Posts

Posted on

Kindle Fire 10 – Alexa show mode

After many months, Amazon have finally issued the OS update to the UK to enable Show Mode on the Fire 10 tablet.   Was quite annoyed when found this wasn’t enabled from the off as it was a feature that had been touted in the press at the launch.

Any way, its available now, and good to get visual confirm of what Alexa heard and actioning and getting the weather displayed as well as spoken.   Intention is to install in the kitchen so readily available for cooking timers, receipes and travel updates before heading out.

 

Posted on

PHP 7.2

No sooner do FreeBSD jump from PHP 5.6 to 7.1, the default version jumps to 7.2 in a matter of weeks.  Cue rebuild of all the Apache and PHP ports again.   least everything is being patched regularly.

 

 

Posted on

Nagios installed

Although I have had webmin on the server for ages, and keep looking at Fing,  I didn’t have any real time monitoring of the network.   This has now been addressed thu the installation of nagios

Took a bit of figuring which version of nagios to install for FreeBSD.   Nagios 4 aka Core is available in the ports so was quite an install, once I realised I was missing mod_cgi from my Apache configuration.  The CGI files where coming down as downloads and not running as scripts.  That and checking Nagios had access to the folders.

Still struggling with plug-ins and add-ons.  The default add-ins  have been installed from the ports but there are lots more on the Nagios website, but not sure how to install now.  So plenty of spare weekends and evenings tinkering with now the core service is up and running.

 

Posted on

PHP 7.1 and Samba 4.8 updates

Quick flurry of updates as Samba 4.6 finally went out of support earlier this month so no more patches, so quick deinstall of Samba46 and then install of Samba48 to get Samba back into support.

Update to PHP 7.1 was a bit more involved.  Needed to update make.conf to amend the default_versions from 5.6 to 7.1 and then locate the port directories for mod_php56 and de-install.   Quick build of mod_php71 to update that and then pkg delete php56 to remove all the extensions.

I have Kanboard and phpsysinfo installed, so a quick trip to their port directories to re-installed pulled in most of the PHP extensions needed, but oddly not php71-extensions, so on Apachectl Restart WordPress spewed up some Server 500 Errors.  A quick check of the previous php extensions now installed versus the previous 56 variants thru up a few ports that had not been pulled back in.   A quick re-build of those ports and another apachectl restart and all is well and Apache is now running PHP 7.1 happily.

 

Posted on

Alexa Show Mode

After treating myself to a Kindle Fire 10 as a stop gap until I could justify the price of an iPad Pro was looking forward to trying out the Show Mode that was heavily written about in the Tech Media at the time

Suffice to say the firmware for the UK version has not come out yet and still no sign of the Amazon Docking Station to make this a permanent fixture.  The Fire 8 HD requires the latest 8th Gen iteration to enable

Not  sure if my bad research at the time in July or if Amazon his the fact it wasn’t  coming to the UK versions of Fire 10.

Will be watching out for the latest developments on the Amazon support website

 

Posted on

Nothing much?

neglected to mention the upgrade to 11.2 and then the patches.   I had planned to add DKIM and DMARC protection  to one of my other domains, but having took my laptop realised I had not packed the charger, so decided against making changes I might not be able to complete.   A job for another weekend.

 

Posted on

Slow summer

Not much to report this month as weather far too nice to spend messing around on the server indoors. Technological updates have really been around the house and finally getting to set up the smart tellies to be able to stream content stored on the server.

Plus just taken possession of a Kindle Fire 10 with Alexa built in so will be interesting to see how much use that gets

Posted on

SSMTP and emails from Root not arriving

My daily and weekly status updates from Root stopped appearing in my main inbox a while back, (probably when I switched from Sendmail to SSMTP.  )  but they did appear in my secondary email account as this was the bounce-back address for email failures, as failure reports.

Issue seemed to be that the Root mail box was not reachable anymore.   Attempts to amend an alias to have them delivered to a live account failed as most of the method listed for amending Root’s alias are for Sendmail.

A bit of googling found this post  http://possiblelossofprecision.net/?p=591 and identified the correct file to edit as /ETC/MAIL.RC and add

set append dot save ask crt
ignore Received Message-Id Resent-Message-Id Status Mail-From Return-Path Via
alias root yournewrootmailboxhere@nowhere.com

to finally restore my housekeeping updates from the system

 

Posted on

Problems updating WordPress

Had been playing around which Apache to add a new virtual host and somewhere, somehow, the auto update on WordPress stopped working and insisted that I entered the FTP credentials which is not something I have enabled on this server.   A bit of googling came across this post highlighted a potential work around in the WP-config.php to allow direct updates.    A quick edit with EE and an apachectl restart and WordPress update routine worked flawlessly as it did before, with out needing FTP access.

https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/update-wordpress-without-ftp/