Glue system/util/thing I love - Pashua - Quick Scripting of Mac dialog windows.

Mac-only: This one has a soft spot in my heart as I used it many years ago for adding a menu and rudimentary password protection to Netboot Deployments. (I could netboot and deploy our custom MacOS9 ASR image in under 10 minutes over 100MBit, if I recall correctly.) To my delight, I discovered it's still being maintained!

Pashua  (https://www.bluem.net/en/projects/pashua/) provides a pretty simple way of scripting dialog boxes, takes input, and send it back. Currently it has bindings for AppleScript, Shell, JavaScript for Automation (JXA), Perl, PHP, Python (even Python3!), Rexx (?!?), Ruby and Tcl.

Brew Cask Updater

Reminder for myself, and because I think it needs more love:

Auto-updater for cask (GUI) apps in mac homebrew.
https://github.com/buo/homebrew-cask-upgrade

Compiling sysbench on WSL and SmartOS

As I noted in https://github.com/akopytov/sysbench/issues/102
SmartOS

( joyent_20161013T025521Z) in a native zone (base-64-lts 16.4.0), required:

#pkgin install automake make gcc libtool gcc49 pkg-config gmake


Windows Subsystem for Linux:

Current Windows 10 Pro (1607, build 14393.693).

Already had GCC installed and who knows what else, needed packages:
apt-get install autoconf libtool pkg-config libmysqlclient-dev

Both of these are using current from a straight "git clone https://github.com/akopytov/sysbench.git",
 version is "sysbench 1.1.0-2343e4b (using bundled LuaJIT 2.1.0-beta2)". I've just tried CPU test as a quick sanity check for now.


So thank you to whoever did the configure/make scripts in such a way as to be more portable. (Probably for supporting Oracle/Solaris back in the day.)

SmartOS native zone rename

SmartOS hostname rename:

(from Bob to Alice)

vmadm get 12345678-e0fa-c099-b6f0-ead8e357826d | grep bob
"alias": "bob",
  "hostname": "bob-server",
vmadm update 12345678-e0fa-c099-b6f0-ead8e357826d hostname=alice-server
vmadm update 12345678-e0fa-c099-b6f0-ead8e357826d alias=alice

To actually rename, within the zone, edit:

/etc/nodename
/etc/hosts
/etc/hostname.[interface]  (e.g. /etc/hostname.net0)

Solaris(h) OS link love

I'm picking my way through the "Solarish" and BSD world, looking for something cleaner than Linux, but with ZFS/DTRACE goodness, and has to support both OS virtualization (probably KVM) and containers. (Docker support is a bonus.) For myself and to bump those google scores up oh-so-slightly so that others might find them:

• 
  
• Nice overview of SmartOS - http://churnd.net/2014/06/29/smartos-homelab-hypervisor-v3/
• 
  
• The best explanation of the SmartOS global zone, and the general design architecture I've found: - https://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/smartos-and-the-global-zone.html  (How come it's not in any of the documentation/intros/wikis?)
• 
  
• OmniOS - looks to be the most straightforward, traditional server-os spin.

Managing Windows Server Core without a domain.

Testing out "Hyper-V Server", which is the free version of Server Core with the Hyper-V role pre-installed.

After re-installing the RSAT package (thanks to the November Win10 update removing/ignoring my previous install), discovered that Server Manager wouldn't play nice: "WinRM Negotiate authentication error". Several forum searches pointed to various bits of Voodoo, but none of them worked. (Were some of them needed or contributed? Who knows...who needs change management on a home server, right? Riiiigggght.

 Finally, found via this post, it's actually in the official documentation:

Set-Item wsman:\localhost\Client\TrustedHosts ServerHostname -Concatenate -Force

(Note this is with 2012R2, I haven't tried with 2016 yet, as the upgrade UI eventually displays a blank screen that is non-responsive.)

BTSync codes

This is more for myself, but folks are welcome to use them if they find it useful. (The more nodes, the faster! Just running on a couple desktops for now, will be adding to home router/server/nas later.) The shared links are, of course, read-only.

I've been using BittorrentSync since it was in 1.x beta, great to keep a collection of files (say, troubleshooting utils, patches, ISO's, whatever) locally accessible at various locations and only updated once.

==

First up is my collection of "Live" window utils - just the things I find myself always wishing for/downloading, or a couple obscure ones. Currently just under 300 megs, it's very nice to have on phone with you. (Provided you keep a USB cable handy!)


Using their kinda-obtuse link system:
https://link.getsync.com/#f=Util_Live&sz=3E8&t=2&s=BZLMIQQGRTZCZHVOUHSR6DWKZQLDLQD3OGCAXHIZU4BNK4W44QLQ&i=CUWN3TKCMKKXNIRCOXHYAFFPE2V4PS5CY&v=2.0


And the QR for phone funsies. (I've put a copy of the code in the folder itself. SyncCeption!)

Deltacopy rsync installer script for Windows.

From the readme:

Rsync is good. BackupPC is good. Rsync on Windows is...not so good. We (small-ish IT department) decided on using the DeltaCopy version of rsync (still using Cygwin) to allow our BackupPC server(s) to backup our windows clients. It's fairly quick'n dirty but works well enough for our purposes.

I've posted it on bitbucket in all it's "glory".  (https://bitbucket.org/TechMonkey/backuppcwinclient) Of course folks are welcome to submit patches, suggest changes and the like, but this is mostly an exercise in version control...

WEI/WinSAT on Windows 10 - D3D score is bogus.

Most of us know the Windows Experience Index was removed from the GUI in Win 8, and many are familiar with calculating/getting the scores from many posts like this one.

 I can rarely remember the steps (I prefer to open admin powershell, then "winsat formal", and then "Get-WmiObject Win32_WinSAT")

Something I noticed according to this Win32_WinSAT class entry:

"After Windows 8.1, WinSAT no longer assess the three-dimensional graphics (gaming) capabilities of the computer and the graphics driver's ability to render objects and execute shaders using this assessment. For compatibility, WinSAT report sentinel values for the metrics and scores, however these are not calculated in real time."

 Indeed, on a decent older-desktop with a Radeon 4670, it returns a 9.9 for D3D:

CPUScore : 5.3
D3DScore : 9.9
DiskScore : 5.9
GraphicsScore : 6.2
MemoryScore : 5.4
TimeTaken : MostRecentAssessment
WinSATAssessmentState : 1
WinSPRLevel : 5.3

Just another tidbit/gotcha to be aware of.

Linksys WRT320/E2000 conversion missing file.

Lots of copies of (apparently) this post, but the download links for the CFE files are borked, as is the CAPTCHA on the comment field.

I found a copy for the 320/2000 CFE at http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=715205, same SHA-1 hash. (db2d4cd117faac4c0a330afa4cdcdb5ad133d82a)

I've made a copy available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8BlCCtbBj6edVhhdnRYbjN4cGM/view

Benign event ID's 120xx on WSUS

WSUS on a Server 2012 R2 CORE, working fine, but event ID's 12052 12042 12022 12032 12012 whenever healthcheck ran.

http://jackstromberg.com/2013/10/windows-update-services-multiple-errors-in-event-viewer-event-id-1205212042-12022-12032-12012-1200213042/ had the answer.

I'm not 100% sure what it does to fix the problem, but re-running "wsusutil.exe usecustomwebsite true" worked for me.