Mostly work related stuff which I would've entered into my "Log book". Instead of hosting it on an intranet site, outsourcing the hosting to blogger!
Saturday, November 30, 2024
ffmpeg commands - image sequence to mp4
Tuesday, November 26, 2024
upgrade Moodle 4.4 to 4.5
Since the theme for some of our Moodle instances was "Moove" and this theme had some updates which would work on 4.5 only after upgrading the theme, first changed the theme to the built-in theme "Boost" from the UI, completed the upgrade, upgraded the plugins including the Moove theme, changed back to Moove theme, OK.
The upgrade itself was
screen
cd /var/www/theLMSgit
sudo -u www-data /usr/bin/php admin/cli/maintenance.php --enable
git config core.filemode false
#git branch --track MOODLE_405_STABLE origin/MOODLE_405_STABLE - this was done earlier.
git checkout MOODLE_405_STABLE
git pull
sudo chown -R azureuser:www-data .
sudo chmod -R 775 .
sudo -u www-data /usr/bin/php admin/cli/upgrade.php
Sunday, November 24, 2024
Activity dashboard in google docs
There was a request from a user that he wanted activity to be turned on -
he is not able to see who all opened the document through the shared link.
Copy-pasting from my reply -
linux desktop shortcut to open a directory in terminal
in our case, xfce4-terminal --working-directory=/the/relevant/directory
Friday, November 22, 2024
show the rules for creating username on Moodle - email based signup
There was a request for a method to show the rules for creating usernames (shouldn't have spaces, should be only lowercase) for new users registering on Moodle.
While a help message is provided for the password, similar information is not provided for username...
My reply was:
https://our.moodle.server/admin/settings.php?section=manageauths
There is an "instructions" field available at the above link, which you can use to provide instructions to the people logging in. Maybe that might help you.
(Another option is to remove the option for users to enter Username, and instead only use Email address as username. But I'm not sure how to do that.)
With this "instructions" field the problem seems to be mitigated - these instructions are shown on the login screen itself.
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
referer in apache logs not seen in awstats
Trying to set up awstats for one of our servers which needed referer information to be captured - the referer info was not being displayed initially.
https://simonecarletti.com/
better to have separate logs for each virtual server. So, set that up.
Saturday, November 09, 2024
OpenSpace - running version 0.20.1 on Linux Mint 22
sudo apt install libboost1.74-dev
with
sudo apt install libboost-all-dev following https://askubuntu.com/questions/922625/cannot-install-libboost-all-dev-because-dependencies-are-not-getting-installed
make -j 2
doing 2 concurrent jobs instead of unlimited concurrent jobs - and now the linker complained that some symbols were not found. I suspected that this was due to the interrupted builds due to the crashes - so,
make clean
sudo apt install task-xfce-desktop -y
moving from Azure CDN
The Azure portal had emailed us that the Azure CDN from Edgio would be retiring, and that since Edgio had gone into bankruptcy, service continuity was iffy. Their "recommended replacement" Azure Front Door Standard or Premium, looked pricey:
Front Door seems to have a minimum monthly cost of $35,
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/frontdoor/
So, instead, shall I just migrate the content elsewhere?
Currently, only old issues of a newsletter seems to be on cdn.ourdomain.org - content being served from a particular storage container.
I could move all the stuff there to a github pages repository instead, and map cdn.ourdomain.org to that - Github pages is free, (limited to 2 GB per repository).
Another option is that I can configure a cheap VM to point to the relevant container, mounting the container with blobfuse -
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-how-to-mount-container-linux?tabs=RHEL
Looking at the size of the content, which was only 780 MB of archival content and not expected to grow, thought of going with github pages.
Created a github pages repository,
put all the files there,
and changed cdn.ourdomain.org CNAME record to point there instead of the CDN.
Tested with google site:cdn.ourdomain.org for old cached links, working with the new site - like
http://cdn.ourdomain.org/sssihms/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/nameoffile.pdf
OK.
Wednesday, November 06, 2024
Database connection failed error on Moodle instance - enable service to make it start automatically on reboot
The problem was that I had not "enable"d the tunnel service (details in a previous post) which was tunneling the database connection over ssh - so, on server reboot, the tunnel service was not restarting automatically. We need to do
sudo systemctl enable name-of-our-service
to make it start automatically on reboot, and then
sudo systemctl start name-of-our-service
to actually start it the first time.
Saturday, November 02, 2024
Lenovo Thinkcentre desktop - Linux Mint notes
Decided to try out Linux Mint on one of the desktops which had Windows 10 installed. To minimize interference with the borrowed machine, we installed Linux on a separate 256 GB SSD. To connect the SSD, we disconnected the CD/DVD drive.
To boot into the install USB, F10 is the key we have to press on boot, which gives the option to go into System Settings or BIOS.
The machine was rebooting instead of shutting down when the 'Shut down' option was chosen.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1321208/computer-reboots-instead-of-shutting-down
All Power > "Power on X" settings should be turned off in BIOS. I also found a setting which said, "When lose power" --> "go back to previous state". Changed that to 'shut down', too.
With these changes, the machine shuts down. But when power is removed and re-applied to the SMPS (by putting on the UPS the next day), the machine still automatically boots even without pressing the power button - so a separate switchable plug would be desirable.
Then, added swap to prevent sudden freezes due to memory issues (though system freezes due to insufficient power is still possible, the SMPS is underpowered) -
https://thelinuxcode.com/add-swap-space-linux-mint/
free -h
sudo fallocate -l 32G /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo chmod 0600 /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile
free -h
Edit: The above method of adding a swap file does not persist on rebooting - apparently it will persist only if added to /etc/fstab - so I added a line to root cron -
sudo crontab -e
#(at the bottom of the file)
# all other cron jobs must be above this
@reboot swapon /swapfile