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Best way to setup a VirtualBox to avoid system crashes on a reboot

Broken Hard Drive reminds of of Broken Eggs

We now use permanent VirtualBox OSes to run part of our infrastructure.

We ran in all sorts of issues with those, but one thing for sure is that you do not want your OS hard drive to fill up because a (re)boot may not be possible after that. This is because the drive is likely to go bust if completely full.

You should, of course, have tools to let you know how filled up your hard drive is to make sure to catch such issues early. In our case, we had a Jira instance that filled up the drive mainly because we made one backup of the database per day. One day, one of those backup ended that ...

Basic Website Development Tools Every Blockchain Developer Needs

Developers can choose from many advanced software applications in today’s environment of intensive research on potential uses for blockchain technology. Web development tools include Ethereum DApps Development where researchers and developers strive to build decentralized apps and smart contracts. Smart contracts have the built-in ability to adjust based on changes to key terms and to monitor compliance with the terms of the contract.

Blockchain development tools help to facilitate software development. If a developer is new to blockchain or lacks experience, he or she should become ...

Docker, an advanced chroot utility

Chasm—just like a Docker creates a chasm between two sets of software

SECURITY WARNING

Before installing Docker and containers with services on your Linux system, make sure to read and understand the risks as mentioned on this Docker and iptables page. Especially, Docker will make all your containers visible to the entire world through your Internet connection. This is great if you want to indeed share that service with the rest of the world, it's very dangerous if you are working on that container service since it could have security issues that need patching and such. Docker documents a way to prevent that behavior by adding the following rule to your firewall:

iptables -I DOCKER-USER -i eth0 ! -s 192.168.1.0/24 -j DROP

This means that unless the IP address matches 192.168.1.0/24, the access is refused. The `eth0` interface name should be replaced with the interface name you use as the external ethernet connection. During development, you should always have such a rule.

That has not worked at all for me because my local network includes many other computers on my LAN and this rule blocks them all. So really not a useful idea.

Instead, I created my own entries based on some other characteristics. That includes the following lines in my firewall file:

*filter
:DOCKER-USER - [0:0]

-A DOCKER-USER -j early_forward
-A DOCKER-USER -i eno1 -p tcp -m conntrack --ctorigdstport 80 --ctdir ORIGINAL -j DROP
-A DOCKER-USER -i eno1 -p tcp -m conntrack --ctorigdstport 8080 --ctdir ORIGINAL -j DROP
-A DOCKER-USER -i eno1 -p tcp -m conntrack --ctorigdstport 8081 --ctdir ORIGINAL -j DROP

My early_forward allows my LAN to continue to work. These are my firewall rules that allow my LAN computers to have their traffic forwarded as expected.

Then I have three rules that block port 80, 8080, and 8081 from Docker.

Docker will add new rules that will appear after (albeit not within the DOCKER-USER list) and will open ports for whatever necessary service you install in your Dockers.

Note that the only ports you have to block are ports that Docker will share and that you have otherwise open on your main server. If Docker opens port 5000 and your firewall does not allow connections to port 5000 from the outside, then you're already safe. On my end I have Apache running so as a result I block quite usual HTTP ports from Docker.

Docker

As we are helping various customers, we encounter new technologies.

In the old days, we used chroot to create a separate environment where you could have your own installation and prevent the software from within that environment access to everything on your computer. This is particularly useful for publicly facing services liek Apache, Bind, etc.

Deleting a (Duplicate) Retweet from your Twitter Feed

Double Retweeting and How to Avoid Over-Duplication

I have seen many people retweeting like crazy and I've noticed that once in a while these people have been retweeting the exact same tweet more than once.

I'm pretty sure that in most cases these people ignore the fact. Personally I find their twitter feed annoying because of that. Retweeting is totally okay, it's sharing what others have tweeted and there is nothing wrong with it. However, seeing the exact same tweet 2, 3, 4, or even 5 times pretty much in a row is rather bad taste. I understand that this very tweet is super ...

PHP e-Fax requires valid SSL certificates (failed with code 1)

As e-Fax is updating their systems further to be compliant with various security systems, some new problems may arise on your servers.

The main one is an SSL error that is quite unclear.

Warning: stream_socket_client(): SSL operation failed with code 1. OpenSSL Error messages: error:14090086:SSL routines:ssl3_get_server_certificate:certificate verify failed in /path-to-php-efax/http_request.php on line 294

As we can see, the error mentions a server certificate function and says it could not verify a certificate.

If your server is not 100% up to date with newest SSL versions or your web ...

Bad Google Indexing "Secure" Pages...

About a week ago I got a customer who started having their website appear in Google with HTTPS (the secure version of the site.) The pages are served securily, but it uses our website certificate so you get a big bad error saying that everything is broken and if you proceed you'll know what hell is like.

"This Connection is Untrusted" by FireFoxThe fact is that this customer never had a secure certificate. In other words, there is no reason for the site to have been referenced with HTTPS unless someone typed a link to their site and inadvertendly entered https://... instead of http://...

I checked a few of the pages where there ...

Simplemenu Settings

Menu Settings

Menu

Select the menu to be displayed as the Simplemenu. By default, we display the Navigation Menu which makes the most sense for administrator (as the Simplemenu was primarily created for administrators wanting to quickly go to all administration pages.)

Theme

Select a theme to display your Simplemenu items and dropdowns. The default is called original.

The themes reside in the module sub-folder named themes. Each theme is defined in a specific directory named after the theme. That name is what appears in the dropdown in the settings.

It is possible to add new themes as

Simplemenu Upgrade Path

Version 7.x

Version 7.x-1.x-dev is a starting point... It is not complete, although it shows you a functional Management menu as a dropdown. More to come as time allows... See issue [#791664] for more info.

Version 6.x

Version 6.x-1.13 fixes the vertical menu problem which had to do with CSS caching getting lost.

Version 6.x-1.10 to 6.x-1.12 fixes the non-called theme() function versus the other sub-modules that have callbacks through the theme() calls. However, we really need to have callbacks instead. Added horizontal and vertical themes. Attempts to fix to the vertical menu problem

Protected Node Password Field set

Once installed and properly configured, the Protected node module adds a field set in the node edit form (assuming the user has the corresponding permission: "edit any password" or "edit password <node type>".)

Password field set sample.This field set includes two flags, a password, and emails (optional.)

By default, the field set is closed unless you selected protected by default. Whether the field set should be opened or closed can selected in the node type settings.

The <node type> is protected

The first check box is used to password

Drupal Aggregator

The default Aggregator Drupal module does not work very well. There are several problems with the Drupal Core module, one of which we have not fixed in our version (i.e. the flatness of the item table.)

There is a list of the known issues and our comments and whether we fixed the problem:

Problem Solution in m2osw's version of Aggregator
Missing XML marker The <?xml ... ?> marker is missing from some RSS feeds, add it as required
Spurious data Some RSS feeds add spurious data ...