Holyarmy.org

Non-Destructive PVC Namespace Move with Longhorn on K8s

Mon, 06 Sep 2021 15:16:42 -0500

K3s and Longhorn

I’ve long run a server (or servers) in my home. There’s been many different tech stacks used over the years, but I’ll save that saga for other posts.

Today, without even providing the backstory for my current HomeLab adventures with K8s (Kubernetes), I’m going to dive into the specifics of a storage related problem and my quick and dirty solution.

However, I suppose it’s at least important to know I’m running K3s, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution, and for my magical storage solution on Kubernetes, I’m running Longhorn.

Switching to Hugo

Sat, 08 Dec 2018 17:11:34 -0600

The time has come to move to a new platform.

Over the years, Wordpress (in various forms) has served reasonably well, but it is a constantly moving target. Since it is SO popular, it must constantly be upgraded, maintained, etc. Both security and performance are significant concerns.

When I first started blogging, it seemed SO COOL to have a dynamic website. But in recent history, it’s just become a hassle.

Ubuntu USB Ethernet Naming for Alias and VLAN Interfaces

Sat, 24 Dec 2016 18:18:25 +0000

In my ongoing adventures of playing with the Chromebox as a firewall, I eventually found a reason to use stock Ubuntu 16.04 instead of VyOS.

For the most part, devices just work as you’d expect under Ubuntu. Even my USB ethernet network interface (NIC) devices work fine. But I eventually noticed a problem.

By default USB NICs under Ubuntu 16.04 (which uses systemd & udev) are named “enxABCDEF123456” where ABCDEF123456 is the full MAC address of the device.

VyOS on an Asus Chromebox M004U

Thu, 04 Aug 2016 15:38:55 +0000

This is a bit of a follow up from my last post. I’ve still got my Asus Chromebox. I’m not running ESXi any more… but something I do want to try out is VyOS. Why? Well, my original intent when purchasing the Chromebox was to play around with it, but then I really did expect it to replace my home router. I’ve used pfSense for a long time, but I’m curious about VyOS because I know several people using EdgeRouter Lite which uses EdgeOS, a fork of VyOS. So I wanted to play around on existing hardware.

ESXi on an Asus Chromebox M004U

Sat, 23 May 2015 18:51:55 +0000

I recently stumbled across the ASUS CHROMEBOX-M004U. It’s a Chromebox, which is cool in its own right, but I was interested in using it’s dual-core Celeron Haswell CPU, expandable RAM (up to 16GB), and M2 Sata storage for other purposes.

First things first, you’ve got to enable the box to run things other than ChromeOS… Thankfully that’s well documented ( http://kodi.wiki/view/ASUS_Chromebox ), so I won’t go into detail at this time. But I will say, I used the standalone, custom coreboot firmware and chose the headless option, as my current planned use cases are for servers. Apparently you want non-headless if you plan to use the box as a Plex Home Theater or Kodi box. Oh, also, I set it to boot first from USB if available.

Odd Git Licensing Message on OSX

Wed, 18 Sep 2013 23:28:52 +0000

Today,IOS 7 dropped to the general public. As usually comes with the release, there was an Xcode update. I updated.

For some time, I’ve been using the git bundled in Xcode as it makes it simpler to get updates as they come with Xcode. Today, that yielded an amusing message.

I use git via an alias in my .bashrc

alias git='xcrun git'

A simple version check reveals all:

git –version

Oops… git is apparently subject to Apple’s licenses.

Have fun RESTing!

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 10:46:59 +0000

Cheesy post titles aside…

I just discovered the very simple but incredibly useful RESTClient at: http://code.google.com/p/rest-client/ .

It’s a simple Java GUI app for testing out one’s REST services. You can choose your: URL, HTTP method, add any custom headers, add a body for PUT/POST, set auth info, SSL info, and do simple scripting.

This is an incredibly useful tool, AND a far cry better than doing it all on the command line with curl.

Here, File File! Nears Release, Gets Attention

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 22:51:08 +0000

I’m taking time away from adding spit and polish to the exciting Here, File File project to say WOO HOO!

The whole team (Adam, Buck, and I) are psyched! A few days ago we found out Here, File File is a finalist in the AppsFire Apps Star Awards. And today, The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) published a great HFF write up.

If you haven’t seen our promo video yet, give it a whirl!

Killing “find” Errors

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:46:53 +0000

I’ve used the unix filesystem search utility find for many years. Though, like most things, until forced to learn its deeper secrets, I generally get by with only the most basic knowledge.

One of the cool things about find is that you can specify a search and then execute an action on the results, all in one command.

This example is probably my most common use of find:

find . -type d -name .svn -exec rm -fr {} \;

This means: find, in the current directory (.), a directory (-type d), named .svn (-name .svn), and for every result (-exec) remove that directory (rm -fr {}) . The “{}” represents the matched path string, and the “;” is required to end the “-exec” command.

Resetting Forgotten OS X 10.5 User Password

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:43:02 +0000

I have an older G4 Mac Mini I use for testing the Mac app I’m working on (Here, File File F.K.A. Welcome to Your Mac. It’s just nice to have a machine that I can test both 10.4 and 10.5 as well as PowerPC compatibility.

Yesterday I needed to do some updates on the 10.5 system and couldn’t remember my password.

Google was my friend and showed me an Apple Knowledge Base article to solve the problem.

Fixing Snow Leopard’s broken ‘focus follows mouse’ Terminal behavior

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:14:59 +0000

Since upgrading to OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), I’ve been frustrated by Terminal’s focus follows mouse behavior. I typically like such behavior but it’s broken as of 10.6. I would frequently CMD-Tab to switch to a different application and start typing only to wonder why my keyboard was not working, then realize my input had gone to the Terminal which sometimes was no longer even visible.

To fix this, type the following in Terminal:

VPN on Ubuntu Linux with Juniper Network Connect

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 23:13:25 +0000

There’s one standard document on HOWTO get Network Connect working on Ubuntu Linux. It’s mad scientist’s doc: http://mad-scientist.us/juniper.html . However, there are a few things not covered. I’ll assume that you’ve followed mad scientist’s excellent guide before going any further.

Issue #1: 64-bit Ubuntu

By default, when you install java on your 64-bit system, you get a 64-bit java. No surprise there, right? Well, Juniper’s tools don’t play nice with 64-bit java. If you attempt to start the junipernc script you’ll promptly see the “VPN has failed!” error message.

Mac Mini DVI-HDMI on LCD HDTV

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 21:26:49 +0000

I recently purchased a Mac Mini to be my home media computer. I plan to blog more about that later. For now, the only tricky thing about using a Mini has been using my TV for a monitor.

There’s a lot of noise on the web (or Google at least) when trying to search for a solution to using a Mini’s DVI output on LCD TV’s. Typically they recommend using DisplayConfigX or SwitchResX to tweak your display modelines, timing, resolution, and just generally dive deeper than I like into display configuration. My solution was MUCH simpler.

Jive Launches SBS and a Rocket

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:07:04 +0000

My company is amazing. In preparation for the launch of our new product, some of the team got together to launch a rocket. After all, NASA uses Jive, so why shouldn’t we use rockets?

There was one dude on site who managed to catch this awesome snapshot!

Updating RubyGems on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 04:38:40 +0000

I’m just posting a simple tip today.

I was wanting to play around with the very cool SASS meta-language using Compass. The language and tool are implemented in Ruby, which is pre-installed on OS X, but as I discovered, I needed a newer version of RubyGems.

I had already known I needed to update Gems, so I was doing the following:

$ sudo gem update

Eventually I got errors like this:

Updating installed gems...
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.github.com/
Attempting remote update of RedCloth
ERROR:  Error installing RedCloth:
    RedCloth requires RubyGems version >= 1.2
Attempting remote update of capistrano
ERROR:  Error installing capistrano:
    capistrano requires RubyGems version >= 1.2
Attempting remote update of net-sftp
ERROR:  Error installing net-sftp:
    net-sftp requires RubyGems version >= 1.2
Attempting remote update of net-ssh
ERROR:  Error installing net-ssh:
    net-ssh requires RubyGems version >= 1.2
Gems updated: RedCloth, capistrano, net-sftp, net-ssh

Turns out, to update RubyGems, one must update the gem system!

Foxmarks: Bookmark Synchronization Heaven

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 22:19:25 +0000

Long have I searched for the magic bullet solution to my bookmark synchronization woes. I’ve wanted a simple plugin that would synchronize my bookmarks between multiple installations of Firefox and Safari, thus making it simple to access said bookmarks from any computer, or between the two commonly used browsers on my Mac. I’ve looked at many options, but always the solution only allows me to sync one browser or the other, leaving me looking for some secondary sync tool to get between Firefox and Safari on my Mac itself, not via network or a proper sync.

Building a Hackintosh Successful Attempt #1

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 05:32:39 +0000

Since getting a Mac Book Pro for work, I’ve become quite the fan of OS X. As a unix/software guy, I really enjoy having the power of a BSD/Unix system readily available, without having to install some hack like cygwin. (I’m not knocking cygwin, it’s a really nice Windows add-on, but I prefer not to run Windows, in general.) I also like the OS X user interface, and lately, that it runs the very cool boxee media center software. So, I wanted to build a boxee box. My options were AppleTV, Mac Mini, or Hackintosh. The Mac Mini was more money than I wanted to spend for an untested solution. The AppleTV would probably be a good solution, especially now that it’s getting more testing from the boxee community, but I wasn’t sure about it. Finally, I thought that a Hackintosh would be a cool project, give me not just boxee but a full OS X system, and I could buy the parts for $235 from newegg. That’s a cheap computer, and especially a cheap Mac.

I went with an Intel D945GCLF2 motherboard. It’s a mini-ITX board with built in dual Atom 330 processors, the kind of CPU’s used in the new and inexpensive NetBook computers. It’s a very low power solution, but with the dual processors most of the research I did suggested it should do 720p HD content. It has a S/PDIF header for digital audio out, but requires an extra cable and I have yet to test it. VGA out is less preferable than DVI, but again, this is cheap, and my Samsung 46″ LCD has VGA-input, so it certainly works. Also, it’s limited to a single 2GB DIMM, so max out that RAM early. 🙂

I bought the following from newegg:

D945GCLF2 motherboard – $80
Any old PATA (SATA should work, too) DVD Burner – $25
2GB Kingston 240-pin DDR2 667 SDRAM – $21
APEX MI-100 Black/Silver Mini-ITX Case w/ 250w PSU – $56
80GB Western Digital SATA Hard Drive – $37
Shipping/Handling + rush processing – $15

Total cost: $234

Full disclosure: I later bought a cheap USB bluetooth dongle ($25) and Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard and mouse (full retail, ouch) as that was the best wireless control solution, but any USB keyboard and mouse combo should work fine for normal usage.

INSTALL GUIDE FOR RETAIL OS X on D945GCLF2

Logins with mod_rewrite, Cookies, and Javascript Redux

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 06:44:45 +0000

A while back I posted a simple solution for restricting website access in a situation where HTTP basic authentication couldn’t be used.

Not much more to the story, but I did make a few tweaks to my sample code. The mod_rewrite rule and javascript have been a tiny bit improved, so now after a successful login, it will try to redirect you to where you intended to go. (Previously, it always sent the user to /)

WordPressMU Plugin Commander

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 07:56:01 +0000

I’m solidly impressed with the WPMU Plugin Commander. One thing that seemed odd to me about WPMU was that I either enable users to have plugin control, or NO ONE (not even the site admin) has the ability to enabled/disable plugins (without a lot of hacking).

This plugin provides a control panel where I can globally enable/disable plugins, set plugins to be auto-enabled for new blogs, and give users the ability to enable/disable only selected plugins.

WordPress Regenerate Thumbnail Plugin

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 06:57:50 +0000

I was literally sitting down to write a plugin that did this, when I stumbled across Viper007’s Regenerate Thumbnail plugin.

I could still write my own version, but eh, what’s the point. 🙂 Seems to work great!

Use vi key bindings in bash

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 06:29:38 +0000

A long time ago I used ksh with vi key bindings, and life was good.

Then I moved on to bash, but for some reason, I never investigated using vi key bindings. I simply lived with the defaults (which, for the record, are emacs-like key bindings).

So, just the other day I said to myself, “Self, I want to use vi key bindings in bash. I want to again experience the joy of traversing and editing my command line in COMMAND MODE. I want the speed and the power of my precious vi (well, I use vim) at my finger tips. And I NO LONGER want to waste time holding arrow keys or to think about using emacs-like commands.”

Bonjour Avahi Addendum

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:23:53 +0000

A while back I wrote about advertising Linux services via Avahi/Bonjour. Since then I’ve made a few changes to my setup.

First, I nixed netatalk for direct AFP support. My primary reason for using it was to gain a more Mac-like network filesystem which would make Time Machine happier. Well, Time Machine uses a sparse bundle disk image on it’s target; after learning about that, using AFP seemed a bit unnecessary. Also, Samba CIFS/SMB seemed to perform better. I don’t have solid benchmarks for this, but simple file copies seemed to be consistenly faster with Samba. One of the biggest annoyances about netatalk was all the extra hidden files and folders it created. I run a hybrid network, I have more Mac machines, but also Windows, plus I browse file systems on the command line quite often; and those excess files pushed me over the edge.

Second, I nixed Time Machine. Just when I thought everything was working perfectly, it completely blew up and could no longer access its data store. Not good for a backup solution. I plan to write about my new home backup solution sometime, but it’s basically rsync with a few key points.

A Project Idea: iPhoto to WordPress [gallery] Export

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 05:52:02 +0000

I’ve been spending some time getting my son’s blog setup. In doing so, I discovered that as of WordPress 2.5, there is built-in [ gallery ] functionality. Though it isn’t full featured, it’s pretty nice, and perfectly integrated with WordPress, since, well, it IS WordPress.

Currently the process to put photos into a gallery is:

Choose photos in iPhoto
Export chosen files to disk
Create new WordPress post
Add media via WordPress uploader

This isn’t too bad, especially for a geek who’s used to lots of arcane workarounds to accomplish simple goals. But… for my wife or others who don’t want the hassle, this is basically annoying.

Upgrades and Offline Photos

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:01:40 +0000

I’m working on some updates to my personal blog which have more or less taken photos down for a while.

Hopefully, all will be well again soon.

Fight Back! (When VPN Clients Mis-Behave)

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:20:19 +0000

I have to use VPNs at work. Specifically, to access my production webservers (etc), I have to use a Cisco VPN client. Sadly, the VPN concentrator overrides my choice of allowing local LAN access. So, when I am on the VPN, I have my DNS options changed so I can’t use any local servers. This is a serious, serious pain. So painful in fact, that many times instead of fight with it, I simply would run a Windows session in VMware (on my Mac) and connect the VPN there. This has drawbacks too, but it’s better than not having local network access.

Beating the Cisco VPN Client Error 51 On Leopard

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:10:01 +0000

I had this error popup today on my Mac OS X Lepopard 10.5.4 machine.

This is not cool as, well, I NEED MY VPN TO WORK!

Thankfully google came to my rescue. The solution is to execute the following in Terminal:

sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart

Thanks for the answer, VirtuallyShocking.com.

Good Post on Using Ant for Solid Build Process

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:35:30 +0000

I use Ant for my Java projects. It’s a great and powerfule build too. However, there’s always more than can be done to improve the quality of the build process.

I found this nice article that gives some good examples of a complete build process with Ant: dev, test, prod, etc.

I Downloaded Firefox 3

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 02:28:21 +0000

As I mentioned recently, I’ve been using pre-release versions of Firefox 3 for a while now. I’ve been happy, but today is great because FF3 was officially released!

They are trying to set the record for most downloads in a day, so go get it!

Firefox 3 rc2 Is Out!

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:41:01 +0000

Since moving to the Mac, I’ve tried to use Safari almost exclusively. I definitely like it, and it’s got some great tools, but I usually found myself running back to Firefox 2 whenever I had to really do work on a website because I really like some the power Firefox extensions give me. A couple of the things NOT too like about Firefox 2 was the heavy memory usage, the crashing, and the lack of native Mac OS X widgets.

Plainview: presentations ala web

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 09:18:11 +0000

I just stumbled onto the coolest little app for Mac. Plainview is a web browser based on WebKit (also the guts of the Safari browser). What’s unique is it’s intended to NOT have chrome (the name for all tose fancy navigation bars, address text boxes, menus etc). It’s slim… so slim the chrome is non-existent. This is a full-screen mode web browser, intended to utilize the full screen real estate for presentations! Essentially, instead of having to take screenshots of websites and put them into power point or something, you can just demo the site. It’s awesome… and i’m not even explaining it as well as they did… but I am tired. 🙂

Investigating OpenID

Tue, 27 May 2008 15:02:43 +0000

Aaron (one of my co-workers), recently posted a link about OpenID. I’ve given OpenID only cursory glances over the last year, but the Coding Horror link in Aaron’s post had a comment to this Google Video where Simon Willison gives a Google Tech Talk on The Implications of OpenID. The video is nearly a year old, but to date, it’s done more to convince me to get on the OpenID bandwagon than anything else.

Using Microsoft Entourage on my Mac

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 11:01:30 +0000

I’m not really a Microsoft fan, nor do I consider myself a Microsoft hater. I generally like Linux and free Open Source software, and as a network and software engineer type I really like the power and flexibility of Unix-like operating systems. I made the switch to Mac because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and if I would benefit from a “Unix like system that just works.” Though there were a few bumps in the road, I’m pretty happy overall. Sometime maybe I’ll post about my Mac experience and thoughts in a broader sense.

Logins with mod_rewrite + Cookies + JavaScript

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 03:05:32 +0000

I recently had an odd situation come up, though it’s not incredibly hard to imagine. I needed to create a staging web server, identical to production, but it should live on a different hostname (eg, staging.sherman.bz, instead of www.sherman.bz). The content should not accessible to the public, nor to search engines. This isn’t really so much a privacy or security issue as it is a convenience and customer service issue. If search engines somehow picked up on our staging site (and they would, given it’s full of SEO triggering info, google analytics scripts and the like) then our search information could become poisoned with the staging URL. Also bad would be if a customer found the staging site and posted information to the wrong place. I’ve actually seen both of these happen in the past when measures were not in place to prevent it.

Updates to WPG2, and others

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 18:27:46 +0000

I keep the WordPress code on this site up to date with security and bugfix updates as they come out. Same for Gallery and the plugins. But today I saw that the WPG2 plugin had been updated from version 2.x to 3.0. This plugin integrates my gallery with my wordpress blog. In the old version, I had to hack up my theme and add custom widgets in order to display random image widgets and get a “Photo Gallery” tab to show up in my page list by the header of the page. Now the plugin does all of that automatically and more! It’s cool, because I can switch themes much more easily now, without all the custom stuff. Hurray for improvement!

Advertising Linux Services via Avahi/Bonjour

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 22:20:42 +0000

Update: most of this information is still correct but an update for combining service definitions into one file and setting an icon is available here: bonjour-avahi-addendum

In my last post I outlined how I followed others’ directions to enable netatalk on Linux and Time Machine backups to a shared AFP folder. Originally, I also described how to put all your shares on netatalk. I suppose if only have Mac clients or you REALLY want to use AFP, you can do so. As I worked with files over AFP shares, I started noticing that the performance seemed to be quite bad. No, I didn’t benchmark, but copying large video files to a shared folder over my gigabit network was substantially slower over AFP (netatalk) than over CIFS/SMB (samba). I use my network shares pretty heavily, so this was a concern. Also, netatalk tries very hard to replicate an HFS filesystem complete with resource fork support. This means that your shared directories end up with lots of extra folders named “.AppleDouble”(and a few others) containing Mac specific info. (Note: even on CIFS you’ll get the “.AppleDB” folders unless you disable a setting in Finder. I can deal with .AppleDB better than .AppleDouble AND .AppleDB) So, because of these two issues I decided to try using CIFS and samba again.

Time Machine backup to Linux via Netatalk

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 07:26:49 +0000

So, when I got the upgrade from Tiger to Leopard on my MacBook Pro, I was looking for a good backup solution. I’ve used rsync in the past, but when I saw that Apple had a new Time Machine backup tool, I was curious to give it a shot. The catch is you basically needed an external USB or Firewire drive, until they recently came out with the Time Capsule. Anyway, tonight I got the itch to really see if I could make Time Machine work without buying extra hardware. I mean, seriously, I’ve got a good hunk of mirrored disk sitting on my home server; that seems like a good place to do backups.

Some googling found me this link to a blogger who’d done it!

I’ll make my own version of this post, since I had a few differences from the original I where I found the info.

Safari Session Save & Restore with ForgetMeNot

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 14:46:12 +0000

My foray into the Mac OS X world is fraught with daily challenges as I try to learn my way around this new environment.

Firefox has long been my browser of choice on Windows and Linux. So now, I’ve used it on Mac, and while I still like it, I’ve felt the urge to try out “Mac native” apps such as the bundled Safari web browser. For the most part, switching to Safari meant learning new keyboard shortcuts, but one thing that was really killing me is that if I closed Safari or it crashed, I lost all my tabs. I am a pretty heavy user of the auto session save in Firefox.

Fixing Binary File Corruption from Ant Copies

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 02:44:09 +0000

So there I was, poking around in some java / j2ee code, trying to learn how it all works. I did some testing on a Linux server and realized, something is broken. It seemed something was corrupting ALL the Jar files in WEB-INF/lib/.

A co-worker guessed that the token filtering Ant was doing might be the culprit. He was right. It seems Ant has issues with detecting whether files are binary or not, given that it uses a Reader class which runs the files through a character decoder. This is specifically a problem on Unix systems since they commonly use UTF8 character set, and in that case Ant hasn’t a clue if its looking at UTF8 text or binary data.

Tabbing to HTML Form Elements in Mac Web Browsers

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 20:33:18 +0000

So, I’m a MacOS newbie, just switched over from Windoze / Linux. I figured, it’s cool, things “just work”, and it’s got a Un*x/BSD core. What else is there? Hehe, the interface has definitely been a challenge.

So, the first huge problem that drove me nutz was that in Firefox, I couldn’t tab to checkboxes, some buttons, multi-select boxes, etc. I asked around, but found others with the same problem.

Network Directory Services

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 21:00:41 +0000

Network directory services are core to Internet functionality. The Domain Name System (DNS) provides a global (and/or local) directory of hosts and services. Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) servers can provide some of the same information as DNS (or be used to back DNS), but are more frequently used to create network user databases, store user group information, providing centralized account information and password storage.

I recently completed an upgrade of these two core services on a network I manage. We had been running outdated (but functional) BIND v8 and OpenLDAP v2.0 instances for of DNS and LDAP servers. Also, throw a Windows Server 2003 into the mix, which, as an Active Directory domain controller has to run its own DNS and LDAP (AD is tweaked LDAP) servers.

EasyVMX: Easily Create VMware Player Machines

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 15:39:31 +0000

I’ve used this before, but today I was struck by how useful EasyVMX really is! I’m setting up a new PXELINUX / TFTP server (which will incidentally be running the PXE Knife tools put together by my friends John and Brian.

Anyway, EasyVMX provides a form (easy, super simple and 2.0 with advanced options) to generate a VMX config file (which VMware uses) to run a virtual machine. All you have to do is choose a few basic options about what you need on your machine, how much RAM, how big your disk needs to be, etc; click ‘Create’; and download your zip file. Simpl, easy, and I’ve got a VMware virtual machine that I can run in the free, VMware player.

WordPress Blog Goes Live for All of Holyarmy.org

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 02:50:28 +0000

I’ve decided to finally put this blog site out for public viewing. Never before has my blog been the base from which all of sherman.bz extends, so this is micro-monumentous.

I have kept the links that were on the former front page in the “Stuff @ Holyarmy.org” link section, but there was not much more to keep.

Granted I’ve ‘officially published’ the site, but I still expect to make substantial changes. I hope to improve the site graphics, photo gallery, and already existing content. Despite wanting to make changes, I felt I might as well get it out here and start using it. Enjoy!

Re-Conversion to WordPress

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 06:36:46 +0000

After much non-use and non-posting, I have been working to get this blog functional again. Spending a year in Iraq didn’t do a lot of good for my website maintenance, so that has contributed a bit to my delay.

Having come home with a clear mind, it now seems that Geeklog is a bit of overkill for my personal needs. Also, basic theme modifications require more mucking about the PHP source code then I care to do. So, I checked out WordPress and it did what I needed. I also found a handy database importer to pull my content out of Geeklog and into WordPress.

New Theme and Minor Upgrades

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 08:30:00 +0000

I stumbled across this theme oh… several hours ago and was quite taken with it. It’s pretty clean, it’s pretty simple, and it’s GREEN! How fitting. 🙂

So, “Commando” is the new default theme for my site.

Finally, more photos were added today! Quite a few. And Steph should be adding more. (Note: many of the new photos will be private access only)

Photos Online

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 01:50:00 +0000

The Photo Gallery is coming along nicely. I’ve been working on adding in my old photos from the previous photo album software I’d written myself. I’ve also added in several photos and albums that are completely new.

Everyone seems to want me to put up wedding photos. 🙂 Well don’t worry, they are coming… in time.

Old System 2 Geeklog

Tue, 09 Nov 2004 19:21:00 +0000

Huzzah! Again!

After working with WordPress for a while, it was nice, but it didn’t quite cover some of my needs out of the box. Then I discovered Gallery and set it up for my brother-in-law. I was hooked. I needed a blogging system that would let me use Gallery, too.

Enter Geeklog!

This software is great! It’s got all the user features I was looking for, it integrates with Gallery, it was easy to import my existing blog data to, AND, it has features and plugins I can add in to make my site much fancier, should I ever want them in the future.

Old System 2 WordPress Conversion

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 06:06:00 +0000

Hurrah! I’ve actually made headway on converting my blog!

I’ve converted all my core content from the old database to the new wordpress format. However, I still need to to do a bit of cleanup on it, tweak some things here and there. I need to get my quotes working, some clever hack should make that work, and if I’ve seen anything, it’s that lots of people hack wordpress. 🙂 I’m also looking into getting a much nicer theme for the site, but that will come in due time. right now I’m more concerned about data integrity.

Photos Temporarily Offline

Mon, 27 Sep 2004 13:39:00 +0000

As I’m in the middle of (slowly) moving my site over to ~~WordPress~~ Geeklog. It seems that my photos will have to be offline for a while.

Content Change

Fri, 15 Aug 2003 13:38:18 +0000

Due to personal and professional considerations, the journal content of this blogsite has been removed.

I will make a substantial effort to focus on updating the topical content, and I intend to add technical topics for java and compters, etc.

Postings similar to the journal content will continue on private mailing lists. Please contact me via email should you wish to be added to such a mailing list.

Update, Oct 4, 2003: My apoligies for not updating this like I said I would. Getting a new job, moving, going to school for the Army, settling into new apartment, settling into new job, and finding time for life have taken more time than anticipated. Will post an update soon, I hope.

Migration Fixes

Mon, 11 Aug 2003 06:27:26 +0000

Admin Pages:
- converted to pure PHP4, _SERVER[var, _POST[var], and _GET[var] references
- Main Pages:
  - removed referer display code until I can get it fixed

code cleanup

Thu, 07 Aug 2003 13:17:30 +0000

Main Pages:
- consolidated and cleaned up code; less redundant code is good
  - added HTTP referer display code
    - resized big photos for consistency and space saving
      - renamed templates from *.ihtml to *.html
        
        fixed a bug in “content_individual.html” blog template

Visible Links

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 03:45:53 +0000

Database:
- added “visible” column for link table
- Admin Pages:
  - added “visible” check box to editlink and addlink pages
  - Main Pages:
    - made non-visible links not show up in link displays

Cool Upgrades

Thu, 31 Jul 2003 07:19:36 +0000

Database:
- added table for counting clikthrus out of site
  - added table for counting HTTP_REFERRERs into the site
  - Libraries:
    - renamed hit_tracking.php to stats_tracking.php
      - add clikThruCount() method
        
        added redirect script for counting clikthrus
        
        modified Counter() method to track HTTP_REFERRERs
        
        Main Pages:
        
        added search capability
        
        renamed “home” topic to “blather”…. since it’s kindof the catch all blog topic

Tuesday Modifications

Tue, 29 Jul 2003 21:48:39 +0000

Database:
- wrote a script to strip the slashes out of my database. slashes were icky.
  - cleaned all code of unneccesary slash stripping.
  - Admin Tools:
    - made main admin page reflect topics for news entries
      - news edit and adding uses topics for ease of navigation
      - Main Pages:
        
        added “next/prev” navigation for individual viewing of entries.
        
        changed layout of “next/prev” on multi-view(default view)
        
        display time zone

Original System Notes

Tue, 29 Jul 2003 20:41:04 +0000

I originally wrote this website software to run on a crappy HP-UX box that only had PHP ver. 3.0.8 or something. It was horribly outdated for its time even. That was September 25, 2001. Nearly 2 years ago. Anyway… I started first by trying to implement the database with DBM. DBM sucks. I didn’t try that for long at all. After that I decided to just use flat text files with custom delimiters and a small API for accessing and updating the data in those files. That’s probably why I didn’t spend a lot of time writing admin pages at the time; the parsing of all that text got ugly fast.

updates to the custom PHP codebase

Fri, 25 Jul 2003 19:48:01 +0000

This week I’ve made several major and minor changes to the website code. I’ll start keeping track of what I do here. It’s high time I know what I do when with this site. 🙂

Database:
- Added hit counter tables
  - Added an order column for topics
    - Added link table
      - changed date fields in links and quotes to datetime fields
      - Libraries:
        
        Added Date_Calc class library for better handling of dates and formatting of dates. (File: Calc.php)
        
        Used in new code, haven’t yet retrofitted old code to use.
        
        Added Counter function for tracking visits to each page and direct visits to articles. (File: hit_counter.php)
        
        Added my_escape_SQL_single_quote function for cleaner data in database.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

What is holyarmy.org? In short, it is a vanity domain. It exists for little more reason than to provide me a place to put stuff online, put friend’s and family’s stuff online, provide a consistent e-mail address for friends and family, etc.

Who is behind this site? This site is run by Benjamin Sherman (me). I am a:

Jesus follower
husband
father
guitarist (4 & 6 string)
software developer
soldier (former)
gamer
fun loving geek

Why? Why not?