Upgrade PCRE from 7.8 to 8.x on CentOS 6

A WordPress plugin required PCRE 8.x for it to work. The following instructions were taken from the source cited below and worked flawlessly. The step below determined the version of PCRE and whether there was PHP support for it. To install the newer version of PCRE create a link to the repository. Yum update Check the version Restart Apache Downgrade…

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Resize an Encrypted LUKs filesystem with LVM on Linux

There is a CentOS 6 server that needed additional diskspace. I had no idea, that this server had an encrypted filesystem for one of it’s mount points. I thought the worst for procedures, but I found this one article that worked and worked well. The situation was a VM on an ESXi server contained a LVM mount called for example,…

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VMware vSphere Client incorrectly displays Guest OS version for CentOS 7.4

The vSphere Client (desktop) Version 5.5.0 correctly displayed the CentOS 7.x point releases until version CentOS 7.4. Where it once displayed, Guest OS: CentOS 4/5/6/7 (64-bit) under the Summary tab of the virtual machine, the display is Guest OS: Linux 3.10.0-693.17.1.x86-x64 CentOS Linux release 7.4.1708 (Core). As I once thought that this was problematic, I found a discussion in Gitlab…

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Synology Diskstation DS1812+ Suddenly Dies and Resolution

I had a negative experience that turned out to have a positive ending. Sharing this experience may hopefully help someone else. A Synology Diskstation DS1812+ NAS has served well for several years, until one day it was found turned off. I pressed the power button in an attempt to turn it back on as there was no prior indication of…

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Certbot Requires Python 2.7

This article describes how to use certbot with Python 2.7.  The assumption is that you have already installed certbot. At the bottom of this article, is a related post on how to install Python 2.7.  After installing Python, install/run certbot. A shortcut, run a command within a temporary environment, like this functional example below. To run certbot, enable python 2.7…

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Install Python 2.7 on CentOS 6.x

CentOS 6.x uses python 2.6 for various things.  It is the default install and Python 2.7 is not available as a typical install but I  had a need for it and found a solution that worked for me. The test. If you type exit, and type python -V, this will revert to the existing python version.  The scl enable is…

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Convert an OVA/OVF VirtualBox to ESXi

This guide won’t go into the actual export of a VirtualBox OVA with the intended use for a VMware ESXi 5.5 environment.  It won’t even use the conventional tools that some sites suggest; however, this method worked for me. After repeated failure attempts to import a VirtualBox OVA, I used 7-zip to extract the contents (ignoring any error or warning…

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Cannot Set Password Never Expires on Windows Server 2012

A stand-alone Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with logon as local Administrator keeps presenting itself with a popup message that the password is expired in 1 day and that you must change your password.  There were a couple of solutions that exist. One seemed more elegant and quicker than the other. The first solution to use the local security policy. Go…

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Elasticsearch bootstrap checks failed [RESOLVED]

Elasticsearch is a distributed, open source search and analytics engine for all types of data, including textual, numerical, geospatial, structured, and unstructured.  After installing Elasticsearch the application failed to start with a bootstrap error. Problem ERROR: bootstrap checks failed max file descriptors [4096] for elasticsearch process is too low, increase to at least [65536] max number of threads [1024] for…

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Install Emby Server on NetGear ReadyNAS Pro

While playing with Plex and Emby on different virtual machines, I thought it would be a fun exercise to install Emby on a NetGear ReadyNAS Pro. Emby is a media server designed to organize, play, and stream audio and video to a variety of devices. The problem was the ReadyNAS Pro firmware was 4.x.x and Emby server supports 6.8.0 or greater. …

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ReadyNAS Pro Upgrade Firmware from 4 to 6 (unsupported)

The NetGear ReadyNAS Pro can be a fantastic addition to any environment. Aside from a flaky power supply which wasn’t too difficult to replace, (Another story for another time.), this box has been relatively descent. Well the power supply issue was big and annoying. The other annoying aspect to this NAS is it’s dated firmware which displays this awful web page…

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smbclient error in Mounting CIFS and NFS

There is a known working samba share.  There are servers that connect to it.  All of them happen to be Windows boxes.  However, wanted to connect a Linux (CentOS 7) to it.  When testing for a connection, it failed with an error message. The command and the error. The resolution turned out to be a simple one.  Update the client…

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CentOS Linux and passwords

User creation and password changes can be handled as one-liners for as long as you use the correct commands.  Today I learned of another password utility other than passwd.  It is chpasswd, a powerful tool to change passwords without the prompt and the password can be encrypted. User Creation To create a user may be a two step process. First…

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How to share a folder without password in Windows 10 home network

It seems like it would be very easy to share a folder on your Windows 10 computer to other Windows users in a home network by using your file explorer, right clicking on a folder, under properties, select sharing, then advanced sharing, and share the folder.  It doesn’t work as one would expect.  This is particularly annoying as the home…

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Rename all files to lowercase names

There seems to be several solutions offered for renaming all files in a directory from mixed or upper case to all lowercase names. Of the solutions, one of the worked without issue. ls | while read upName; do loName=`echo “${upName}” | tr ‘[:upper:]’ ‘[:lower:]’`; mv “$upName” “$loName”; done Although this was found in an Ubuntu forum, it works flawlessly in…

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Remove non-ASCII characters from file

There was a text file that contained non-ASCII characters that acted like spaces within the file, so I used the tried and true dos2unix command to attempt to clean the file; however, the characters remained.  With hundreds of lines to correct, manually deleting the offending areas of the file was not an option.  A real solution is needed. Once again,…

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The truncate command

If you ever get in a bind and a log file has gone out of control and your disk space is full, you may be tempted to delete the log file.  There may be a couple of problems with that.  One, the application is still using the file so that delete may not actually take place until the application is…

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