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So You Start netplan Configuration for Additional IP’s

  • byJordan
  • June 11, 2020
  • 1 minute read

This took way too long to figure out and it’s my own fault as I do have a good understanding of networking.

When you order additional IP’s from So You Start, you’re usually giving IP’s in a different range the main IP address of your server. This might confuse some because of how traditional networking states you have to be in the same subnet as your gateway.

This causes problems for deploying virtual machines when using Xen and Ubuntu 18 as it has moved over to netplan. The problem lies in the fact you shouldn’t be able to reach your gateway out of your subnet.

So you have to do the following so that netplan is able to understand how to add the gateway properly.

Go

Here’s the wonderful thread it came from

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1062406/ubuntu-18-04-server-vps-on-failover-ip-ovh

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Xen Ubuntu 18 Guest Creation Using xen-create-image (bionic template and netplan fix included)

  • byJordan
  • June 11, 2020
  • 1 minute read

So I was having issues with deploying Ubuntu 18 guests on a Xen hypervisor. It originally started with a template for bionic not existing.

This is easily fixed with a couple of commands to copy the karmic.d template to bionic.d template.

However, once your host boots up. You’re now faced with a network issue as Ubuntu 18 added netplan as the default network manager.

This is fixed by replacing the /usr/share/xen-tools/40-setup-networking file with a new xen-tools 4.8 release.

Here is the github comment.

Plain Text

You can simply do the above to fix your issue, or install the latest 4.8 xen-tools at https://github.com/xen-tools/xen-tools/releases

Or you could just grab the 4.8 ubuntu package from eoan Ubuntu 19.10 at http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/x/xen-tools/xen-tools_4.8-1_all.deb

GGuide

Clearing DNS Service Cache on Synology NAS

  • byJordan
  • March 23, 2020
  • 1 minute read

If you’re using the Synology DNS server for your local clients or services on the Synology NAS, then you might need to clear it’s cache.

It’s really simple, and after googling I couldn’t find a straight answer. So I did some digging and found this was the appropriate way to clear the DNS Service Cache on a DSM6.x

  1. Login via SSH as root
  2. Run “/var/packages/DNSServer/target/script/flushcache.sh”
UUncategorized

ProxMox CIFS Share error “failed: error with cfs lock ‘file-storage_cfg'”

  • byJordan
  • February 11, 2020
  • 1 minute read

You may have encountered the following error message when trying to mount a CIFS share from the web interface of your Proxmox server. If you run the following command below via SSH, you will get a little more detail. 

❯ pvesm add cifs pooter-linux-isos --server 192.168.2.9 --share linux-isos --username proxmox --password
Enter Password: *********
mount error(95): Operation not supported
create storage failed: error with cfs lock 'file-storage_cfg': mount error: Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs)

The issue is solved by running the command with –smbversion 2.0 or 2.1 or 3.0 as per this forum topic. For my Synology it was –smbversion 2.0 that worked.

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/cifs-issue-error-with-cfs-lock-file-storage_cfg-working-now-but-shows-question-mark.45962/

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Upgrading WordPress 3.2.1

  • byJordan
  • November 16, 2019
  • 2 minute read

So this is the journey to update WordPress 3.2.1 to 5.3

I’ve taken a copy of the site and set it up on a temporary URL and set the following within wp-config.php

define('WP_HOME','http://test.site.com');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://test.site.com');

I’ve also had to drop the PHP version to 5.6 to be able to run the site.

Step 1 – Getting to a wp-cli capable version 3.2.1 to 3.7

So I’d like to use wp-cli, and increment the installation a bit in the 3.x branch just to see how well it goes.

Grab wp-cli version 1.3.0 at https://github.com/wp-cli/wp-cli/releases/download/v1.3.0/wp-cli-1.3.0.phar

There is no available download on wordpress.org for 3.7, at least one that isn’t listed. So if you simply grab a download link for any older version from their release page you can change the version number in the file name.

Here’s WordPress 3.7 zip installer https://wordpress.org/wordpress-3.7.zip

Upgrade WordPress Manually using these instructions https://wordpress.org/support/article/updating-wordpress/#manual-update

Since I have SSH access I’m going to do it the following way. The below commands assume public_html is your directory root where your WordPress installation sits.

wget https://wordpress.org/wordpress-3.7.zip
mv public_html to public_html.old
unzip wordress-3.7.zip -d public_html
rm -rf public_html/wp-content
cp public_html.old/wp-config.php public_html
cp public_html.old/wp-content public_html

Go to your sites /wp-admin page and update the database.

Step 2 – Upgrade 3.7 to 4.0 because why not?

So I just choose 4.0 because it seems far enough ahead but not too far.

I’m going to first test my custom wp-cli and see if I can upgrade to 3.7.31

php5.6 /usr/local/bin/wp-cli-1.3.0.phar --allow-root core update --version=3.7.31
Updating to version 3.7.31 (en_US)...
Downloading update from https://wordpress.org/wordpress-3.7.31.zip...
Unpacking the update...
Cleaning up files...
No files found that need cleaned up.
Success: WordPress updated successfully.

Success, so now let’s bump the version up to 4.0

php5.6 /usr/local/bin/wp-cli-1.3.0.phar --allow-root core update --version=4.0
Updating to version 4.0 (en_US)…
Downloading update from https://wordpress.org/wordpress-4.0.zip…
Unpacking the update…
Cleaning up files…
No files found that need cleaned up.
Success: WordPress updated successfully.

You’ll need to login to your sites /wp-admin and run the database updates if there are any.

You’ll also want to confirm that your site is still displaying properly. You might find that your theme isn’t supported by WordPress 4.0

You might also need to upgrade PHP at some point, however WordPress supports 5.6 all the way up to WordPress 5.3

Step 3 – Upgrade to 5.3! Let’s do it!

So I don’t really need to use the old wp-cli v1.3.0 and can use the latest version since we got up to WordPress 4.0

wp --allow-root core update
Updating to version 5.3 (en_US)...
Downloading update from https://downloads.wordpress.org/release/wordpress-5.3-new-bundled.zip...
Unpacking the update...
Cleaning up files...
No files found that need cleaning up.
Success: WordPress updated successfully.

Luckily for me, there were no issues!

UUncategorized

Deploying Ubuntu 18 Guest on Ubuntu 18 Host DomU

  • byJordan
  • November 14, 2019
  • 2 minute read

TLDR; Head to the bottom and you can update the shipped version of xen-tools 4.7 to 4.8 via the xen-tools GitHub repo. There’s a dpkg available under the releases tab.

Currently, the only available version of Ubuntu available to deploy using xen-create-image (xen-tools 4.7-1) on Ubuntu 18 is Ubuntu 16.04 (Zenial)

If you want to deploy Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic) an error will occur using the following command

xen-create-image --hostname=server1 --vcpus=2 --size=150Gb --swap=2Gb --memory=8GB --arch=amd64 --ip=192.168.1.2 --pygrub --dist=bionic --gateway=192.168.1.1 --netmask=255.255.255.0 --lvm=vg0

You will get the following error

ERROR: 'bionic' argument takes a distribution name (see /usr/share/xen-tools for valid values).

You’ll need to edit /etc/xen-tools/distributions.conf and add in the following line under zesty

bionic        = ubuntu     pygrub

You will then also need to run the following to link the xen-tools hook directory for karmic to bionic. Reality ist hat karmic.d has nothing for the hooks, and we should really be creating the appropriate hooks to enable networking and etc. Here’s the xen FAQ that has more details http://xen-tools.org/software/xen-tools/faq.html

cd /usr/share/xen-tools
ln -vis karmic.d bionic.d

You should then be able to run your xen-create-image without issues. However, you’ll run into a new problem…networking.

So Ubuntu 18 shipped with xen-tools that didn’t have support for Ubuntu 18, and so there are no hooks for setting up networking. However, there is a thread on how to do all of this.

https://github.com/xen-tools/xen-tools/issues/51

It details the method above and has some of the hooks required.

You can also simply just install xen-tools 4.8 release from the xen-tools GitHub repo at https://github.com/xen-tools/xen-tools/releases/tag/release-4.8

wget https://github.com/xen-tools/xen-tools/releases/download/release-4.8/xen-tools_4.8-1_all.deb
dpkg -i xen-tools_4.8-1_all.deb

You should then be able to deploy Ubuntu 18.04 on Ubuntu 18.04 DomU

DDrafts

Windows 10, ZSH, Putty, Powerline Fonts and Screen

  • byJordan
  • August 20, 2019
  • 1 minute read

I recently was setting up my Windows 10 desktop machine with Putty so I could access some servers. I use the ZSH shell with OMZ and the Powerline9k theme. I use the following article to set up Putty and grab the appropriate fonts for Windows 10 that were patched.

http://mschulte.nl/posts/using-powerline-in-PuTTY.html

There were some additional options on the following blog article that were required.

Oh My ZSH! with PuTTY

Everything was working great until I was having issues with powerline font’s not showing correctly when using screen.

Running the powerline echo test below resulted in hashed blocks.

echo “\ue0b0 \u00b1 \ue0a0 \u27a6 \u2718 \u26a1 \u2699”

echo "\ue0b0 \u00b1 \ue0a0 \u27a6 \u2718 \u26a1 \u2699"

Turns out I didn’t have my locale set in my shell environment.

export LANG=”C.UTF-8″

export LANG="C.UTF-8"

Once I had the appropriate locale set, everything worked fine.

DDrafts

WP-CLI Cheat Sheet

  • byJordan
  • August 12, 2019
  • 1 minute read

WooCommerce

wp wc update – Updated WooCommerce database from command line.

LiteSpeed

wp lscache-purge all – Purge all cache.

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Improve WordPress Comments Load time when using Akismet: Adding an index to wp_comments

  • byJordan
  • July 22, 2019
  • 1 minute read

A customer of mine was seeing a 15 second load time on their WordPress site when clicking on “Comments”.

I installed Query Monitor and saw that the Akismet plugin was running the following SQL command on each comment.

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM wp_comments WHERE user_id = 1820 AND comment_approved = 1;

This query was to show how many comments the user had previously had approved. The query was taking 0.5 seconds per comment listed when you visit the “Comments” page. The page was taking around 15 seconds to load at times. Now if you had this page set to load 100 comments per page, then you’re looking at 60 seconds.

I decided to run an explain on the query to figure out what was going on.

explain SELECT COUNT(*) FROM wp_comments WHERE user_id = 778 AND comment_approved = 1;

Which resulted in the following. (Sorry for the screenshot, copy/pasting and reformatting was not something I wanted to do. Also this references the wp_bspr_comments. This is due to the database having a wp_bspr for it’s table prefix.

MySQL Explain on wp_comments query not indexed

As you can see, the query is having to go through 19866 rows within the wp_comments table which is the total amount in the table. Since they’re using count(*) all rows are scanned.

So I decided to add an index for the user_id and comment_approved columns.

create index wp_comments_askismet ON wp_comments (user_id,comment_approved);

No when running an explain, there are only 9 rows scanned.

MySQL Explain on wp_comments with Aksimet after index

Load times were reduced dramatically. However, this can all be mitigated if you simply turn of the Akismet feature.

Akismet option to show number of approved comments beside each comment author.