Technology on SANJAY REGMI

Quickly Update Freebsd 15.x and Over and All Jails

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 18:00:31 -0700

Assuming you have:

pkgbase and 15.x FreeBSD server with a bunch of jails
bastille as the jail manager
and that the host and all jails are on pkgbase

here’s a single command to upgrade them all in one shot. What does the command do:

Importing a Large PST file Into Outlook Classic? Note What to Expect

Wed, 27 May 2026 18:45:59 -0700

If you are importing about 25GB of PST file into Outlook Classic, here’s some notes for you¹.

Remember to run scanpst.exe over the exported PST several times before you import. It’s usual for scanpst to take several passes. Go until it finds no problems. This is a good practice to do especially on large PSTs.
Also remember to increase the size of the PST via registry updates to make sure Outlook can handle PSTs of upto 100GB (50GB is the default), if you expect the final size will be bigger than 50GB. Of course, there are risks to using a PST greater than 50GB, be aware of them.
On a 1Gbit line with SSD on the computer, it takes about 30 minutes to fully import the PST locally.
It will then take anywhere from 4 to 16 hours for Outlook to push all the emails into the Cloud. During this time, there might be hours where your inbox in Outlook WILL NOT show the latest emails. It looks like when importing such a large PST (we had about 100k emails in it), the synchronization process is so heavy that even inbox doesn’t show the latest emails. However, the web version and phone app will show those emails. If in doubt, always look at message trace in Office 365 admin portal.
If you have another machine with the same Outlook profile (say a user with two computers, after the machine into which the PST was imported fully syncs up with the cloud, downsyncing the new emails to the other machine is pretty fast. If they have good bandwidth, the downsync will happen within an hour or two.)
It’s always better to do large imports during the evenings because Office 365 might throttle the import during the day.

😨

Disk Full and Crashing: How to Urgently Recover Windows Disk Space

Wed, 13 May 2026 18:48:14 -0700

Sometimes, you come across Windows machines that are crashing because they’ve run out of disk space. And even after you do the regular cleanup, it either fills up quickly or you need more space. Here’s something to add to your arsenal.

List of Fake Scams and Pop Ups

Mon, 11 May 2026 17:49:36 -0700

This will be a compilation of windows scams. You can just copy paste the screenshots into an LLM to figure how to resolve them.

1
#

This screams at you to call the number shown in a loop. Appears inside the browser.

Instructions to Allow Ninjaone Access to Macs Upon Installation

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:01:41 -0700

It’s a straightforward installation of NinjaOne¹ on a Windows box. On a Mac though, there are three permissions to enable. Here’s the permissions and the steps you can use to tell your client to follow so you get full access.²

Thunderbird Fails to Send Emails When Setup With Office365

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 11:28:16 -0700

Now with OAuth2, you can quickly set up Thunderbird email client to use with Office 365. This comes in handy if you use the Microsoft Office Basic plan that comes without installed applications. There’s a caveat though. When you try to send an email, Thunderbird comes back with an error saying it cannot connect. There’s a lot of stuff written on the intertubes about how to solve them and much of it is outdated. The simplest solution is as follows:

Properly Setup Outlook With Email Hosted on Networksolutions.com

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:12:22 -0700

When you set up your email hosted on networksolutions.com, here are the instructions to configure Outlook (Classic).

Open Outlook –> File –> Add account.
Input your emal address and let Outlook handle it. If you’re lucky, you’ll be set up and asked to enter password. If not, go back, start again and the screen where you need to enter the email address, click “Advanced options”, enable “Let me set up my account manually”. It might take few seconds, wait.
In the next screen, select IMAP and fill in as following:

Server: imap.powweb.com
Port: 993
Encryption Method: Leave it at None. This is the critical step. Changing it to SSL/TLS will not work!
Leave the Require logon using Secure Password Authentication.
Under Outgoing mail,
Server: smtp.powweb.com
Port: 465

Hit next, enter password and you’re set.¹

🌄

Close to 50 GB in Outlook and considering Email Archiving? Read before you turn it on

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:11:20 -0700

If your Office 365 mailbox is getting close to 50 GB and you’re considering enabling archive mailbox, read on.

When you turn on archiving, technically called “In-Place Archiving,” it creates another mailbox in the user’s Outlook with its own calendar. And the most commonly cited assistance page does not really tell you about the split unless you thoroughly read it and click on the section entitled “Instructions for end users” towards to end.
To make matters worse, all emails and calendar items that are older than two years are automatically moved from the main mailbox into the online archive mailbox. Yes, two years is the default. There’s no alert during the enablement, either. Why they thought two years is enough as default is beyond me.
If you realize you made a mistake, there is no revert button or a straightforward process to undo it. Pretty unbelievable.
And even if you change the archiving duration to, say, 5 years or 7 years, it will not revert any of the changes. It applies to all calendar items and emails from the point archiving was turned on.
Users who are used to checking their calendars and emails on their phones now have to take the extra step of looking at what is effectively another mailbox. And sometimes, the Outlook mobile app does not even show the online archive at all. (I hear the feature to show online archive was added only last year.)

So now, you have a split mailbox, with emails and calendars in two different places and no quick way of going back. But you can go back. The following is a somewhat manual process, but it will work.

What to do When You Cannot Find 'Microsoft Print to PDF' Option When Trying to Print to PDF

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:21:22 -0700

Sometimes you’ll come across Windows 11 computers that do not have the very handy “Microsoft Print to PDF” option in the list of printers to select. This option is very handy to save files as PDF and to split big PPDF by individual pages. Here are the steps you could try to get that option back and working.¹²

Two Quick Steps to Upgrade Windows Home to Windows Pro with a cheap license

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 13:23:29 -0700

last updated 7 Aug 2026

Step 1: Purchase a low cost Windows license from here.. Apparently, the ‘Retail’ key is more reliable than the ‘OEM’ version of the key.

Step 2: On the machine to be upgraded, start Command Prompt with admin privileges. Run this: changepk.exe /productkey VK7JG-NPHTM-C97JM-9MPGT-3V66T. This will require you to reboot the machine and install the files necessary to get you into Professional license. If you are not going to buy a license and are okay without activation, you can use it. But if you bought a license go to the next step.

Fix Upgrade Issues After Using Pkgbase on FreeBSD 15.x

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 22:21:41 -0800

I recently upgraded my nas from 14.x to 15-RELEASE and then converted to pkgbase because I just loved the idea of being able to do pkg update and pkg upgrade for all upgrades moving forward. After the upgrade, the version I was on was 15.RELEASE-p1. After about a month or so, when I noticed p2 was out, I ran pkg update and pkg upgrade, it still kept me at p1. Investigating, I figured when I ran the lua based script to upgrade to pkgbase, it didn’t (or I forgot) to say yes for FreeBSD base repository. If you’re like me, here’s the instructions to fix it quickly.

Fastest Way to Copy Ext4 Formatted Data to FreeBSD Using WSL2 as an Intermediary

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 17:56:52 -0800

I run immich on a very old dell laptop with 100mbps ethernet with USB connected disks for data. The disks are formatted ext4 and the dell runs fedora. (Immich doesn’t run on FreeBSD yet. :( ). When the disk was full, I wanted to use my FreeBSD server as the data drive over NFS. And retire the USB disks. This required copying about 500GB of data from the USB disk to my FreeBSD server before I could switch over.

How to Get the Best Throughput - Both Upload and Download - From Remote Servers When Connected via Tailscale and Using Pfsense Firewall

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 16:29:04 -0800

If you’ve had a VPS with Hetzner in Europe (very competitive hosting rates) and you’re a Tailscale aficionado you’ve probably used Tailscale and been unhappy with upload/download speeds in kilobytes when connected via Tailscale over SSH. It turns out one reason for the low throughput is that you use pfSense as your firewall, and it can be difficult for Tailscale to punch a hole through pfSense. As a result, it falls back to its DERP servers, which are shared resources for all Tailscale users and often have poor throughput. With that said, here’s a quick change to apply on pfSense to alleviate the problem.

The Easiest and Fail Safe Way to Set Up Scan-to-Email on Your Scanner With Office 365

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 14:28:21 -0800

You just bought a shiny new printer, say an HP, and you want to set up Scan to Email so that when you scan from the multifunction device (printer/scanner), you receive an email with the scanned attachment.

Swap Growing on Your Freebsd Server? Check Your php_fpm Settings - Step 2

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 19:39:00 -0800

After tuning for swap space by reducing MySQL memory usage, the other area to look into would be php_fpm settings.

The settings are located here if you’re using a freebsd jail:

Swap Growing on Your Freebsd Server? Check Your Database Settings - Step 1

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 15:03:24 -0800

On a FreeBSD machine with a bunch of wordpress website jails that work with one database jail, the system might continuously use up swap space if your VM has say 4G or less memory.

Setup Website Monitoring Properly So You Know if Your Database Connection Goes Down

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 00:14:03 -0800

I monitor my websites with UptimeRobot on the free plan. It’s good, the timer checks every five minutes and for most hobby projects, it’s more than enough. The monitor URLs were set up as for example, https://prasna.ca. A few days ago, I realized there was ‘database connection’ error but since I use redis and CloudFlare, simple curl commands give status 200 and we never found out AND UptimeRobot was happy as well so we didn’t know the site was down.

Exploit the benefit of security and stability of FreeBSD by running webservers in jails along with reverse proxy jail, database jail and a redis jail

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 16:07:29 -0800

This holiday season I read up on FreeBSD jails. I’ve always wanted to be able to set up secure and stable websites. And Jails were the answer.

I’ve used Bastille as a jail tool, there are many out there and you can even do it without a tool, the FreeBSD handbook has enough to set them up.

How to Enable Sending Email From Your FreeBSD Machine Using Dragonfly Mail Agent (DMA)

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 19:10:57 -0800

After you’ve set up your FreeBSD box, having the box email you for all sorts of reports, cron updates etc is really useful. You don’t have to login to the machine to see them, you can get them in your email. With DragonFly Mail Agent, the setting of such an email system is quick and easy. Here’s the instructions:

Upgrading Proxmox 8 to 9 on Macbook Pro 2015

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 19:03:56 -0800

I run proxmox 8 on an old 2015 ish Macbook Pro. 16GB memory, silent, 500GB SSD, it’s a good machine. When Proxmox 9 came out, I wanted to upgrade it to 9. Proxmox has an upgrade guide. Followed it, everything went fine. After reboot and upon ssh, I realized, root was mounted read-only.¹

Hard Disk Noise and Seagate IronWolf Pro 12TB

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 15:41:08 -0800

I bought two Seagate IronWolf Pro 12TB hard drives recently for my home NAS. They’re considered great drives for 24/7 operation. I’m using them as mirrored ZFS drives in FreeBSD. One thing that took me by surprise was the noise of the disk! The first time I installed them and I was running them on a desk (yeah, too excited to place them in the case), outside the case, the noise was startling. I thought the disks were bad. I had to repeatedly run smartmontools to check that they were good and that the ZFS pools had no errors. The seeks are pretty loud and unsettling and the writes are noisy as well. Since then, I’ve properly installed them into the case and kept the case about a metre away and I’ve perhaps gotten used to it. I’ll probably move it out but if you have a lot of continuous disk operations during the day at your office, you’d really have to get used to the noise.

Enjoy Fedora Command Line Input (CLI) colors? Apply it quickly to your Ubuntu and Debian machines

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 13:13:59 -0800

I recently installed Fedora and loved the CLI color combinations (vibrant!). I wanted to apply it to Ubuntu and Debian (Proxmox) servers so here are the commands, just copy paste it into your cli.¹:

Turn your Proxmox host into a fully functional Apple Time Machine backup server using Samba + Avahi — compatible with all modern macOS versions

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 12:18:06 -0800

The following are the steps to connect a USB external disk to proxmox host and enable Time machine. The instructions work for macOS 10.13 → 15.7.¹

1. Connect your USB disk and mount it
#

lsblk                     # find your USB disk, e.g. /dev/sdb
fdisk /dev/sdb            # create GPT + one partition (n → enter → enter → w)
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1
mkdir -p /mnt/usb-timemachine
blkid /dev/sdb1           # copy UUID

Edit /etc/fstab:

If You Are Constantly on SSH and Having to Run Long-Running Processes Then Use Tmux

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 21:14:57 -0800

If you’re like me, always running ssh to connect to servers and having to run processes and wanting to know what you ran earlier in one combined session, run tmux. No backgrounding of commands, no using nohup, and even if the ssh session breaks, which most of the time it does if you’re running something that takes a long time, tmux is the best.

Combine Lots of Video Clips Into One Very Quickly

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 21:03:16 -0800

Say you have 30 (or any large number) different clips in a folder that you just want to combine (concatenate) based on the timestamps. You do not want to reencode them, just want to connect/combine them into one as if they were text files. The reason you do not want to re-encode them is that it’ll take a long time to process them and you might lose fidelity of the video if re-encode was not done correctly. The following instructions will just concatenate the files and produce a single file as an output in no time even on old hardware. (Ran this in FreeBSD 14.3 but you should be able to adapt it to a linux box or a Mac with homebrew).

Set Up Your Own Photos Server Instead of Google Photos or Something Else by Using Immich and Tailscale

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 20:40:22 -0800

Last updated: 03 Jan 2026

The solution is a free software called Immich https://immich.app and you can run it at your home (or in a rented server somewhere) on an old machine with some USB drives or set it up on fancy stuff with RAID etc.

Finally You Can Install Latest Versions of Mac OS on Old Hardware

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 19:00:00 -0700

I keep a bunch of old hardware. The oldest one is a Toshiba Dynabook SS 2000 DS80P (circa 2001). But I digress. I also have a 2015 Mac stuck at Monterey. I’m always trying to see if my old machines can be used in any way so they’re relevant still today. While researching recently, I came across something called Opencore Legacy Patcher (OLP) that allows you to install latest Mac OSes on old computers! I was jubiliant.

How to do disk cloning when Clonezilla doesn't list the external source disk

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 12:32:42 -0700

I wanted to clone an external SSD at 256GB (source) with internal NVME 512GB (destination) using clonezilla. (It had freebsd in it). External SSD was connected via usb-c. The machine was a Dell XPS laptop.¹ Each time I ran clonezilla, it wouldn’t show me the external disk. However, lsblk showed it and to make matters worse, if I chose the image to disk option, the external disk would show! I even tried with the latest Clonezilla live cd, “alternative stable - 20250620-plucky” and it had the same issue.

Find DMARC DKIM SPF Nameservers With One Script

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 16:33:52 -0700

If you are setting up Microsoft Office or Google Workspace, you’re constantly having to check DMARC, DKIM and SPF values and then check if the edited values have propagated. Here’s a script that does just that. It even saves main zone records in a new folder with a symlink of the latest output. All output is saved.

Image and Restore Macs Using Clonezilla

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 18:10:53 -0700

If you want to quickly image a Mac’s hard disk (create an exact copy saved as a compressed file) and later restore it, Clonezilla is a simple and reliable choice. This method is especially useful for older Intel-based Macs where internet recovery can be slow or unreliable. Here’s how to do it.

Toshiba Dynabook SS 2000 DS80P/2 – the thinnest laptop before MacBook Air

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 20:44:23 -0800

Back in 2006, when I was trawling the second-hand electronics stores in Akihabara, Tokyo, I found this extremely slim and light Toshiba laptop. I remember asking the owner about it and he said it did not work and did not have an operating system.

Fastest Way to Release your Domain for use with Google Workspace

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 09:20:36 -0700

You bought Google workspace through a reseller (say Wix) but let it expire. Now you want to get a new Google Workspace account directly with Google but when trying to set up, you get an error,

Reuse My Book Live 2012 for Use With DLNA With a Smaller SSD

Thu, 01 May 2025 13:21:52 -0700

We owned a My Book Live, with 1TB HD as a “fancy” NAS Drive probably released around 2012. Because Windows 11 now comes with default SMB 2.0 and upwards, you cannot use it unless you install SMB 1.1 (SMB 1.1 is insecure and old). I had some older 256GB SSDs and I wanted to replace the existing HD with the SSD and use it primarily to stream music from the drive. I also had saved a 3TB image of the firmware a couple years ago. Here’s how I did it.

Checklist for Setup of Google Workspace for Micro Small Business

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 09:20:36 -0700

This is a checklist when you set up Google Workspace Email for your small biz so you cover the basics and fundamental security. The steps are in a chronological order for maximum speed.

Mac Terminal Commands Cheatsheet

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 12:55:31 -0700

Just a cheatsheet for terminal commands on a mac.

Find all updates
softwareupdate -l
Install all updates
softwareupdate -i

👢

How to Remove Folders With Tilde in Windows

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 14:31:26 -0700

If you have folder names in Windows that start with a tilde (~), they cannot be easily copied or deleted or moved. Here’s the trick to remedy the issue.

Run this:

How to Erase Your Macbook M1 Harddisk the Easiest Way

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 15:48:53 -0800

Starting with Macbook M1s, you cannot simply delete partitions in the hard disk. If you are one of those that installs linux and edits partitions, you might get into a stage where you cannot create/edit partitions anymore. Diskutil commands also will not help you. As a last resort, you might want to reset the hard-disk and its not easy as in the old models. To make matters worse, you’re probably in recovery mode.

Acer Machine Bios Update Stops Windows From Booting normally

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 12:54:26 -0700

Acer BIOS version R01-B1 has a bug where when you update the machine, Windows 11 will boot in safe mode because it cannot find the hard disk.

The root cause of the problem is that, the BIOS update changes the storage driver to VMD which Windows 11 doesn’t seem to support natively, at least as of this writing.

What to Do When You Cannot Onboard a Windows Professional OS Into Microsoft Defender After You Have Upgraded Windows Home Edition to Windows Professional

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 21:56:54 -0800

It’s well known that Microsoft Defender (all versions as of Dec 2024) requires a Windows Professional license. Many users buy machines that have Windows Home. When we upgrade Windows Home machines to Windows Pro by buying an upgrade key, there are times when the upgrade misses out on installing some key components that are necessary to run the onboarding script for Microsoft Defender from security.microsoft.com. And the onboarding script gives an error like this: “The service name is invalid.”

Convert VCF file into CSV the easiest way with no data loss

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 15:54:40 -0800

Applications like Apple mail export contacts in VCF format. Outlook doesn’t understand VCF. So a conversion from VCF to CSV is required. Trying to upload the VCF file to Google will work but many incomplete or badly formatted contacts will be removed. This doesn’t bode well for data integrity.

Setting Up Microsoft Defender for Endpoint - A First Timer's Guide

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 16:03:29 -0700

Defender for Endpoint is a wonderful cybersecurity tool that works in Macs and PCs and in PCs works with Windows Defender, other Defender flavors that Microsoft produces etc. It has the following benefits:

On Migration From Google Workspace to Microsoft Office - Some caveats and notes

Thu, 03 Oct 2024 16:28:20 -0700

If you’re migrating a large number of clients from Google Workspace over to Microsoft Office 365, there’s a bunch of software that allows you to do that. They require configuration but the task will be much more scalable, you’ll be able to move over hundreds of accounts with minimal time and hiccups. But if you’re doing only a handful of migrations and you have to install the Office 365 thick clients on client machines, doing it manually will probably be faster and cost effective. Either way, if you go the manual route, here’s a few things that need to be noted.

How to Block a Website Using Pfsense when you have to stop your kids and family from using some popular websites

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 14:33:02 -0700

Let’s face it. You’re supposed to do important work but want to listen to some music you remembered on youtube and then get carried away into watching something more interesting, forgetting you have a job at hand. Kids with homeworks due are the most vulnerable :).

Microsoft Outlook Error: The Operation Cannot Be Performed Because the Message Has Been Changed

Mon, 12 Aug 2024 15:42:39 -0700

This message appears when editing a draft email in outlook and generally when using IMAP with/without a flaky wifi. The solution is simple:

Solution
#

Open Outlook, File -> Options -> Mail.
Uncheck all options under “Conversation Clean up”.
Save, quit Outlook and restart Outlook.

Workaround
#

If you don’t want to or cannot spend any time tinkering as explained above, you can use the online version of Outlook at either office.com or outlook.com. Online versions are not affected by this issue.

CrowdStrike Outage July 2024 - Technical Summary of What Happened

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 14:35:21 -0700

An update to CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor on 19 July 2024 caused about 8.5 million Windows machines (estimated) to hang and show BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). A fix was pushed out later that day but the machines that went down had to be manually fixed (as of this writing). Here’s a technical summary of what happened based on Dave Plummer’s video below:

Failed to Load Kernel 'Kernel' FreeBSD

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 14:35:21 -0700

Sometimes when you release upgrade freebsd, you might get the following error:

Failed to load kernel ‘kernel’

can’t load ‘kernel’

Type ‘?’ for a list of commands…

How to Upgrade FreeBSD to a Newer Version or Release

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 10:44:21 -0700

Commands:

freebsd-update upgrade -r 14.1-RELEASE
freebsd-update install
shutdown -r now
freebsd-update install
shutdown -r now

Notes:

“14.1-RELEASE” –> You can use replace it with “14.2-RELEASE” or any other release in that format.
Before running the final “shutdown -r now”, you might have to do an additional “freebsd-update install” if any application is asking for it.

👅

How to Keep FreeBSD Updated With Security Patches

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 10:39:41 -0700

To keep FreeBSD updated with all the security patches, run these two commands:

freebsd-update fetch
freebsd-update install

When you run the first command, you can type “q” to get out of the prompt if you do not want to review all the changes so you can run the second command.

Git Error - Fatal: the Remote End Hung Up Unexpectedly

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 16:54:29 -0700

When you push commits to git, you sometimes might get into this error. I got this when pushing hugo code into git.


git push -u origin main
Enumerating objects: 61, done.
Counting objects: 100% (61/61), done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (45/45), done.
error: RPC failed; HTTP 400 curl 22 The requested URL returned error: 400
send-pack: unexpected disconnect while reading sideband packet
Writing objects: 100% (54/54), 2.07 MiB | 5.37 MiB/s, done.
Total 54 (delta 14), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0 (from 0)
fatal: the remote end hung up unexpectedly

This is caused by git buffer settings. Run:

How to Disable Internet Access for a Period of Time Every Day or On a Schedule Using Pfsense

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 19:40:42 -0700

Say you want to disable internet access on a specific computer in your LAN/wifi between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. every day and you have the pfsense (https://pfsense.org) firewall properly set up. Here are the steps:

How to Develop Locally in Drupal and Host Static Files on your Website

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 18:41:16 -0700

Background
#

Say you have an old website on Drupal 7 with plugins that don’t work with the latest versions of Drupal. You now cannot migrate over to Drupal 9 or 10 without doing a lot of manual work and/or losing the functionality of your current plugins. If your requirements are still fulfilled by the old Drupal 7 website, there’s a solution to keep using it.

How to Get an 'A' Rating From Qualys SSL Labs if Your DNS Is Cloudflare and You Use OpenLiteSpeed as Your Wordpress Web Server

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 17:43:31 -0700

By default, when you set up a WordPress site using OpenLiteSpeed (https://openlitespeed.org), you’ll get a “B” rating in Qualys SSL Labs SSL test at https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/. And even if you set up your minimum TLS version on Cloudflare to be TLS 1.2, Qualys reports your website still uses TLS 1.1. The following steps allow you to fix the certificate issue and get an “A” rating.

How to Install Pfsense Firewall With an Existing Netgear MR60 Mesh Wifi With Two Access Points MS60s

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 13:12:43 -0700

I’ve always heard of pfsense as a great opensource firewall with a nice list of features. We have an MR60 with two APs (MS60) for a total of three access points and its a great piece of hardware providing good wireless through the two stories. I wanted to control internet access and MR60 has a module to do that but only for a yearly subscription. I thought this was a perfect time to set up pfSense so this blog is about installing pfsense where there’s an existing Netgear MR60 with two MS60s.

Replacement for Ssh - Mosh (Mobile Shell) Is the Modern Secure Shell - use it starting today

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 08:10:43 -0700

If you are a regular user of ssh, you’re aware of some of its issues:

ssh breaks when there’s a disconnection and it doesn’t reconnect. I use tmux as a stopgap so I can go back to what I was doing.
typing on ssh terminal when the remote server is faraway is downright painful because the response times are so slow. One has to wait for the characters to be acknowledged by the server.
and when that time you want to hit a CTRL + C because you ran the RSYNC command wrong, it doesn’t accept Control C in time. Worse, the SSH terminal then breaks down.

Enter Mosh and it solves all the said problems and some more. It allows for:

Agriculture Drones in Greater Vancouver Region

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 22:42:19 -0800

A month ago at the Tradex in Abbotsford did I see drones being marketed for use in agriculture in the lower mainland. I thought drones for agriculture were a cool modern disruption because it would be so much cheaper to fly an automated drone than to own and fly little airplanes with pilots or huge (and costly) sprayer machines that need to be driven on land. I also thought it would be a good thing for the survival of the business when it goes from retiring parents to their kids - drones are something that the kids are growing up with, are familiar and excited about, while many might not want to touch a tractor! I also heard that there were regulations in place that obstructed the full scale use of drones and that the drone companies were fighting with the government over it.

Rsync Fails When Copying Files With Tilde: rsync: [sender] fstat failed: No such file or directory

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 21:58:08 -0800

Rsync Error:

send_files(71922, /source/TQR6~B)
rsync: [sender] fstat failed: No such file or directory (2)

Trying to rsync between two different machines, I found rsync fails when it finds files that have ~ (tilde) in their filenames. I initially thought this was an issue specific to copying from a Samba Share to FreeBSD zpool. I couldn’t solve the issue entirely but figured escaping the awful tilde was a way to finish copying without rsync crashing. Here’s the command:

Unlocking FreeBSD's Potential: Learn, Use and Elevate Your Experience with Generative AI

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 20:26:34 -0800

The benefits of FreeBSD are numerous. (Just ask chatgpt!). For me, it’s a very stable system, one that runs on any hardware, old and new, installs very quickly, configurations are in text and the pkg system that installs extra software is simple and powerful. But for a long time, anyone wanting to set up a home server or a VM to try with had to read lots and practice lots and even after practice, if you forget the commands, which happens when you use it infrequently, you have to google feverishly and many a time, the results the search engine finds might not be correct or actually be wrong. Enter ChatGPT and generative AI and things have changed drastically, for the good!

How to Read IDE Hard Disk Formatted With NTFS on FreeBSD

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 22:24:42 -0800

I came across one of my first hard disks when home so I took it out and brought it with me to copy the data out. It was an IDE HD so I bought a cheap IDE to SATA adapter and connected it to my FreeBSD machine to copy the data. (Feeding the power directly from the motherboard’s molex connector was more stable for the old hard drive.) Here’s the steps that worked for me.

ZFS: unsupported feature: com.klarasystems:vdev_zaps_v2

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 21:12:43 -0800

Note of caution:

Read the FreBSD Release Notes carefully at https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.0R/relnotes/ especially the section called “Upgrading from Previous Releases of FreeBSD”.

If you recently upgraded to FreeBSD 14 but you get the above error displayed before the beastie logo (see image below), here’s a solution for those with the boot loader in the MBR and that use the GPT partition scheme.

How to Install Tailscale on FreeBSD

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 22:33:23 -0800

Tailscale.com’s download page doesn’t list if it’s available for FreeBSD. But it does work on FreeBSD (tested on Release 14). Here’s how:

Install the package: pkg install tailscale
Edit /etc/rc.conf to add tailscaled_enable="YES"
Run service tailscaled start. If you get an error, reboot.
After reboot, run tailscale login. Grab the url, copy paste in a browser and approve the connection.
You can now ssh into the machine from another ’tailscaled’ machine from within your LAN or outside your home/office.

How to update Tailscale
#

Once installed, when you run the command tailscale on FreeBSD as root, you get a list of all the commands. Use tailscale update to update.

Create Your Own Secure Network Accessible Over the Internet Using Tailscale

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 22:18:07 -0800

It’s 2024 and there’s a fantastic tool available that can connect Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD machines together into a single network. Of course, that’s possible using samba, ssh, nfs or a whole range of other tools but tailscale makes the process super easy and very quick. And for upto three users, you can have a network of upto one hundred machines, free!

What Is Magnetized Target Fusion

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 02:18:58 -0800

Vancouver Canada is an awesome place and did you know that in Richmond that we have a company that’s been working on Fusion Technology since 2002?! It’s called General Fusion. But the best part is the Founder and Chief Scientist Michel Laberge explains with pure excitement what it is all about. All you need to invest is 81 seconds. Watch it here and if you’re like me, you’re really going to enjoy it!

Pxe Boot to Install Any Operating System the Quickest Way

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 12:18:06 -0800

If your (old) machine doesn’t have a CD ROM drive or does not boot from USB, PXE boot to re-install a new operating system is the best option if you do not want to buy any more hardware to solve the situation. In the past, setting up a PXE server was a hassle. The internet is littered with linux configurations on tftp server. But if all you want to do is to boot your machine and autoload the ISO, here’s the fastest way with minimal fuss.

How to configure SSH for a passwordless login into your remote machine

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 21:44:06 -0800

On local machine, run

ssh-keygen

This creates two files /.ssh/id_rsa.pub (public key) and /.ssh/id_rsa (private key).
Still on local machine, run

ssh-copy-id remoteusername@remoteserver

This copies your public key to remote server.
Now try doing ssh to remote machine, no password should be required.

if ssh-copy-id fails
#

Sometimes, ssh-copy-id gives an error and doesn’t copy the files. In that case, use this one liner but replace the remoteuser and servername:

Install Hugo on FreeBSD, commit to Github and deploy to Cloudflare pages

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 14:38:15 -0800

Prerequisites
#

Install PHP
Install nginx

Install Hugo
#

pkg install gohugo (install as root or do sudo)
follow this after install - https://web.archive.org/web/20231202094641/https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/framework-guides/deploy-a-hugo-site/
remember to remove hugo.toml from the root directory otherwise you’ll get a “not Found” error!

Tip
#

Install the GUI (maybe xfce or Kde5) so you edit md files, update them on the fly. Copy pasting and updating is easier with the gui and the terminal available. Refer to Hugo Cheatsheat if you need instructions to create the new site.
If you start getting weird errors from Git, just create a new hugo site, copy your contents and config.toml and follow instructions again. IMO Github has a lot to be done before it becomes user friendly. I’ll write about it separately someday.

🌶️

Hugo Cheatsheet

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 21:24:34 -0800

Table Of Contents

Redirect a website in Clouldflare

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 20:52:31 -0800

Login to Clouflare –> select your website –> Rules –> Redirect Rules –> Create Rule.
Set “All incoming requests” to Static, your URL to be redirected to, set Status Code to 301 (permanently moved.
Hit “Deploy”, wait for propagation.

🔴

Create static website from Drupal 7 and deploy into Cloudflare Pages

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 20:50:12 -0800

To extract a static website from Drupal 7.x so it can be hosted on Cloudflare Pages, follow the instructions below:

Install plugin “Static Generator” from (www.drupal.org/project/static)
Run it.
All static files will be created under “static” folder in the root of your Drupal Installation after you complete initial setup.
Create a new Github repo, upload all files to Github and deploy into Cloudflare. Your website will be live in the URL you set up during deployment.

If you do not know git, use “Git Desktop”, load all the files, and sync it up. As soon as the sync is complete, if you’ve set up Cloudflare pages to autodeploy (default mode), your site will be deployed in Cloudflare near instantly.

Resolve "Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance" error in Wordpress

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 20:52:43 -0800

Cause - happens when a plugin update gets ‘stuck’ or when trying to update multiple plugins at the same time in WordPress. If it doesn’t go away:

SSH to the server (or FTP)
Navigate to the web root directory. It’s /var/www/html for Apache and Nginx generally.
Navigate to the root folder of the website as you might have more than one website running.
Find and delete the file called “.maintenance”. (rm foobar)

🎀

Add your website to Clouldflare DNS using the free tier

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 20:49:52 -0800

Cloudflare free tier is too cool not to use for your websites. It provides DNS management, free optimizations, DDOS protection, free caching and quick response times. Here’s how to set up a website.

Delete all alarms from iPhone

Sun, 26 Nov 2023 20:50:23 -0800

Tell Siri “Deleted all alarms” followed by a “yes”!

🍅

Install GRAV on WSL based off Ubuntu

Sat, 25 Nov 2023 20:51:24 -0800

Install WSL (powershell command as admin “wsl –login”)

Inside WSL upon installation

install php
download latest version of grav with admin console, expand in your non-root user account
CD to the grav directory
Run “php -S localhost:8000 system/router.php”
Access Grav at localhost:8000/admin on the browser of your windows machine
install any component that Grav complains about (generally PHP libraries)
your site is at localhost:8000

🍉

Configure FreeBSD on an Old Intel Machine with ATI Graphics

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 01:41:28 -0800

Steps
#

Default install using Ventoy USB with FreeBSD install ISO
update pkg by running to install any package ex. pkg install vim
pkg install bash
Install video drivers for ati - ref AMD section in https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/x11/. This should take the screen to VGE mode with max resolution
Make default shell bash: chsh and edit (vim editor runs) the tcsh out with bash
install kde5, xorg, xfce, firefox-esr, mc, elinks, htop, libreoffice
allow root to login as ssh: edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and set PermitRootLogin to yes; restart sshd

Tips
#

Make root writable in single user mode (if you cannot login as root because you messed up the shell or have some corruption:

Vim Cheatsheet

Sat, 11 Feb 2023 14:24:52 -0800

This page is frequently updated :).

Didn’t know Vim offered spellcheck, handy when editing your md files on the ssh console; enter the following in Vim command mode:

  :set spell spelllang=en_ca

Paste from clipboard:

SHIFT + Right Click

Edit all files iside the directory

vim \* (open all files inside the directory)  
  :ls (shows all opens files in vim)  
  :w (write the file that is open)  
  :ls (show all files. The files that is open is marked)  
  :b filename (open the second file)  
  repeat until you're done.

🌲

Sources of Energy in Canada

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 20:50:43 -0800

40pc Petroleum Products
36pc Natural gas
17pc Hydro
1pc Others

76% is from non-renewable sources.

2022 Data - https://web.archive.org/web/20221019161726/https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-canada.html

🍓

Teach Kids Crypto

Wed, 22 Sep 2021 20:53:04 -0800

Ask them to read in the following order (12-13 yrs old):

Bitcoin Whitepaper: https://web.archive.org/web/20210906010924/https://nakamotoinstitute.org/bitcoin/
After the dry whitepaper, this will get them excited: Silkroad - https://web.archive.org/web/20210917214326/https://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-1/

🐾

Install FreeBSD via pxeboot Using mfsbsd for Systems That Have Less Than 512MB Memory

Tue, 09 Apr 2019 13:30:37 -0800

If you are PXE booting a client machine with an ISO file that is bigger than available memory on your client, the PXE boot will probably fail. This is because PXE boot is copying the ISO into memory. Nowadays, most of the OS install ISOs are more than 512MB, even for FreeBSD. So here’s the process to install FreeBSD on your very old hardware with 512MB memory or less.

Split Windows in Text Mode in Freebsd and Linux

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 13:55:36 -0800

tmux is a beautiful console program that allows you to split your windows. Very handy with today’s large screens.

run tmux
CTRL + B “ for horizontal split
CTRL + B % for vertical split
CTRL + B o to move from one window to another
a cheatsheet lives at https://tmuxcheatsheet.com

🦌