default you need to install it through the package manager first be it apt or yum etc.

# apt-get –yes install netcat
…

First lets create a new file test_email_content.txt using bash's echo cmd.
 

# echo 'EHLO hostname
MAIL FROM: hip0d@yandex.ru
RCPT TO:   solutions@pc-freak.net
DATA
From: A tester <hip0d@yandex.ru>
To:   <solutions@pc-freak.net>
Date: date
Subject: A test message from test hostname

Delete me, please
.
QUIT
' >>test_email_content.txt

# netcat -C localhost 25 < test_email_content.txt

 

220 This is Mail Pc-Freak.NET ESMTP
250-This is Mail Pc-Freak.NET
250-STARTTLS
250-SIZE 80000000
250-PIPELINING
250 8BITMIME
250 ok
250 ok
354 go ahead
451 See http://pobox.com/~djb/docs/smtplf.html.

Because of its simplicity and the fact it has a bit more capabilities in reading / writing data over network it was no surprise it was among the favorite tools not only of crackers and penetration testers but also a precious debug tool for the avarage sysadmin. netcat's advantage over telnet is you can push-pull over the remote SMTP port (25) a non-interactive input.

7. Using openssl to connect and send email via encrypted channel

root@linux:~# openssl s_client -connect smtp.gmail.com:465 -crlf -ign_eof

    ===
               Certificate negotiation output from openssl command goes here
        ===

        220 smtp.gmail.com ESMTP j92sm925556edd.81 – gsmtp
            EHLO localhost
        250-smtp.gmail.com at your service, [78.139.22.28]
        250-SIZE 35882577
        250-8BITMIME
        250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN XOAUTH2 PLAIN-CLIENTTOKEN OAUTHBEARER XOAUTH
        250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
        250-PIPELINING
        250-CHUNKING
        250 SMTPUTF8
            AUTH PLAIN *passwordhash*
        235 2.7.0 Accepted
            MAIL FROM: <hipo@pcfreak.org>
        250 2.1.0 OK j92sm925556edd.81 – gsmtp
            rcpt to: <systemexec@gmail.com>
        250 2.1.5 OK j92sm925556edd.81 – gsmtp
            DATA
        354  Go ahead j92sm925556edd.81 – gsmtp
            Subject: This is openssl mailing

            Hello nice user
            .
        250 2.0.0 OK 1339757532 m46sm11546481eeh.9
            quit
        221 2.0.0 closing connection m46sm11546481eeh.9
        read:errno=0

8. Using CURL (URL transfer) tool to send SSL / TLS secured crypted channel emails via Gmail / Yahoo servers and MailGun Mail send API service

Using curl webpage downloading advanced tool for managing email send might be  a shocking news to many as it is idea is to just transfer data from a server.
curl is mostly used in conjunction with PHP website scripts for the reason it has a Native PHP implementation and many PHP based websites widely use it for download / upload of user data.
Interestingly besides support for HTTP and FTP it has support for POP3 and SMTP email protocols as well
If you don't have it installed on your server and you want to give it a try, install it first with apt:
 

root@linux:~# apt-get install curl

To learn more about curl capabilities make sure you check cURL –manual arg.
 

root@linux:~# curl –manual

a) Sending Emails via Gmail and other Mail Public services

Curl is capable to send emails from terminal using Gmail and Yahoo Mail services, if you want to give that a try.

Go to myaccount.google.com URL and login from the web interface choose Sign in And Security choose Allow less Secure Apps to be -> ON and turn on access for less secure apps in Gmail. Though I have not tested it myself so far with Yahoo! Mail, I suppose it should have a similar security settings somewhere.

Here is how to use curl to send email via Gmail.

root@linux:~# curl –url 'smtps://smtp.gmail.com:465' –ssl-reqd \
  –mail-from 'your_email@gmail.com' –mail-rcpt 'remote_recipient@mail.com' \
  –upload-file mail.txt –user 'your_email@gmail.com:your_accout_password'

b) Sending Emails using Mailgun.com (Transactional Email Service API for developers)

To use Mailgun to script sending automated emails go to Mailgun.com and create account and generate new API key.

Then use curl in a similar way like below example:

curl -sv –user 'api:key-7e55d003b…f79accd31a' \
    https://api.mailgun.net/v3/sandbox21a78f824…3eb160ebc79.mailgun.org/messages \
    -F from='Excited User <developer@yourcompany.com>' \
    -F to=sandbox21a78f824…3eb160ebc79.mailgun.org \
    -F to=user_acc@gmail.com \
    -F subject='Hello' \
    -F text='Testing Mailgun service!' \
   –form-string html='<h1>EDMdesigner Blog</h1><br /><cite>This tutorial helps me understand email sending from Linux console</cite>' \
    -F attachment=@logo_picture.jpg

The -F option that is heavy present in above command lets curl (Emulate a form filled in button in which user has pressed the submit button).
For more info of the options check out man curl.
 

9. Using swaks command to send emails from

root@linux:~# apt-cache show swaks|grep "Description" -B 10
Package: swaks
Version: 20170101.0-1
Installed-Size: 221
Maintainer: Andreas Metzler <ametzler@debian.org>
Architecture: all
Depends: perl
Recommends: libnet-dns-perl, libnet-ssleay-perl
Suggests: perl-doc, libauthen-sasl-perl, libauthen-ntlm-perl
Description-en: SMTP command-line test tool
 swaks (Swiss Army Knife SMTP) is a command-line tool written in Perl
 for testing SMTP setups; it supports STARTTLS and SMTP AUTH (PLAIN,
 LOGIN, CRAM-MD5, SPA, and DIGEST-MD5). swaks allows one to stop the
 SMTP dialog at any stage, e.g to check RCPT TO: without actually
 sending a mail.
 .
 If you are spending too much time iterating "telnet foo.example 25"
 swaks is for you.
Description-md5: f44c6c864f0f0cb3896aa932ce2bdaa8
 

root@linux:~# apt-get instal –yes swaks

root@linux:~# swaks –to mailbox@example.com -s smtp.gmail.com:587
      -tls -au <user-account> -ap <account-password>

The -tls argument (in order to use gmail encrypted TLS channel on port 587)

If you want to hide the password not to provide the password from command line so (in order not to log it to user history) add the -a options.

10. Using qmail-inject on Qmail mail servers to send simple emails

Create new file with content like:
 

root@qmail:~# vim email_file_content.text
To: user@mail-example.com
Subject: Test

This is a test message.
 

root@qmail:~# cat email_file_content.text | /var/qmail/bin/qmail-inject

qmail-inject is part of ordinary qmail installation so it is very simple it even doesn't return error codes it just ships what ever given as content to remote MTA.
If the linux host where you invoke it has a properly configured qmail installation the email will get immediately delivered. The advantage of qmail-inject over the other ones is it is really lightweight and will deliver the simple message more quickly than the the prior heavy tools but again it is more a Mail Delivery Agent (MDA) for quick debugging, if MTA is not working, than for daily email writting.

It is very useful to simply test whether email send works properly without sending any email content by (I used qmail-inject to test local email delivery works like so).
 

root@linux:~# echo 'To: mailbox_acc@mail-server.com' | /var/qmail/bin/qmail-inject

11. Debugging why Email send with text tool is not being send properly to remote recipient

If you use some of the above described methods and email is not delivered to remote recipient email addresses check /var/log/mail.log (for a general email log and postfix MTAs – the log is present on many of the Linux distributions) and /var/log/messages or /var/log/qmal (on Qmail installations) /var/log/exim4 (on servers running Exim as MTA).

 Closure

The ways to send email via Linux terminal are properly innumerous as there are plenty of scripted tools in various programming languages, I am sure in this article,  also missing a lot of pre-bundled installable distro packages. If you know other interesting ways / tools to send via terminal I would like to hear it.

Hope you enjoyed, happy mailing !

The post Mail send from command line on Linux and *BSD servers – useful for scripting appeared first on ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary.

How to set-up Virtualbox shared folder to Copy files from PC Host  and Guest Virtualized OS?

Running VirtualBox Host is an easy thing to set-up across all Operating Systems.  Once you have it sooner or later you will need to copy files from the VM Host OS (that in my case is GNU / Linux) to the virtualized Guest operating system (again in my case that's again another Linux ISO running indide the Virtual Machine).

Below are steps to follow To use Virtualbox Shared Folder functionality to copy files between VBox and your Desktop / server Linux install.

1. Install Virtualbox Guest Additions CD Image ISO

I've explained how to add the Guest Additions CD image thoroughfully in my previous article Howto enable Copy / Paste Virtualbox betwen Linux guest and Host OS
Anyways I'll repeat myself below for sake of clarity:

To do so use Oracle VBox menus (on the booted virtualized OS VBox window):

Devices -> Insert Guest additions CD Image

Mount the ISO inside the Linux Virtual Machine:

root@debian:~# mount /media/cdrom1/
 

If the mount fails and there are no files inside the mount point it might be because the virtualbox-dkms and virtualbox-guest-dkms packages might be missing on the Host OS.

To install them (on Debian GNU / Linux) assuming that you're using virtualbox default distro packages /etc/apt/sources.list :
 

apt-get install –yes -qq virtualbox-dkms virtualbox-guest-dkms

and run:

root@debian:/media/cdrom1# cd /media/cdrom1; sh VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
…

2. Create directory for Shared Folder that will be used to access Host / OS files from the Guest Virtualized OS
 

root@debian:~# mkdir /mnt/shared_folder

3. Map from VBox program interface Shared folder settings and Mount /mnt/shared_folder location

Devices -> Shared Folder -> Shared Folder settings -> Transient Folders (click blue folder add small button right)

From Transient Folders add whatever directory you want to be shared from your local notebook / PC to the VM.

Depending on whether you would like to mount the shared folder only for reading files (choose Read Only) to make it a permanent shared folder (and not just for the one session of current running Virtual Machine until its killed use Make Permanent) or check Auto-Mount tick if you want the shared_folder mapping to be mounted on every VM boot.

Once the shared_folder directory location is set-up from GUI menu click OK and in order for the settings to take effect, you'll need to restart the VM Guest with Linux (use halt command from terminal) or Power Off the Machine via the VBox menus.

To mount use command like:

mount -t vboxsf name_of_folder_linked_from_vbox  /mnt/name_folder_guest_os/

In my case I wanted to share home folder /home so the command I used is:

root@debian:~# mount -t vboxsf  shared_folder /mnt/shared_folder

If everything is fine your Host OS file content from /home will be visible (for read and write if you Mapped it so) 
under /mnt/shared_folder …

And as Turtles Ninja used to heavily say Cowabunga !!!
You have it mounted and ready for file share between Desktop -> Virtualized OS.
 

Bear in mind that above mount command has to run as root (superuser) to succeed.

You now could copy files from your Host OS (running the Virtual Machine) and the Guest OS (Virtualized OS) using /mnt/shared_folder mount point without problems.

The example is if you want to share files between VirtualBox installed Linux and the Guest (Desktop / server) OS, however at many cases mounting your Host OS directory for root users might be not very practical but, instead you might prefer to do the mount for specific non admin user, for example I prefer to do the shared folder mount with my pointed non-root username hipo.

Here is how to do above VM shared_folder mount for non-root user:

First you need to know the exact UID / GID (User ID / Group ID) of user, you can get that with id command:

hipo@linux:~$  id
uid=1000(hipo) gid=1000(hipo) groups=1000(hipo),24(cdrom),25(floppy),29(audio),30(dip),44(video),46(plugdev),108(netdev),114(bluetooth),115(lpadmin),119(scanner)

As you see UID / GID in my case are 1000 / 1000

hipo@linux:~$ sudo mount -t vboxsf -o rw,uid=1000,gid=1000 shared_folder /mnt/shared_folder

4. Mounting configured shared_folder to automatically mount into the Guest OS Linux on every boot

a) Configuring shared_folder auto-mount using /etc/rc.local

If you need the shared_folder to automatically mount next-time you boot the virtual machine quickest way is to add the mount command to /etc/rc.local (on Debian 8 and Debian 9 and newer Ubuntu Linuxes rc.local is missing by default to enable it to work like it worked before read follow my previous article ).

b) Configuring auto-mount for shared_folder through /etc/fstab

The more professional way to auto-mount on emulated OS VM boot time,  you could add the vboxsf mount definitions to /etc/fstab with your favourite text-editor mcedit, nano, joe etc. … (for me that's vim).

Syntax of /etc/fstab is as follows:
 

<Device> <Mount Point> <Type> <Options> <Dump> <Pass>

root@linux:~# vim /etc/fstab

shared_folder /mnt/shared_folder                                vboxsf rw,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

Note that you will want to change 1000 / 1000, id / gid with the ones of the non-admin user you would like to add to mount it for.

A quick way to add it to /etc/fstab with a shell one-liner is with command
 

root@linux:~# echo 'shared_folder /mnt/shared_folder                                vboxsf rw,uid=1000,gid=1000 0  0' >> /etc/fstab

An alternative way to add a user to have permissions for vboxsf file system (without specifying the long -o uid=1000,gid=1000 options is to simply add the username in question to group vboxsf like so:

c) Adding non super user username to vboxsf group

root@linux:~# usermod -G vboxsf hipo
root@linux:~# grep -i vboxsf /etc/group
vboxsf:x:999:hipo

hipo@linux:~$ sudo mount -t vboxsf  shared_folder /mnt/shared_folder

without the extra arguments and the options to pass to /etc/fstab (for eventual requirement to auto mount the shared_folder) would be more simple e.g.:

echo 'shared_folder /mnt/shared_folder                                vboxsf ' >> /etc/fstab

One note to make here is if the uesr is added to vboxsf the line for /etc/fstab to auto mount to mount for root user and non-root will be identical.

Then you can get the /etc/fstab auto-mount configured tested by running:

c) Checking auto-mount is working

hipo@linux:~# mount -a
hipo@linux:~# mount |grep -i vboxsf
shared_folder on /mnt/shared_folder type vboxsf (rw,nodev,relatime)

5. What if you end up with mounting failed errors ? – What might be causing the mounting failed Protocol error (a few things to check to solve)

In case of troubles with the mount you might get an error like:

hipo@linux:~# mount -t vboxsf  share_folder /mnt/shared_folder

/sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: Protocol error

This error might be caused because of Insert Guest Additions CD Image might be not properly enabled and installed using the ISO provided VBoxLinuxAdditions.sh shell script.
Other common reason you might get this error if you have mistyped the Folder name: given in Shared Folders -> Folder Path -> Add Share for example I have given shared_folder as a Map name but as you can see in above mount -t vboxsf, I've mistyped share_folder instead of the correct one shared_folder inserted.
In some VBox releases this error was caused by bugs in the Virtual Machine.
 

One useful tip is to be able to check whether a Virtualbox Virtual Machine has a configured shared_folder (if you're logging to manage the machine on remote server – nomatter whether you have logged in with VNC / Teamviewer / Citrix etc. or via SSH session.

To do so use VBoxControl as of time of writting usually located on most distributions under (/usr/bin/VBoxControl)
 

hipo@linux:~# VBoxControl sharedfolder list -automount
Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest Additions Command Line Management Interface Version 5.2.18
(C) 2008-2018 Oracle Corporation
All rights reserved.

 

Auto-mounted Shared Folder mappings (0):

No Shared Folders available.

You can use VBoxControl command to get set and list a number of settings on the VBox VM, here is an useful example with it where you get information about numerous VBox info values:

root@linux:~# VBoxControl guestproperty enumerate
Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest Additions Command Line Management Interface Version 5.2.18
(C) 2008-2018 Oracle Corporation
All rights reserved.

 

Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/OS/Product, value: Linux, timestamp: 1536681633430852000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/Net/0/V4/IP, value: 10.0.2.15, timestamp: 1536681633438717000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/HostInfo/GUI/LanguageID, value: en_US, timestamp: 1536697521395621000, flags: RDONLYGUEST
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/Net/0/MAC, value: 08002762FA1C, timestamp: 1536681633442120000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/OS/ServicePack, value: <NULL>, timestamp: 1536681633431259000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/HostInfo/VBoxVerExt, value: 5.2.18, timestamp: 1536681619002646000, flags: TRANSIENT, RDONLYGUEST
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/Net/0/V4/Netmask, value: 255.255.255.0, timestamp: 1536681633440157000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/OS/Version, value: #1 SMP Debian 4.9.110-3+deb9u2 (2018-08-13), timestamp: 1536681633431125000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/VersionExt, value: 5.2.18, timestamp: 1536681633431582000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/Revision, value: 124319, timestamp: 1536681633432515000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/HostGuest/SysprepExec, value: <NULL>, timestamp: 1536681619002355000, flags: TRANSIENT, RDONLYGUEST
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/OS/LoggedInUsers, value: 1, timestamp: 1536681673447293000, flags: TRANSIENT, TRANSRESET
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/Net/0/Status, value: Up, timestamp: 1536681633443911000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/Net/0/Name, value: enp0s3, timestamp: 1536681633445302000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/HostGuest/SysprepArgs, value: <NULL>, timestamp: 1536681619002387000, flags: TRANSIENT, RDONLYGUEST
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/Version, value: 5.2.18, timestamp: 1536681633431419000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/HostInfo/VBoxRev, value: 124319, timestamp: 1536681619002668000, flags: TRANSIENT, RDONLYGUEST
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/Net/0/V4/Broadcast, value: 10.0.2.255, timestamp: 1536681633439531000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/HostInfo/VBoxVer, value: 5.2.18, timestamp: 1536681619002613000, flags: TRANSIENT, RDONLYGUEST
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/OS/LoggedInUsersList, value: hipo, timestamp: 1536681673446498000, flags: TRANSIENT, TRANSRESET
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/Net/Count, value: 1, timestamp: 1536698949773993000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/OS/Release, value: 4.9.0-7-amd64, timestamp: 1536681633431001000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/OS/NoLoggedInUsers, value: false, timestamp: 1536681673447965000, flags: TRANSIENT, TRANSRESET
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/HostVerLastChecked, value: 5.2.18, timestamp: 1536681702832389000, flags: <NULL>

Hope you enjoyed ! Have phun!

The post Virtualbox Shared folder set up on Linux between Host and Guest OS – Set up Virtualbox shared folder to Copy files from PC Host to Guest appeared first on ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary.

Mass substitute WordPress site Old domain URL to new URL in MySQL (MariaDB) database after website migration

If you have just migrated a wordpress blog or site to a new server (domain URL) and you have many articles pointing to the old URL. Out of sudden the new domain will end up with many broken links and that would have a severe negative SEO effect on your website leading to a certain downfall of your number of daily unique visits.

Of course manually changing the URL links is achievable by going through all Published Posts when migrating small websites with 10-20 pages,  however it is an impossible tedious task you would definitely want to avoid when you're migrating large WP based websites with few hundred or thousands of posts / pages,
bacause this would be a few weeks of mindless repeatable job to go through each and every post and substite the broken URLs.

Fortunately with a little bit of SQL magic either through MySQL CLI or PHPMyAdmin (if the website is moved to a shared hosting where you have disabled access to MySQL (MariaDB) default connect tcp port 3306.

Depending on the type of WordPress or Website the old broken URLs might be located in various Database tables.
 

– So when Mass URL substitution is might be required ?

1. You migrate a Website http://what-ever-website.com with (PHP / CSS / HTML / Templates) etc. from Hosting Provider Hostgator.com to UK2.com (because the website target client changed lately to United Kingdom customers) to http://what-ever-website.co.uk and the site is moved to a new domain beacause of Business rebranding
 

2. Other reason for changing internal URLs from one URL to another might be if you're migrating your website from HTTP to HTTPS for security.

3. You are restructuring file storage / image directories on the server or due to migration of files to external CDN (Content Delivery Network).
For example (http://your-server.com/images/ , http://your-server.com/files )  URLs pointing to old website location subdirectory has to be changed to the new one (http://your-server.com/img/ , http://your-server.com/data)
 

– So what is the automated approach to solve the task of Mass URL substitution across WP site ?

•  Create full backup of all your website database and double-check the backup (try to restore on a test (home) server or other hosting account to make sure the backup is consistent and restore would work normally if necessery
   
• You can Create Backup either with mysqldump command tool manually … with the right command arguments or use some kind of script such as My tiny mysqlbackupper.sh shell script which I shared under my previous article Make daily MySQL on Linux backup with Shell Script  via PhpMyAdmin.

2. Change old website URL to new one directly from Database using MySQL text client
 

To change incorrect URL with the new correct one the general query to run is:

update TABLE_NAME set FIELD_NAME = replace(FIELD_NAME, ‘find string’, ‘replace string’);

To change old website URL to the new website URL across every table within the wordpress database use below queries:
 

hipo@linux:~$ mysql -u root -p
Enter password:

USE blog;

 

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, 'Existing (old) URL', 'New URL') WHERE option_name = 'home' OR option_name = 'siteurl';

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, 'Existing (old)URL', 'New URL');

UPDATE wp_postmeta SET meta_value = replace(meta_value,'Existing (old) URL','New URL');

UPDATE wp_usermeta SET meta_value = replace(meta_value, 'Existing (old) URL','New URL');

UPDATE wp_links SET link_url = replace(link_url, 'Existing (old) URL','New URL');

UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_content = replace(comment_content , 'Existing (old) URL','New URL');

3. Replace Old website URL to New one after migration using PHPMyAdmin web interface
 

If you don't have access  ssh shell, you can also run the queries via PhpMyAdmin to do so:

1. Open PHPMyadmin URL Panel in browser and login with your user / pass

2. Choose the wordpress database of the wordpress site / blog

3. Select SQL tab and in the panel type on above given SQL queries
 

If you're lazy to type there is also a web based SQL queries generator tool for moving websites to a new domain

4. Using Search and Replace WordPress plugin to do the old URL to new URL (strings) transition
 

If you have never used SQL queries and you're totally new to it and don't want to risk breaking up something there is also a bunch of wordpress plugins available that do the URL string substitution throughout each wordpress table in a WP database one such WordPress plugin is Search and Replace I have written earlier an article Change string in all WordPress Posts with Search and Replace plugin.

5. Problems with data-serialization
 

If you do a simple search and replace of Old domain urls to New ones, using above given commands and you still end up with some broken links on WP Pages that might be due to data-serialization issues (for the cause of issues check out what is data serialization).
Data serialization in wordpress terms is an array of PHP encrypted data that contains the actual URL, thus a simple search and replace as explained above if URLs use data-serialization would not work. There are available tools online that does URL search and replace operation through  "serialize-data sensitively" if you stuck with data-serializatoin caused issues.

Besides that for there are written scripts that does URL substitution to a WordPress or Joomla websites so an alternative to above WP plugin to replace the URL after migration is to use one of the scripts available a very famous one that will do pain-free all URL / string substitutions inside your WP, Drupal,  Joomla databses is interconnect/it.
 

Few closure words
 

As a system administrator and webmaster I have migrated wordpress installations many times with the need to change the old URLs to a new ones for both customer websites and my own wordpress based. On many ocassions because of lack of attention and hurry, I've messed up things.
The moral I got out of this is when you're doing a WordPress migration just like everything you have to be very attentive and do everything step by step slowly and have a good idea on what you're doing in advance …

Even as a person who had overall idea on how MySQL Server works and have experience in writting SQL queries, I have to confess I've  made mistakes during URL substitution operations when doing it via the MySQL CLI every now and then.

Thus I would recommend you better use some of the many plugins for wordpress and script tools (few of which I mentioned above), especially if you're not having at least few years with some kind of UNIX variation / Linux / MySQL.

The post Mass substitute WordPress site Old domain URL to new URL in MySQL (MariaDB) database after website migration appeared first on ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary.

1. Listing All installed packages (.pkg) files on Mac OS X

If you are used to Linux package management (with dpkg .deb package tool or Redhat's .rpm package manager rpm command) and out of a suddeny you have to use for some time or permanently choose to migrate to Mac OS X and joined the Jailed closed Computer model of Mr. Steve Jobs.

As a Linux command addict,yYou might be wondering on how to list all installed packages on Mac OS with a command just like you use Debian / Ubuntus terminal to list installed packages and their overall state for example with dpkg with:

dpkg -l

or Fedora / CentOS to list all installed packages you're pretty much accustomed to:
 

rpm -qa

The same is possible in Mac OS X by opening Terminal and running cmd:

MacBook-Air:Volumes root# pkgutil –pkgs

om.apple.pkg.OSX_10_13_IncompatibleAppList.16U1254
com.apple.pkg.MRTConfigData.16U4001
com.apple.pkg.ChineseWordlistUpdate.14U1355
com.apple.pkg.GatekeeperConfigData.16U1300
com.apple.pkg.MRTConfigData.16U4003
com.apple.pkg.ChineseWordlistUpdate.14U1356
com.apple.pkg.ChineseWordlistUpdate.14U1346
com.apple.pkg.GatekeeperConfigData.16U1259
com.apple.pkg.GatekeeperConfigData.16U1265
com.apple.pkg.XProtectPlistConfigData.16U4009
com.apple.pkg.ChineseWordlistUpdate.14U1353
com.apple.pkg.ChineseWordlistUpdate.14U1347
com.apple.pkg.ChineseWordlistUpdate.14U1351
com.apple.pkg.MRTConfigData.16U4038
com.apple.pkg.iTunesX.12.7.3.delta
com.apple.pkg.XProtectPlistConfigData.14U4058
com.apple.pkg.GatekeeperConfigData.16U1138
com.apple.pkg.MLVUpdate_en_GB_daniel.16U1127
com.apple.pkg.EmbeddedOSFirmware
com.apple.pkg.MRTConfigData.16U4005
com.apple.pkg.ChineseWordlistUpdate.14U1323
com.apple.pkg.GatekeeperConfigData.16U1572
com.apple.pkg.iTunesX.12.7.delta
com.apple.pkg.MRT.14U2321

…

For the sake of convenience run it with a pipe to less cmd:

MacBook-Air:Volumes root# pkgutil –pkgs | less

To find whether a package with a certain name is installed or not

MacBook-Air:Volumes root# pkgutil –pkgs|grep -i oracle
com.oracle.jre|

To further list the content of the package (the package files contained and directory structure etc.) this is like the Linux equivalent of
dpkg -L packagename and rpm -qa rpm-packagename use:

MacBook-Air:Volumes root# pkgutil –files the-package-name.pkg

Checking the package location is done with:

MacBook-Air:Volumes root#  pkgutil –pkg-info com.oracle.jre
package-id: com.oracle.jre
version: 1.0
volume: /
location: Library/Internet Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin
install-time: 1523533193

2. Deleting a Mac OS X package .pkg 

After reviewing the .pkg file content for smaller sized packages the best way to remove it is to manually remove all files belonging to the package (but before make sure you are not deleting an important packageand have visually closely inspected them otherwise you might break badly your Mac OS X  …) you can run below 2 commands to delete package files and directory:

# pkgutil –only-files –files the-package-name.pkg | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -n 1 -0 sudo rm -f
# pkgutil –only-dirs –files the-package-name.pkg | tail -r | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -n 1 -0 sudo rmdir

Once you have removed the files you can remove the receipt (e.g. remove it from Mac package database), with:
 

# pkgutil –forget the-package-name.pkg

pkgutil –forget is useful if you get errors during removal attempt with pkgutil –only-files … , pkgutil –only-dirs …. cmds.

Note that to remove a package you have to be root  or run the commands via sudo with admin privileges if you have it installed and using it.

When removing the files be extremely careful as some of the packages you might try to remove might be updating important Mac OS X system components or used as a backbone for the overall Mac OS GUI / background operations thus removing a system related package might leave your MacBook unbootable because of the removal of the necessery component …

If you get some errors while issuing some of the 2 above commands like:

"Operation not permitted when trying to uninstall" this is because  the command or directory you're trying to remove is in current use by a running process on the Mac OS or because the file or directory has a special set permissions to prevent them from easy removal (as a precaution OS safety measures).

You might wonder what might be the purpose of a manual command removal of Mac package but, If you have to regularly delete Mac OS X packages by scripting the removal of unnecessery packages or Mac OS X updates on a many numbers of computers to automate removal jobs.
I've found also a github repository bash shell script that is automating the process of removal and could even save further time if in need to script a package information about Macs and be able to easily manage packages of mac Desktops via (lets say SSH), check out pkg-remove.sh script here.

The post How to list and uninstall installed Mac OS X packages command appeared first on ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary.