A view of the Powder Point Bridge in Duxbury at sunset. It was once the oldest and longest wooden bridge in the world, until it was damaged by fire and completely rebuilt in 1986.
Powder Point Bridge At Sunset
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Blue Hour Over Jacobs Pond
A long exposure (77.0 seconds) of Jacobs Pond in Norwell during blue hour.
Norwell, MA.
Acadia National Park
While in Bar Harbor, Maine over the past weekend, I had a chance to make a stop at Acadia National Park and sneak in a few shots. Since I didn’t get to arrive early or stay late for the sunset, I had to make do with the light I had. Good thing I always pack my Lee Big Stopper 😉
How To Create And Secure An Ubuntu Server 20.04 VM On ESXi 7.0
Introduction
In this guide I will show you how to create an Ubuntu Server 20.04 VM on ESXi 7.0 and setup basic security such as firewall and SSH key.
Download Ubuntu Server 20.04
Head over to the releases page and download the image. For this guide, we will be using the “64-bit PC (AMD64) server install image”.
Continue readingHow To Fix Memcache \OC\Memcache\APCu not available for local cache – Nextcloud
Today I updated my self install of Nextcloud from version 22.2.3 to 23.0.0 and after the update I visited the status (Settings->Overview) page in order to see if there are any pending issues and saw the following warning:
The database is missing some indexes. Due to the fact that adding indexes on big tables could take some time they were not added automatically. By running "occ db:add-missing-indices" those missing indexes could be added manually while the instance keeps running. Once the indexes are added queries to those tables are usually much faster.
Missing index "fs_id_storage_size" in table "oc_filecache".
Missing index "fs_storage_path_prefix" in table "oc_filecache".
Please double check the installation guides, and check for any errors or warnings in the log.
Check the security of your Nextcloud over our security scanThe error indicates that I can simply run “occ db:add-missing-indices” at the command line and the error should be resolved so I navigated to the occ directory and issued the command “sudo -u www-data php occ db:add-missing-indices” but received another error instead:
An unhandled exception has been thrown:
OCP\HintException: [0]: Memcache \OC\Memcache\APCu not available for local cache (Is the matching PHP module installed and enabled?)Some research led to this github issue which suggested adding apc.enable_cli = 1 to the file apcu.ini located in /etc/php/7.4/mods-available (please note that your version of php may be different) which turns out, it solved the issue allowing me to successfully run sudo -u www-data php occ db:add-missing-indices again.
I now have a clean status page!
How To Configure Static IP on Ubuntu Server 20.04
By configuring a static IP address to your Ubuntu server machine you are simply assuring that the address won’t change when the machine reboots. This is useful specially if you are self hosting services and you want to ensure that they are always available.
Continue readingHow To Send Emails From An Ubuntu Machine Using Gmail
An easy way to send emails from an Ubuntu machine for things such as system alerts is by using SSMTP.
Install and configure SSMTP
Start by installing the ssmtp package by running:
sudo apt-get install ssmtpOnce complete, edit the configuration file by located at /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf (I use nano as my editor):
Configure Tautulli To Send Real-Time Notifications To Pushover
I recently configured Tautulli to send notifications through Pushover for when there’s activity on my Plex server such as Play Start/Stop, Plex Server Status etc. and works fantastically well so I decided to write a quick guide on how to do it.
Sign up for Pushover
First sign up for an account at Pushover (just remember that after a trial period, there’s a one time fee of $5 USD) and login where you will be greeted with a page showing your User Key on the right side of the screen. Take note of this as you will need it later. Now towards the bottom of the page you should see Your Applications. Click on Create an Application/API Token. Give it a name, click on the checkbox and Create Application.
Continue readingSend ESXi Host Logs To Remote Syslog Server
Under the ESXi host, navigate to Host->Manage->System->Advanced Settings and search for Syslog.global.logHost and click edit. Now input the address of the syslog server, in my case, a Graylog VM:
udp://192.168.139.11:8515
Enable SSH on the host and login. Navigate to /etc/vmware/firewall and create a file name.xml and add the following editing as needed:
<ConfigRoot>
<service id="0000">
<id>graylog</id>
<rule id='0000'>
<direction>outbound</direction>
<protocol>udp</protocol>
<porttype>dst</porttype>
<port>8515</port>
</rule>
<enabled>true</enabled>
<required>true</required>
</service>
</ConfigRoot>Save the file and reload the firewall by issuing
esxcli network firewall unload
esxcli network firewall loadYou should now start seeing logs in your syslog server. Just be warned that it is not persistent across reboots.
How to force passthrough of internal USB controller on a Dell PowerEdge Server
Recently I’ve decided to give Frigate a try since as some of you already know, motion detection on most cameras can be very flaky at times and I was looking for a permanent solution to false alerts outside my home. One of the issues I encountered during the process was Frigate suggests the use of a Google Coral Accelerator for object detection (which I was lucky enough to score one during the chip shortage) but since my Frigate instance is running under a VM on ESXi, I needed to passthrough the Coral to the VM which turns out it doesn’t work under ESXi 7.x. Simply plugging in the Coral to my PowerEdge R330 server and passing it through to the VM wasn’t enough.
Lucky, a user at the Frigate repo shared that passing through an entire USB controller to the VM instead of just the Coral DOES work so I had to give it a try. I purchased a controller from Amazon and went to work powering down the server, attaching the controller and powering back up. Once I finished toggling passthrough under ESXi settings and re-configuring the VM to use the controller with the Coral attached, Frigate successfully found it. There was one more issue, although a personal one: the fans on my server went nuts! Most Dell servers that detect a third party PCIe card in the configuration tend to increase the fans to account for the foreign device which for me, was excessively loud and unacceptable.
I then had the idea of maybe passing through the internal USB controller since I have no USB devices currently being used on this server and with the help of iDRAC Enterprice, I can manage this server remotely. The problem is even though I found the controller under the hardware tab in ESXi, I couldn’t toggle passthrough as the option showed not capable. But there had to be a way! Research led me to this article which turns out it does work!
After following the instructions in the link above my server is now running nice and quiet with the Coral being passed through the internal controller and Frigate purring along! Did I mention how awesome Frigate object detection really is?