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Matthew

Personal

The Value of Checking on Your Custom Scripts Often

I love scripting.  I mean, back in the 90s, after my brother taught me HTML 4, I took my knowledge further and started to program in PHP, but since leaving the field to become a Linux Systems Admin, my coding skills started to favor Python.  But I rarely ever publish scripts of my own, and the reason for that is maintenance.

Now there are some times, depending on the complexity of your script, that you can get away without updating it for several years.  I mean my original backup script was in use for over 5 years and didn’t need modifying, and even when I did modify it, it wasn’t because it had broken, but because I wanted to reorganize how the files were saved offsite. …

Personal

Backup Script Recode – But Using AI

In 2021 I shared my backup script that I was using to back up my web server.  At the time I was using VestaCP, man a lot has changed since then.  For one, I switched over to HestiaCP which was a great decision, but this post isn’t about that.  The old script was a quick little script I punched out that had some flaws in the organization of the files.

The original idea was to back up everything daily, which is still the idea.  You see, HestiaCP, like VestaCP, only keeps a limited amount of backups based on the package you assigned the account. …

Personal

Its 2024, and I have gone full circle…

First and foremost, Happy New Year 2024.

I am writing this very late on January 1st, 2024, so it will probably be posted on January 2nd by the time I finish writing it.

As many of my readers know, on January 1st, 2012, I switched provinces.  I moved from Ontario (at the time Cornwall, Ontario) to Montreal Island (Dorval, Quebec), however after 4352 Days on the Island (11 Years, 11 Months, as I moved December 1st, 2023) I have returned home.  I had some amazing experiences in Montreal (and surrounding areas), made a lot of new friends, and landed one of the best jobs I have ever had, but it was time to leave, and I regret noting.…

Personal Rants Technology

My Facebook account got hacked!

It’s about half past midnight here on the island, and I just finished getting my hacked account back into my possession with a brand new password and 2FA enabled.  But I wanted to tell you about my horrific journey and how to recover a hacked account, and of course, ways to make it more secure once you have the account back.

What Happened?

My take starts just under 2 weeks ago.  June 9th, 2023.  I was asleep at my buddy’s house back in my homeland in Ontario Canada, and while I was sleeping, someone in a far-off land was up to some mischief. …

Linux Technology Windows

Samba Based Active Directory on Ubuntu 22.04

Preface

I have been waiting for a long time to write this post.  In order to test this out, I needed to upgrade my home lab.  I had a VM machine running XCP-NG (I tried Proxmox, it’s just not the same), but it had an old dual core Intel and 8GB of ram, so not much I could do with other than host a good single VM… which is pointless, the server might as well be the function of that single VM.  So recently I was able to upgrade my main system to a Ryzen 5 5600X with a new mobo, RAM, and PSU, so I figured I would use my old Ryzen 5 1600X in the server. …

Personal

[FIX] mysql_secure_installation not setting the root password

I recently helped my buddy move from Centos 7 to Ubuntu 18.04.  In the process, we noticed one of his custom websites was a little messed up.  It was throwing a lot of errors in regards to mysqli_connect getting a boolean value instead of the query.  We found out this was due to a difference between MariaDB (Centos 7) and plain old MySQL (Ubuntu).  So we fixed this by removing MySQL and installing MariaDB.  However, there was something else wrong.  No user could log in to the root account on MySQL using a password, they would get the old access denied for root@localhost error. …

Fun Other Personal

Spotify – Gotta love it

It is amazing how much technology has changed over the last few decades.  When I was growing up in the 80’s I remember listening to my brother’s Metallica collection on cassette, then in my high school years, listening to 90’s grunge on Compact Disc (CDs), then in college listening to MP3s on a digital music player (all-be-it mostly downloaded off of peer sharing services like Napster and them LimeWire) and now, I listen to most of my music via a streaming service. Now the great thing about using streaming services, in this case Spotify (not sponsored), if you can pretty much find almost every song you have ever listened to.…

Fun Linux Personal Technology

I moved my web server from VestaCP to HestiaCP and here is why.

I recently took on the task of updating my webserver. The decision to do this was mainly because my web server’s operating system was nearing end of life. For those who know, CentOS 7 is the last of it’s kind, a stable enterprise OS based off of Redhat. With full release updates ending at the end of 2020 and security updates till 2024, I decided to jump ship… to Ubuntu.

Wait… What?… Ubuntu? Yes… Ubuntu (Ick, I hate myself for even saying it…)

Now do not get me wrong, Ubuntu is great, for those who are hobbyists. But for stability and enterprise applications, RedHat has been the leading OS, and hence CentOS (Except the Stream version) was also stable.…

Linux Technology

[ FIX ] Unable to SSH into TNAS after update? TOS 4.2.28

If you are like me, you use your TerraMaster NAS proficiently. By this I mean you use its full capabilities like SSH and SCP. But sadly the TerraMaster has changed their policy with the latest update.

With the latest version, 4.2.28-220119172 they enabled a lot of cool features, one being PAM, which blocks a user if they login with a bad password more than 3 times. However they enabled a feature I am not too fond of: SSH is not limited only to the Admin account. This means that if you had other users who logged into SSH, after the update, after attempting to login into an account other than admin, after a few tries you till get this message:

There is a fix… not official, and I could not find it in the forums… In fact TerraMaster’s
official stance is “Admin only”.…

Linux Technology

Resetting Lost Root Password in Ubuntu when “single” fails.

Background Story (skip)

Quite a few times a year I head out to my best friend Eric’s place back in Ontario. We’ve known each other for the better part of our lives as we met in high school.  One of the passions we share is the Linux operating system, although different ends of the spectrum.  Eric is more into Ubuntu, and he runs it for his work and personal servers, as well as his desktop.  I on the other hand prefer Red Hat based systems, working on servers running Red Hat or CentOS, and have extensively used Fedora as a workstation for my work (although my home PC is still Windows based), and most recently I did switch to Zorin Pro (Ubuntu derivative) and currently use Arch Linux for my workstation for professional use.…