Monthly Archives: March 2024

So what happened

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I was sat down watching crap telly last night, fiddling on the laptop connected to the server over SSH. I was trying to get fail2ban to work with wordpress, so it would ban an IP based on a bad login. So when fiddling I was checking the log files and it was showing that iptables were not working properly. After much Googling I ended up trying to reinstall the kernel. This did indeed reinstall, unfortunately it didn’t install the network drivers which apparently were part of some extension package. So I was now left with a system that booted but had no network connectivity. So travelled upstairs and got on the console. Ended up restoring from a backup. Didn’t work. Tried various restores. Didn’t work. Tried deleting the /boot directory and restoring that, except it wasn’t on the backup. So now had a system that wouldn’t even boot and just sat there at a grub prompt. Bugger. So reinstalled the OS as a clean install. Thankfully it only took a few minutes. System then booted with full networking. Except now of course it was a blank system. So tried restoring the backup again and then rebooted. All came back up and instantly started working again. Relief. So expanded the volume and checked a few things. This wasn’t bad activity considering I’d downed two bottles of wine during the panic.

So today I just monitored the logs. Thankfully everything was fine, as a bonus fail2ban was now working fine. So I added the wordpress jails and all seems to work.

I’m not going to touch it again now until I come back.

Back wax lyrical

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So this morning I had my back waxed by Sharlene. Yes it’s vane. I really don’t care. I just don’t like a hairy back, plus I can’t reach it and I’ve known Sharlene for years. I shave everything else myself. Plus I only do it if I’m going somewhere where I’ll be on a sun bed.

It rained a lot. The weather in this country is really pissing me off. I’ll miss the dogs, I won’t miss the rain. Still, managed to walk everyone and myself. Still haven’t reached my weight goal.

Sat down this evening and removed the private keys out of my courier .pem’s. These have always annoyed me as it makes the private key readable. So removed the privated key, put it in it’s own key file and made it only readable by the courier user, updated the config and restarted the service. After a couple of cockups mail reading was working again. I moved them to the certs folder, I’m happier now, I’ll need to update the doc.

Also logged into the SFTP server and downloaded last nights backup, decrypted it with my private key and then tested the integrity of the tar file, all good.

My new hat arrived. I like it. Feel like I need matching shoes.

Now backed up to the cloud

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So spent a few hours yesterday on SSH into the server. So got an account with ‘adrive.com’ which is one of the only ones which is a) cheap and b) allows ftp access, more importantly SFTP access. So created a public / private key pair with ssh-keygen. Uploaded the public key to ‘adrive’ and magically I can now log in with open-ssh. This is handy as it has a batch mode, so you can log in and upload from a bash script. So I modified the backup script to backup to the tmp directory and then copy this to the external drive. Then use open-ssl to encrypt it using another private key. It then logs into the ftp server using SFTP and uploads the file. To find out if the upload was successful was a bit more tricky. Uses ‘stat’ to get the file size of the local file, then uses ‘ls -l’ on the remote file and stores that in a file. I then had to use a series of ‘sed’, ‘grep’ and ‘cut’ commands to get the file size. I dump this to a file and then just compare the two files. It failed multiple times in testing until I got the script right. Satisfaction.

Also bought a new hat.

Hallelujah

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So had an odd job on today. Well, I say ‘job’ but I wasn’t being paid for it. Jamie (ex.) wanted some advice about mixing some vocals. I just said use a 1176 to chop the peeks followed by an LA-2A to ride it, then chop at about 200Hz as a starting point. I’m disappointed when people don’t follow. So he sent me the stems.

So for reference I processed them all in RX10, did basic noise removal and de-reverb, then did some breath removal. The lead vocal I then put in Melodyne and tuned to E major. Then in Ableton I did some more breath removal, followed by a ‘de-click’. Feeding that into Pro-DS (de-esser), followed by an 1176 and LA-2A. Bit of Pro-Q3 EQ, dynamic on 200Hz and give it some top end. Fed into Oaksound Sooth2 to remove resonances. Bit more EQ. Added some tape slap-back and a tiny bit of Phoenix-verb (reverb). For the harmonies I did a basic de-breath, de-esser and 1176, LA-2A combo. I then used ‘Little Alter Boy’ to add a 5th harmony and then ‘Little Microshift’ to give some width. All harmonies were grouped and then a bus compressor. This group then had trackspacer side-chained to the lead vocal to carve out the EQ. The music track I did a bit of EQ on and then track-spaced to the group containing all the vocals (this also had a bus compressor on it). Finally I put Pro-L (limiter) on the master bus.

Not sure why he couldn’t do this, simples.

Dodged a bullet

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So I’ve now got to Saturday and failed to come down with anything. Much to be said by spraying vast amounts of chemicals up your nose. I did a fifteen mile walk as well as walking the dogs. Got back and immersed myself in a bash script. The object of the exercise was to produce a script that could upload a file to a ftp server. First issue was said server requires an SSH public / private key to validate. To be fair after a bit of Googling this wasn’t much of an issue. Producing a batch file to do this, again wasn’t a problem. Validating the file was there however turned out to be a challenge. There wasn’t any response to say that ‘file is uploaded’. So ended up with with a very interesting combination of ‘sed’ pipes to list the directory entry to a file to get it’s size. So validated the upload by comparing file sizes in a file containing the file size. Still. It was a night in.

The joys of FTP servers

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So I have an ftp server set up on the, er hmm server. In fact I have two of them running. This is due to apache running two web servers, each under it’s own domain and each under it’s own IP address. WordPress likes to update using FTP, but the directories are all owned by the website users (as in I have a unique user account per web domain). This is for security reasons, I don’t want the user of one to be able to access the other. So each FTP server is bound to the IP address of it’s own domain and set to the certificate of that domain (even though it’s only really communicating to itself inside the box, there is no external FTP access as it’s blocked by two levels of firewalls). This all works fine, except when you want to transfer a file to / from the server. You can piss about and log into one of the existing servers using the credentials for that domain and end up uploading / downloading files from the var/www/domain directory (when you’ve finally figured out which directory you actually have write access to). But that’s an ass and I wanted to just be able to move files to some home type directoy.

So now I’ve added a third FTP server deamon. This one is bound to the DHCP IP address of the server (local subnet), this is just using the snake oil certificate as again I’m only transferring inside the local network. I had to create a new unique user. But the fun thing is when I logged in using the user credentials I get and error about chroot. It appears the only way to fix it was to make the user directory not writeable and then add a subdirectory under it called ‘upload’ and make this writeable by the same user. This works fine. Also cannot escape the home directory so all is good with the world.

Next job is remote server backup storage by SFTP. So far I’ve got as far as encrypting the backup files using a private key using openssl. More joy for the weekend I’m sure.

A bleach in time

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So I’ve been trying to remember to bleach my teeth. A task I usually try and perform in the morning after my cup of tea, which follows my cup of coffee. You are meant to keep it in for about ten minutes, which is why I keep it in for three hours. Working on the theory that it’s probably worn out by then anyway. Why do I bleach my teeth? Well it’s the first thing people seem to notice, it’s certainly not my hair as that’s always covered by a hat. They used to be a combination of brown and green, but years of bleaching have now turned them ‘mostly’ white. Plus my dentist has slowly being replacing my amalgams, I only have two left.

My teeth are the only part of my body that is improving with age.

Well if I don’t get lurgie now I’ll be surprised

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So today it was time for the annual haircut. Okay, I usually have one a couple of weeks before I ever go away, and there is a good reason for this. People. Specifically people with diseases. And when I went in the hairdressers today it was like a stomach and flu ward. I was coughed and snotted over constantly for about half an hour. Came back and drowned in antiseptic and rammed vast amounts of killing chemicals up my nose. I may have the constitution of an ox but that was bad exposure. Guess all I can do not is wait, not sure what the incubation period is. But I also quarantine for a week before I go away anyway.

Ebay my life

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So as retirement draws ever closer (1825 days according to one spreadsheet) I need to sort some shit out. Over the years I’ve expanded from one bedroom into a four bedroomed house. I have basically tons of crap everywhere. With the plan to go to warmer climes at retirement there is no way I can transport everything. Basically I would have a twenty foot container to pack my life into.

So I’ve started to sell things, starting with the rubbish first. I’ve got rid of a broken logic board for an Mac Air, a broken Fitbit watch and a skipping rope. I’m certainly not going to get rich by selling some of this stuff, but there are a few gems up for grabs. There’s a lot of vintage computer gear and a ‘mid school’ BMX in the garage that’s been ridden about twice (it’s far too heavy). So when I come back from my next voyage I’m going to start regular clear outs and auctions / sales. If I start now there will be less of a panic down the line, and considerably less crap in my life.