Fixing Linux display issues

 So recently I made what I thought was a small upgrade to my computer - I added a second SSD to my desktop. Fairly simple, power off, remove the power cord, open the case find a spot, an open SATA port, and a power connector to the SATA SSD, and voila. 

Problem was it booted in low graphics mode. That was odd. Run an update, reboot, and now doesn't want to boot at all. 

What I now know - or think - happened was a dead CMOS battery like this one. Since the board is quite old at this point, the battery had gone away, meaning that upon shutting down and pulling the power all the BIOS settings etc were gone. That means the system goes to the default.

This isn't a problem for the most part, but did warrant a new coin cell battery. Because I was getting boot issues the quick fix was to remove the graphics card and use onboard graphics. However, the graphics card was the most expensive part of the system, and I wanted to get it working. After replacing the coin cell battery and using the computer for a few days without the card, I found some time and willpower to open it up again and poke around. 

Steps: 

• Card goes in, DVI-D connect (old computer) goes to the card
• Does it boot? 'Yes' skip the next step, 'No' do this next step
• A couple of things to try if there isn't a post screen - 
• If there is no post (the initial Vendor logo that should say something like "Press F2 or DEL to enter setup"), power off unplug. Popping out the coin battery will reset BIOS settings if that was a culprit/factor. 
• Re-seat memory which in my case was just to reverse the placement of my 2 DIMMs.
• If you get boot and can get to Linux start screen try to log in. 
• I was using an NVIDIA card on Ubuntu 20.04 Gnome for this and the NVIDIA settings weren't coming up. (NVIDIA X server)
  
• Open the terminal and run lspci <- make sure you see the card listed
• You can also run lspci | grep NVIDIA to shorten the list, if you have an NVIDIA card
  
• At here either the driver is missing corrupted or, and I think more likely, the display manager got out of whack.
• Background: Linux like any other OS has a kernel component that interacts and can talk with the graphics drivers. If the setting gets messed up for any reason, it needs to be reset.
• For good measure I reinstalled the Nvidia graphics driver which in Ubuntu if you already setup the proprietary driver is (last number is the version so please ensure you are installing the version you want)
  sudo apt reinstall nvidia-driver-460
  
• In my case running dpkg-reconfigure lightdm then selecting gdm3 as the display manager and reboot fixed the issue. 
• Do check what the display manager is best suited for the distro / desktop variant you are using. This computer was first installed with Ubuntu 16.04 (2016.04 - April 2016), and updated all the way to today. Meaning, it has both Unity and Gnome desktops which caused a few issues when I accidentally set lightdm as the default rather than gdm3 <-- cool thing about Linux is it still worked! Though it wasn't ideal, it worked relatively well aside from a couple of hot-keys. To verify whether to use lightdm or gdm3 view here. 
• Alternatively you can run sudo service lightdm status or sudo service gdm3 status to check if either is running to find the default.
  

 

 

I hope that is helpful. Since I came across the issue I figured I'd share it. 

 

 

Docker install and basic commands

 

This blog has been a long time coming. I've been quite busy work-wise and hiding from Covid so hard to find quiet time to add these videos. 

Apologies. 

This video is around the setup and basic use of Docker in Linux. Running Docker in Linux is honestly the most ideal case, regardless of whether this a production workload or just for testing / development like on Workstation. 

Key commands we go over:

- run - create and start a new container
- start - start an existing container
- stop  - stop an existing container
- exec - interact with a running container
- rm  - remove an existing and undesired container
- ps - view all running containers
- ps -a - view all existing containers

There are a ton of other commands, but based on what I do to initialize some packaged solutions or existing LAMP stack these tools are fine for managing Docker. 

To get more information about how to use Docker / Podman commands to create a LAMP stack without docker-compose (previous video), please check out this blog.

I hope this is useful, and feel free to comment. 

*Note* please excuse the typo in bionic at around minute 4:30 or so. Binonic is obviously not right :). 

BASH! (Bourne Again SHell)

 

BASH and the Linux terminal are essential tools in Linux, and can also be be a very powerful programming language. As shown, it allows for a user to run through the operating system, create, edit, delete files and directories, and have full control over permissions. 

In regards to scripting, probably the most powerful thing about using BASH is the ability to interact and leverage existing Linux commands to grab appropriate input and output. The timeconverter.sh script demonstrates this capability by calling the default 'date' command and using it to get a point of reference of where the user is (or rather where the system is set to), and then using that to help calculate other times around the globe.

What I like about this script - some self pride showing through, sorry - is it's very fast to run and execute. So if one needs to schedule a meeting for 4 pm their local time and wants to see what that time would be in other parts of the world you can run through a slew of possible times in no time at all! 

A few corrections:
Please excuse some typos and little goofs in the video, like having the extra '/' at the end of #!/bin/bash, and finding the /usr/bin/ directory. Hopefully showing the fixes were equally helpful :). The script also doesn't necessarily need the .sh at the end. That is just a habit since many shell scripts have that, but one could simply name the file timeconverter or magictimes or whatever. I should add it is more common for users to add scripts to /usr/local/bin rather than /usr/bin, though as shown either works. 

Tip: cat /etc/environment to see where the PATH links to. PATH in Unix/BSD/Linux defines where all the commands a user can use are located so that they can be run without having to know where each command file is located.

If anyone notices any bugs - the trickiest part is the daylight savings / standard time section - just please leave a comment and I can update.

------------------------------------------

timeconverter:

Source code of the script

--------------------------------------------

Additional reference:

BASH shell

Linux Permissions

The Linux Command Line

Scale-out file systems - GlusterFS

Happened to be working on this and thought I'd create a write up. 

Scale-out file systems are essentially storage areas that are synchronized between different computers (nodes) but still retain the same data. There are many kinds of scale-out file systems - both open source and closed source - and for this tutorial we'll focus on one called GlusterFS.

GlusterFS is an open source project and maintained by RedHat. What it does for storage is allow for files to be written and read from via multiple devices and all files written to a GlusterFS share are identical to from client to client. 

What does that mean? Well it means for example if I want my data to be redundant even if a single computer or server in my group fails, with GlusterFS that's possible. It also helps to improve performance in certain areas because if the servers are used as storage you are serving files and data from multiple hosts (PCs/servers) rather than a single one. 

The steps below explain how to create a GlusterFS volume between 2 hosts (servers) and then mounting the files systems using GlusterFS client so that data between the hosts is synchronized.  This has numerous applications for IT deployments either in single or multiple sites , but GlusterFS can also be deployed in what is known as N+1 or N+N dispersed arrangements whereby the storage doesn't just replicate or mirror data, but also expands the total capacity. For example N+1 with 4 hosts would have 3x the total capacity of any single host. So if you had 10 TB on each host (server), with GlusterFS your usable capacity would be ~30TB minus the file system overhead, and could have one host crash at anytime without losing data.

This might be a little advanced, but I figured I'd share my progress with this as it could be handy.

Getting Gluster running on 2 hosts - tested in Fedora 33 Server

#1

First need to disable or allow the firewall to pass the Gluster packets.

Simple: $sudo service firewalld stop

Complex: $sudo firewall-cmd --zone=FedoraServer --permanent --add-port=24007/tcp --add-port=24008/tcp --add-port=24009/tcp --add-port=49152/tcp --add-port=49153/tcp

#2

IP addresses don't play nice with Gluster - need to add hosts to each node's host file or have them setup in your DNS.

/etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1   localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4

::1         localhost localhost.localdomain localhost6 localhost6.localdomain6

192.168.122.38 fedoraS1

192.168.122.93 fedoraS2

#3

Install glusterfs, glusterfs-fuse, gluster-server 

Gluster geo-replication may also be required, depends on the use case. Geo-replciation is beyond the scope of this tutorial.

#4

Start glusterd 

$sudo service glusterd start

Note: to enable it run $sudo systemctl enable glusterd <-- this allows for it to run on boot.

Another thing to pay attention to is there is the another service called glusterfsd which is the client service. Glusterd is the server portion to run the volume.

#5

As root or sudo, need to peer probe from 1 client to the other

$sudo gluster peer probe fedoraS2 <-- has to be the host name not the IP as that can screw up

#6

As root or sudo, create a volume

$sudo gluster volume create voltest replica 2 fedoraS1:/home/joe/glusterdata fedoraS2:/home/joe/glusterdata force 

Note: force seems needed with running as root

#7

Need to start the volume. 

$sudo gluster volume start voltest

#8

That's all fine and dandy, but files still won't transfer if you write below that data directory, it needs to be mounted as a glusterfs aware file system.

On both hosts run 

[joe@fedoraS1 glustermnt]$ sudo mount -t glusterfs fedoraS1:/voltest glustermnt

[joe@fedoraS2 glustermnt]$ sudo mount -t glusterfs fedoraS2:/voltest glustermnt

Note that both mount from themselves, the opposite of what I would have thought, but I guess it makes sense from a latency perspective.

#9

At this point it should all work - what shows in glustermnt on one host is replicated to the other.

[joe@fedoraS1 glustermnt]$ df

Filesystem                     1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on

devtmpfs                          477484       0    477484   0% /dev

tmpfs                             498348       0    498348   0% /dev/shm

tmpfs                             199340     996    198344   1% /run

/dev/mapper/fedora_fedora-root   9422848 2452612   6970236  27% /

tmpfs                             498352       0    498352   0% /tmp

/dev/vda1                        1038336  253940    784396  25% /boot

tmpfs                              99668       0     99668   0% /run/user/1000

fedoraS1:/voltest               18845696 4909272  13936424  27% /home/joe/glustermnt

Additional reference

https://jonarcher.info/2013/01/glusterfs-quickstart-howto-on-fedora/

https://docs.gluster.org/en/latest/Quick-Start-Guide/Quickstart/

User login and logout using PHP - Part 3 of 3 (still maybe 4)

 

This post and video runs through how to create some logic for searching through a user table in a database, validating the given login credentials, and displaying different results based on the outcome. 

Key concepts covered are the session_start() function of PHP, essentially allowing for the webpage to store data (cookies) about a user, using a counter to help check the login, and then session_destroy() function to logout. 

This bit of code was actually something I thought up, but previous references helped walk me through it. JoyofPHP by Alan Forbes again briefly talks about how, conceptually, to handle some of this, and there are slews of examples on sites like StackOverflow, and W3schools for dealing with sessions and variables.

The bit of javascript code to automatically refresh the page on first load I found from this StackOverflow post. The site is a wealth of knowledge with contributors from all over the world helping to solve each others coding roadblocks. Something anyone who even wants to just start to learn will find useful, and Google results often reference it.

Note: Mentioned in the first post, this tutorial doesn't include a security portion, but should one be considering a live website including SSL/TLS will be critical before doing anything like a user login with sensitive information. At the very least purchase a valid certificate, create your own if its an internal site/system, or run Let's Encrypt on the site.

I hope all of this will be helpful, and provide a good starting place for future development and learning.

Yet another LAMP stack build - Podman!

 

No video this time, just steps. 

After getting tired of LinuxMint (the update from 19.3 to 20.04 didn't work right), I switched back to Fedora. Originally I switched from Fedora to LinuxMint to try it out thinking it would be more stable. Thus far...  nope, but it's my fault for buying a laptop with an AMD CPU. Ubuntu would likely be the better more stable desktop choice, but I prefer flatpak to snapd, and my desktop already runs Ubuntu. Ubuntu is solid, just why stick to only one distro? 

I digress. 

This blog is focused on running a LAMP stack with Podman. I mentioned it briefly in the Intro to Virtualization and Containers video, but essentially Podman is the more open source version of Docker-CE and works almost - key word there - like Docker. However, it doesn't officially have a feature like Docker Compose to build a whole bunch of containers via a yaml file - they need to be built and connected manually...

The nice thing about Podman is that it supports the latest CGroups, and is preinstalled on Fedora (some more background). Fedora 32, by default, doesn't actually support Docker because Docker does not yet support the new CGroups. So Podman is essentially more up-to-date, potentially more secure, and much more of a headache to setup.

Let's get into it.

Need to create a network for the podman containers- default doesn't seem to have a DNS as I understand.

sudo podman network create  <-- Likely better to give a name at the end, just type a name as I understand.

sudo podman network ls <-- Find the name; in the below it's cni-podman1 which is a default name when none is given.

MySQL container

Run sudo podman run --name=mysqltest -p=3306:3306 -d --network=cni-podman1 -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=mysqltest -e lower_case_table_names=1 mysql:5.7

Note: The run command in Docker/Podman is very similar. We give the container a name, map ports  <host>:<container>, -d is detach so the container doesn't eat your terminal, define networking, then -e is environment variables like defined in the YAML file. At the end we name the image to pull from; if not already installed this will automatically pull from docker.io, though podman searchs the RedHat and CentOS image hubs first.

PHPMYADMIN container

Run sudo podman run --name=PHPMAtest -p=8081:80 --network=cni-podman1 -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=mysqltest -e PMA_HOST=mysqltest -e PMA_PORT=3306 -d phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin:latest

Open the browser and go to localhost:8081, upon seeing PHPMyAdmin use username: root and the password as defined, in this case mysqltest. This should work if your Podman networking is set properly, and no awkward firewall rules.

PHP / Apache image

Create a directory Podman-LAMP and a sub-directory src under it (any name for either directory will do so long as your commands are consistent). Under Podman-LAMP create a Dockerfile with the below information information. 

FROM php:7.0-apache
        RUN docker-php-ext-install mysqli
        EXPOSE 80

Like in Docker, Podman recognizes Dockerfile and will build the container image based on the supplied parameters. We first build the container in order to install the mysqli, and allow port 80 <- port 443 may also be needed if you require HTTPS. We are building the container rather than just running it because we want to install mysqli and expose port 80.

Run chmod -R 755 src to allow the Apache server access to files in the src directory.

To build the new image run sudo podman build ./Podman-LAMP --tag apachephppod. The --tag option gives the image a name.

Run the PHP / Apache container

Run sudo podman run --name=APpod -v ./Podman-LAMP/src:/var/www/html:z -p 80:80 --network=cni-podman1 -d apachephppod  

**The :z in the mount command is important for SELinux issues - Docker doesn't have those issues in my experience could also be related to the CGroups and versioning that I've tried. That said other users have mentioned the :z with Docker and SElinux and could be that my previous experience of running Docker on Fedora had yet to enable the latest SELinux functionality.

Once all of that is setup you can connect to the database using msqli and set the MySQL host name as the name of the MySQL container - mysqltest in this example. This can be done in place of the IP of the local host or Docker network though it might work as well. 

Example: $mysqli = new mysqli('mysqltest', 'root', 'password', 'joescoffee');

Where: (<host address/host name>, <user>, <password>, <database>)

With everything created, to stop/start the containers just follow the below commands. Information will be retained because the containers have been named, and the Apache/PHP container has a mapped volume. If you run the run command again it will throw an error since the container with that name exists, and if you keep running run with new names it just keeps adding containers.

sudo podman container start mysqltest APpod PHPMAtest

sudo podman container stop mysqltest APpod PHPMAtest

This was a good exercise for myself. Learning how to connect separate containers together helped reinforce a lot of my understanding about the technology, both Docker and Podman. The SELinux requiring :z threw me the most, but thankfully poking around Google and forum threads pointed me in the right direction. I hope this blog can help save you the hours I spent getting it working.

A quick JS interlude

 

This video is a quick - very quick by my standards - video on a short script and interacting with a website to provide real-time updates to users. The script essentially just pulls in variables and outputs the product (multiplying price * amount) so that a user's total order price changes as they select a different amount. 

Most of what I know of JavaScript - which is honestly not a lot - is from the excellent tutorials at W3schools. I've not spent as much time with other elements of how JavaScript interacts with databases and helps create more dynamic websites, but I am still learning as I go. 

A couple more sites and references which would be good for future reading and understanding are below. Several are beyond what I've spent time with having focused mostly on PHP and Linux the past couple of years, but I know that they are powerful tools and hope the references can give those interested some more direction for future areas to study to improve their web development skills.

Angular - Typescript- and JavaScript-based (AngularJS) web development platform, led by Google Angular team.

JQuery - more advanced functionality using the JavaScript framework, also includes some potential for DB interaction, though less a focus than PHP/mysqli.

w3schools Web Development Roadmap - a great overview for all the various building blocks that go into web development. 

There are a ton of things that go into building a strong website. This is exactly why so many business chose to pay to have things hosted on Amazon or setup a site with Shopify or Wix. I personally don't like default templates and structure for any site I want to create as often the templates are extremely complex or only partially editable at the HTML/JavaScript/PHP level. That said, things like security - SSL/TLS encryption, secure payment methods, and servers for hosting, and a good CDN for helping copy and deliver content the world-round are costly. Most platforms designed to host a site for you take care of a lot of that back end and any creator would need to weigh said costs with the flexibility of developing a site completely from scratch. 

Hopefully these tutorials can help those looking to just gain a basic understanding of what goes into web design.

PHP + CSS + HTML overview - Post 2 of 3 (maybe 4)

This post goes over how to take the functions of the 'mysqli' function we covered in the previous PizzaOrder site, and create a more usable flow in a nicer format. The new site adds an order confirmation page and website management pages for internal users to add products and review new orders.

User login and control is coming in a separate video.

While this particular code is largely my own, I also wanted to link back again to the JoyofPHP, and also help signal out W3schools website which has a ton of info on managing and creating feature websites. Their site is linked on the right-hand side column in the blog as well, but it is a great source of know-how for getting started with website creation/optimization.

One other note to add is the W3schools' explanations of the enctype for uploading a file to PHP - Note https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_form_enctype.asp

I hope this is helpful, thanks again.

Intro to Web design using HTML, CSS and PHP - 1 of 3

This tutorial covers the basics of using HTML and PHP to interact with a user, collect data into an HTML form, capture the data, then submit to an existing database. 

Primarily we cover HTML <form></form>, PHP mysqli, PHP echo, and the basic formatting of an HTML table. 

I designed this to be very simple on purpose to act as a base. In the next two or three videos I hope to explore more about formatting and creating a more useful flow of user data and a shopping cart to open orders. In many ways these fields are just building on what is already shown in this video, but help to demonstrate how powerful the mysqli integration is with HTML, CSS, and PHP for create dynamic websites. 

Of course there are a multitude of other features and optimizations that can be done and included. I hope this can be a good foundation for new users or those interested to take the first steps - like I am - into web and software design.

I also wanted to reference The Joy of PHP by Alan Forbes again as his book taught me what little I know of PHP. The examples I'm showing are just pieces of code and know-how that his more in-depth book details, and I found it really helpful and easy to apply.

Finally, I can't emphasize enough, the current site is NOT secure. We built our LAMP stacks without an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate so that would need to be added to the Apache server/service on a server facing the internet. More information can be found on various sites, and currently one of the best open SSL implantation is Let's Encrypt. It does require some access to the Apache server to setup, but automates the SSL certificate re-registration/authentication so is quite nice for most sites. As an admin it will be up to your team to pick the best solution, but I wanted to ensure that while previous LAMP stacks are both viable test environments, a production environment (hosting a site on the Internet) shoudl have both SSL certicates and strong Firewall protection.