vSphere I’ve been a long time user of VMWare ESXi for my baremetal hypervisor needs. In order for it to function at its best, the recommendation has always been to install the VMWare Tools. On Windows this is an exe and a piece of cake. However on Linux it has always been a gamble.

Recently I’ve taken a liking to Fish Shell. It’s simple, colorful and provides lots of features out of the box, without requiring any configuration whatsoever. Since I have a tendency to touch a lot of different systems, the “out of the box” provides a quick and clean environment to work with. However, today when I was setting up a new machine I ran into a new error message. fish: Unable to create a configuration directory for fish. Your personal settings will not be saved. Please set the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME variable to a directory where the current user has write access.

I’ve been using WordPress on Snowulf for almost two years. In that time, one of the most important things I learned was how to enable updates via SSH/FTP. Today, I bring you something that may very well relegate that post to an amusing anecdote. It turns out that the more recent versions of WordPress, with a little bit of tweaking, can update themselves without any FTP/SFTP access at all!

Last night I had programmatically created a large number of users on a server. Today, I started getting emails from the users complaining that their new accounts didn’t work. Turns out my user creation script had not set their passwords correctly, so I needed to reset everyone’s password. Try as I might, I could not find an automagic method to do so with passwd; thankfully, it turns out there is another command to use for this.

Last night I was having a bit of a philosophical debate and I thought I’d externalize it. Everyone knows that the Wikimedia Foundation is a big proponent of “free software”, and similarly, “free access”. By that I mean audio and video is uploaded in formats like Ogg Vorbis / Ogg Theora rather than patented formats like MP3 & H264. This is, without a doubt, as it should be. You wouldn’t want The sum of human knowledge locked away because of one silly patent. Though there is another side to this “free software”: the software which is used on the desktop machines of the staff… and that’s where things get interesting.

Recently I was given a Lenovo X201 which had Ubuntu installed on it. The problem is that every time the computer booted up, the Ubuntu would come on screen briefly, then the screen would go black and the machine would encounter a hard lockup. You could tell it was locked up because the shift light was blinking (an unusual indicator, but it works).

On Monday I covered how to install Windows 7 via USB drive, but leaving it on it’s own would be unfair to our Open Source brethren. Fortunately, if you want to make a bootable USB drive (under Windows or Linux) with a copy of Linux, it just just as easy. All you need is UNetbootin and optionally an ISO of your favorite Linux distribution.

The first time I dealt with WordPress was when I first started doing IT administration for FanHistory. At that point in time I knew nothing about it and it was breaking horribly. Luckily I managed to fix the issues (which turned out to be Varnish proxy related) and get it standing mostly on its own two feet. One of “minor annoyances” I ran into then and absolutely had to figure out during my migration, was the lack of SSH or SFTP based updates. By default when you go into add or update the plugins (or the software itself) you have only two options FTP and FTPS (SSL). I run neither of these, FTP is majorly old and very insecure. FTPS is just not common. I thought I was stuck doing things manually, until I found out…. You can enable SSH2 based updates in WordPress. Better yet, it is SUPER easy.

I liked the idea of a sub-300$ weather station, that did exactly what I wanted. Yea you can get an ok Oregon Scientific weather station for a bit over 200$, but thats not as cool as making your own (and its not linuxed powered). Anyways I’m just going to post part costs & part name (a few links, the generic stuff is easy though). Most of this stuff is “old tech” so you probably have some of it laying around, so you could get away with it for even cheaper.