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:

Wordpress 2017 -- how do you get a summary in your Category and other lists?

I now also work on a Worpress website with theme 2017 (twentyseventeen) and I noticed that when I go to the Caegories or some other list of posts, I get the full posts.

Looking into it, I could not really see anything about it on the Internet. Strange.

The fact is that all you have to do is go back to each post (yeah, a tad bit tedious if you have hundreds already) and add the "Read more mark". The fact is that Wordpress does not seem to automatically add a feature to automatically calculte the summary of your posts. Maybe I missed it or I would need to install yet another plugin.. ...

As I'm working on a Zap application (see Zapier). I got this error about my triggers:

REST hook trigger needs a polling url (ZSE007)

So... I understand that they want to have a URL to do a poll and they even have documentation that explains why they want to poll in case of a REST hook Zap: Whenever the user wants to test the Zap, the application will get some data using the polling method. That way they can get that data specifically for one test and not force you to generate an trigger. One problem with testing with an actual trigger is that any other Zap listening to the same trigger ...

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,
      ...

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