Capture Lock Screen in Windows

If you ever wanted to capture a screenshot of the logon screen on a physical machine, you may have used whatever means necessary to do so. Which for me, was through the use of a digital camera. The digital camera may have captured the spirit of the screenshot, but always seems to lack in quality. Wouldn’t it be great to…

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How to add desktop icons on CentOS 7

For the most part, I prefer to work using the terminal on a minimal install of Linux; however, there are those occasional times where the GUI is necessary.  Recently faced with having to add a few desktop shortcuts to the Desktop posed a bit of a problem for me. Basically, wanted to achieve two things, a Desktop icon to launch…

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Icinga2 Monitoring for Windows Disks Not Working [Resolved]

Among the many possible services to monitor a Windows based operating system using Icinga2, the service that utilizes the check_command of disk-windows has not quite worked as expected.  It may have been a combination of things that was done incorrectly over the years, or maybe plugin versioning. In any case, a snippet below demonstrates a thought to be working service…

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VIM: Join Lines

I had a document where I wanted to join every other line.  I tried several approaches on a Windows box using Cygwin but only one worked with a couple variations.  Using the vim editor.  This is a new trick to me, and wanted to jot it down before I forget about. The file looked something like this. One approach was…

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Linux: How to logout a user

A user was logged in via XRDP and the screen locked.  Each attempt to logon also resulted in a locked screen.  Rebooting is not an option.  There needed to be a way to identify the user and forcibly log them off, and there is. Logged on as root and typing the who command lists users and logons.  A great working…

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Use htop to determine which processor a process is loaded

Running Linux on virtual machines makes life so much easier when it comes to adding virtual hardware to a vm.  In one case, I added 4 CPUs to a virtual machine, and wondered if I needed to restart the applications to utilize the newly added CPUs. htop is an interactive system-monitor process-viewer and process-manager. It is designed as an alternative…

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VMware Expand Hard Drive Size and Extend in CentOS 7 Linux

One approach to adding space to an existing Linux hard drive that is using Linux LVM is to add space to the drive. This can easily be accomplished in VMware. This has been tested using VMware vSphere Client for Windows with CentOS 7.5 (minimal install). To demonstrate a before and after, here are a few commands that can be used…

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Apache httpd log rotation does not compress the logs

A CentOS 7 installation with a simple yum install of httpd also creates a logrotation script.  The script does log rotate files, however, there is no compression.  A quick look at the script indicates that some compression settings are put into place, but as experience indicates, not enough to do the job. By default, this is the logroation script as…

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Install certbot-auto on CentOS 6 with Python 3.6.x

This is a simplified process for installing and running certbot-auto on CentOS 6 with Python 3.6.x. I have tried several different approaches to this and this method took the least amount of effort. yum install -y centos-release-SCL yum install -y epel-release yum clean all yum install -y rh-python36 curl -o /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto http://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto chmod +x /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto scl enable rh-python36 bash certbot-auto…

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Memory Utilization High in Linux VM

Utilities such as htop, top, and the command free -mh all report a high usage of memory.  The thing is nothing was running.  It turns out to be explainable. Using the following commands, it was determined that VMware virtual server has enabled the vmw_balloon. VMware Tools Balloon Defined The VMware Tools balloon driver is among the utilities installed in the…

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Google Chrome Font Rendering Looks Terrible and How To Fix It

I was beginning to think it was my computer. I had Cleartype enabled and went through the process again to ensure that the settings were correct or not corrupt. I then thought it was the monitors or one of them. Then I realized that the fonts look fine in everything but Google Chrome. Here is a snippet from one page,…

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Install LXC on Ubuntu

Linux Containers (“LXC”) is an operating-system-level virtualization method for running multiple isolated Linux systems on a control host using a single Linux kernel. LXC is the well known set of tools, templates, library and language bindings. It’s pretty low level, very flexible and covers just about every containment feature supported by the upstream kernel. LXC is production ready with LXC…

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VMware Workstation loses bridged network

VMware Workstation loses bridged network and it does not want to come back following the usual methodologies.  I restarted the VMware Workstation services, used the Network Manager, and reboot the computer all to no avail.  In the end, it was something that wasn’t a problem before. Problem On a Microsoft Windows 10 workstation running VMware Workstation 12 for many months…

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VMware Workstation loses bridged network

VMware Workstation loses bridged network and it does not want to come back following the usual methodologies.  I restarted the VMware Workstation services, used the Network Manager, and reboot the computer all to no avail.  In the end, it was something that wasn’t a problem before. On a Windows 10 workstation running VMware Workstation 12 for many months without issue,…

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Add comments to ZIP files with zipnote

Never having given it much thought before, I wanted to know of a way to add a comment to my zip files in Linux.  I used to do this sort of thing many years back with pkzip in the DOS days.  There turns out to be nice little utility, called zipnote. To check for comments in a zipfile.  The command…

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Apply an SSL to MySQL

There is a MySQL 5.6.x install that works wonderfully.  However, a cert was purchased and applied to everything else, so why not apply to the MySQL install too. I ran into a pitfall or two while attempting this, so I am going to write this up in the effort to avoid those pitfalls. The Key file Determine the version of…

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Firefox has blocked parts of this page that are not secure

Firefox has blocked parts of this page that are not secure started to appear recently.  I tried cleaning up any insecure links, such as http, and yet this message continues to plague.  Tried several WordPress plugins to no avail.  It turns out to be something less sinister. The Firefox version was version 57.  After an upgrade to version 59.  All…

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