Welcome to The Linux Page

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This site is a collection of my own work with Linux. Certain things are easy, others take time to decipher and if I ever need to repeat the work (which usually happens!), then I need to remember everything by memory or... have a site with all the steps taken and to take again.

The following are my most recent posts:

Running a specific version of Node.js

The Node.js environment is a backend server-side JavaScript environment which is being used more and more.

Under Ubuntu, we generally get pretty far behind on a TLS version. Ubuntu 16.04 offers a version 4.x when we now have 8.x avaiable! There are many reason for that problem, but that's not the point of this post...

So, I wanted to write a Zapier App. They only run your Zap tests if you have version 6.10.2. Any other version will break their test system because you cannot hope that a test will work perfectly between versions.

Therefore, I had to install the correct version. I found ...

UPDATE:

I reported this problem to the author who took a bit of time but ended up fixing the problem. If you still have a problem, you probably need to upgrade to the newest version.

I just created a new website and added a few plugins, one of which is Polylang. It generally works okay. Not what I really would like to have, but close enough for a Wordpress website.

Only, it has a horrible side effect:

I destroys the canonical URL which instead of appearing as expected appears with a "%pagename%" variable in it. This is because the module caches the results of a previous call ...

The laptop I use runs MS-Windows 8.1, because a few software I have only run on that platform... It uses the WiFi to connect to my LAN. This is how I access the Internet, too.

Only once in a while (very often, if you ask me!), my WiFi would go out. This started to happen more or less when I switched from AT&T to Comcast. I did not really see what could possibly be different and all my other computers would continue to work just fine, including those used with WiFi too.

Many people say that your WiFi is bad or that you should change your WiFi Router... Or maybe when the laptop goes ...

My Embedded YouTube Video Disappeared

Embedded videos from YouTube.com used to work just fine on my website.

Today, though, I just noticed that my video was not showing up on one of my pages. Looking into it, I found out that the problem was the protocol.

I'm not too sure whether it was my browser or YouTube,com (although I'm not too sure how YouTube.com would know...) but the fact is that the iframe source was using HTTP and the page I was viewing used HTTPS.

By editing the page and changing the YouTube.com video from HTTP to HTTPS resolved the issue. It is generally much better to always use encryption anyway.

I have a table with a few columns, two of which are integers, one of which can be NULL in which case the other integer is to be used in my query.

CREATE TABLE my_table (col1 INTEGER NOT NULL, col2 INTEGER);

If `col2` is NULL, then use `col1`. As is, there is how my query looks like:

SELECT MIN(IF(col2, col2, col1)) AS smallest FROM my_table LIMIT 1;

In other words, I need to get the row with the smallest integer, but if one column is NULL, I want to use the other column value.

On a very small sample, the query is still very fast, but the real version is not unlikely to have thousands ...

Today I noticed that my fail2ban wasn't running.

Looking into it, I could see that an error was happening on startup. This pretty much always mean that something's wrong in the configuration files.

sudo systemctl start fail2ban
Job for fail2ban.service failed because the control process exited with error code.
See "systemctl status fail2ban.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.

However, somehow, systemd would not show me the error with the status or checking the journal and it would not write anything to the /var/log/fail2ban.log file which stayed ...

I have been using Thunderbird for a long time and yet I still did not know about the Compact feature.

A while back, i would use my Local Folders to save Junk, Draft, and Sent emails. This is really fast by default. But at some point I had a problem and reverted to using the remote folders which worked.

The problem was that Thunderbird would tell me that my Local Folders were full even though looking at them they were clearly empty.

The way this works is really annoyingly bad:

1. it accepts emails in a file, like the good old days, it uses one file for any number of emails

2. it adds new ...

Lately, I received emails from a customer something like 12 hours later...

So I checked closer and could see that the email was from hotmail.com.

Great.

On the server, I edited my whitelist to see what was going on:

vim /etc/postgrey/whitelist_clients.local

Searching the list I could see hotmail.com, so why is it that it gets bounced with a 450 by Postgrey if it is whitelisted?

Looking closer at the logs left behind by Postgrey, I found this line:

Apr 23 06:33:34 m2osw postgrey[1742]: action=greylist,
      reason=new,
      client_name=<secret>.outlook.com,
      ...

As I wanted to use SugarCRM on my new server, I looked into the Community Edition and apparently the company is not willing to convert their code so it works under PHP 7.

So that would not work on a newer system because the code uses quite a few forbidden mechanism (wrong class definitions, old defunct functions...) and that prevents to even instal the system on your machine.

Now, I have looked closer into it and I am getting a version that works pretty darn well already. I still have some issues here and there, but I think you can already make use of that version. Except for one thing which ...

No Meld Preferences Menu?!?!

In my development, once of the steps is to check the changes I made before I commit them.

To do so, I often use Meld.

Unfortunately, the preferences disappeared and it makes things harder to tweak large changes!

The fact is that my brain does not correctly support the Macintosh like Menu at the very top. (It's not just my brain, it's also the fact that when I move my mouse, it focuses windows automatically, which is the normal X-Windows behavior, and having the menus on the top is not acceptable in that case!)

You remove the menus at the top-right of the screen with:

sudo ...

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

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