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It appears you have stumbled upon my humble blog. What do we do here? Well, it is a bit of a mash-up between the serious and the less-as-such. There are several things which I am passionate about and interested–all of which are posted about here ony my blog. Let’s take a quick peek behind the digital curtain!

Greetings, internet traveler!

It appears you have stumbled upon my humble blog. What do we do here? Well, it is a bit of a mash-up between business and pleasure. This is where I dump my brain, review and discuss things related to my favorite hobbies.

This site serves as a repository of knowledgebase information I’ve found or created, product reviews, information about games, music, writing, tips, tricks, and more. Are you an information technology professional looking for a solution to a problem you have? Are you a consumer looking for tech tips and tricks? Are you looking for content about a certain game? No matter who you are, I am to have something for you. So dive in! The blog posts are warm.

Well look at that…you’ve made it through my pinned post! It can’t have been all bad, right? Hey, listen. Comment down below with things you’d like to see on this blog or your interests! You stick with me and I’ll stick with you. Everything is better with friends. With that, we’ll see each other back next time! Cheers,

~ Griff

Listening | Cannot Hold You by Flux Pavillion, Jamie Lidell (2022)

At the time of this blog post I am listening to ”Cannot Hold You” from Flux Pavillion and Jamie Lidell.

Flux Pavillion’s bio from Spotify:

Flux Pavillion’s polymath-like ability to involve himself in all aspects of music cannot be understated…

Well known for his signature-sound… Flux has the ability to take people on a journey with his experimental sound…

Spotify, posted by Flux Pavillion

Jamie Lidell’s bio from Spotify:

British producer Jamie Lidell became as widely recognized for his effective neo-soul vocals and performances as for his earlier career as a producer of groovy experimental techno…

Spotify, posted by Jamie Lidell

Originally produced for an episode of Andrew Huang’s Four Producers One Sample on YouTube, the track was later released on Spotify and other platforms.

Listening to the original track that was sampled, “A Rose” by Jamie Lidell and then listening to Flux Pavilion’s “Cannot Hold You,” it becomes apparent that he aimed to keep a fair amount of the original mood of the song.

In many of Flux’s songs, his background as both a singer/songwriter and producer both shine through nicely, and “Cannot Hold You” is no different. The song sets a similar mood to that of the original sample and tells an interesting musical story as you listen to this 4m 12s journey.

The song begins quietly with a repeating chord and some atmospheric, cinematic elements. This slowly builds with some overlaid vocals. As the main vocals initially come in, the drums follow partway through the phrase and you are immediately dropped into both a movie, and a laid back musical groove as Lidell’s remixed voice softly sings “I cannot hold you anymore…”. The phrase is repeated again but with a bit more umph, and sans the percussion as the track transitions into a drop. Suddenly the well-known sawtooth that Flux is known for creates the breaking point in the song (and whatever story you’ve started creating in your head as you listen).

This track manages to feel big as well as small at the same time. Jamie Lidell’s voice from the original track is so perfectly suited for both that song and the song that Flux has created. There are heartfelt, painful sections that feel relatable. The breaking point and the big “Flux-y” sections feel grand and somehow both victorious but also terrifying.

The track has parts that get progressively grittier, heavier, and more emotional with some great guitar solos played by Flux on his guitar which he built himself. But despite the heavier portions, there are returns to the softer bits of the song and nods to the moments passed in the song and to whatever history there is behind the story that gets put into your head. The track exits with a great simplied version of the melody and chord progression but sans guitar, and all sawtooth.

If you’re looking for the track that would be your theme song during your turning point and villain arc, look for further than ”Cannot Hold You” from Flux Pavilion. It’s a great ride.

Happy listening,

~ Griff

Signal — What this app is and why we should use it

In a world of always-online, marketing, and advertising, what data of yours *isn’t* being tracked anymore? With Signal, you can take your text messages, group messages, and phone calls out of the equation and start taking back your privacy for free.

You may have heard of Signal, or seen the Signal icon in your phone’s respective App Store. But what is it? This well-built, open-source, and peer-reviewed app for your phone and computer can send and receive text messages and multimedia messages, group texts, handle phone calls for you, and more!

But this isn’t your grandma’s messaging app. There is something specific about it that makes the free app worthy of mention, and recommendation:

Privacy.

Ah, privacy. It used to be something we all had. However, with the rapid growth of a connected and online world, most people enjoy significantly less privacy than they previously did. Websites track you, apps send data about you to their developers, your purchase history, search history, web browsing history, and so much more is bought and sold by businesses around the world in an effort to better advertise to you — or accomplish more nefarious objectives. So…Signal?

Signal offers privacy that other messaging applications do not. Any phone calls or messages sent from a Signal user to another Signal user are end-to-end encrypted, making them very difficult for unwanted listeners/viewers to access. Beyond that, you can rest assured your data isn’t being collected and sold to the highest bidder since the only data Signal retains about its users is:

  • Unix timestamps for when each account was created
  • the date that each account last connected to the Signal service

You can read more about the data they store, and also examples of data they have provided when previously subpoenaed in this article.

Photo from CNBC

Signal provides a variety of optional features that we’ve seen claim popularity on other platforms (that are definitely tracking you and selling your data) such as:

  • Group messaging
  • Stickers, emojis, GIFs, and other animated graphics
  • Disappearing messages
  • Typing icon/notifications and other chat-like features
  • Customizable conversations and notifications per-conversation
  • Voice and video calls — including group video calls
  • Registering with your phone number instead of creating a complicated account
  • No cellular service required when sending between Signal users as long as you have WiFi (think like iMessage or Facebook Messenger, both of which may invade your privacy, especially given their companies’ history with data and privacy issues)

…and all of it can be encrypted and completely private. If all your contacts aren’t on Signal yet, that’s okay; it won’t get in the way of communicating with them. Signal handles regular unencrypted text, multimedia, and group messages just a quickly and elegantly as Signal messages.

Funded by grants and donations, open-source, peer-reviewed and audited, Signal is a best bet in maintaining your privacy while communicating.

You can get Signal for your device at these links as of date this article was published:

Android | iOS | Windows | macOS | Debian-based Linux Distributions

Give it a try! Getting started and using Signal is fast, simple, and secure. A best of all, it’s both private and free. Join me on Signal today! If you’re already a Signal user, or decide to try it, leave a comment below with your thoughts on the encrypted messaging service, what you like or don’t like, as well as any thoughts you have on the privacy issues surrounding our online world.


This article is not sponsored by Signal or any of their affiliates.

Featured image from dnaindia.com.

Print Server using Windows Server Core

Introduction

Many administrators are always looking for ways to simplify the required management of their environments, save on overhead, resources, etc. With the advent of Windows PowerShell and it growing to be a commonplace administrator utility in Windows environments, simple systems such as print servers no longer really require a full-fledged graphical user interface. Print servers are prime candidates to be hosted on the CLI-based Windows Server Core variant of Windows Server, especially where they are so easily managed through remote PowerShell. In this brief article, we’ll take a quick look at spinning up a core print server and some of the options available for administering the new server.

Spinning up your machine

Whether you are using traditional hardware for your server (a rackmount server, blade server,tower server/desktop PC) or a virtualized environment, you’ll first need to actually install Windows Server Core on your machine. For my environment, I spun up a virtual machine in my Proxmox virtual environment, but many may be using VMware, Hyper-V, or other solutions which will work perfectly fine.

Adding the features and roles to the server

Once you have Windows installed and your requisite network and domain configuration done, add the necessary services and features to the server:

Install-WindowsFeature Print-Services

This will install the Print Services role as well as the Print Server Role Service. No further configuration is necessary as far as the services and features go. All that is left to do is add some printers!

Administering the server

There are multiple ways to administer your new Windows Core print server.

PowerShell

Arguably the correct way to manage a Windows Core server, is PowerShell. Like other deployments, a print server is managable through the command line with general ease. Beginning with Server 2012’s Core version, there are many print management commands available to administrators.

As an example, we can configure a printer using just two commands:

Adding the printer port: Add-PrinterPort -Name "192.168.254.5" -PrinterHostAddress "192.168.254.5"

Adding, sharing, and publishing the printer: Add-Printer -Name YourPrinter01 -DriverName "HP Universal Print Driver PCL6" -PortName 192.168.254.5 -Shared -ShareName "YourPrinter01" -Published

VBS

An archaic option also exists. At C:\Windows\System32\Printing_Admin_Scripts you’ll find a variety of VBS scripts that can be used to administer the print server. But seriously, who is preferring VBS when we have PowerShell?

As an example, we can configure a printer using the following commands:

Creating the printer port: cscript prnport.vbs -a -r 192.168.254.5 -h 192.168.254.5 -o raw

Adding a printer on the above printer port: cscript prnmngr.vbs -a -p YourPrinter01 -m "HP Universal Print Driver PCL6" -r 192.168.254.5

Sharing the above printer: cscript prncnfg.vbs -t -p YourPrinter01 -r 192.168.254.5 -h YourPrinter01 +shared -direct -m "Default printer for HR" -l "YourDesiredLocation"

Publishing the printer to Active Directory: cscript pubprn.vbs \\printserver\YourPrinter01 "LDAP://CN=YourContainer,DC=YourDomain,DC=com"

GUI

If you really just can’t let go of using the graphical user interface just yet as you ease into command-line-based administration you can still get your hands on the GUI by executing: C:\Windows\System32\printui.exe /il

Additionally, on a remote machine, you can connect RSAT to your Windows Core print server and use the Print Management snap-in for the Microsoft Management Console to visually administer the print server.

But seriously…get comfortable with PowerShell. This is the way.

Conclusion

And, well, that’s pretty much it. There is certainly a more granular level of detail we could go into, but for the purposes of a general overview, I think that does it. Windows Core servers are quick and easy to spin up and an absolute breeze to configure if you are comfortable with PowerShell. In a lab environment, they can also be a great way to get more comfortable with PowerShell if you are just learning. Go ahead and spin up a Windows Core server in VirtualBox or your choice of virtualization bench and give it a try!

What are you using core servers for in your environment, and how do you like it? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.


Additional Reading

Install Print and Document Services | Microsoft Docs

Using Server Core as a Print Server – Microsoft Tech Community

Proxmox Node Cannot Update Packages via apt-get

Problem

A virtualization host/node running Proxmox (whether clustered or not) will fail to update packages via apt-get and produce the below error messages in the task queue:

Environment

Proxmox Virtualization Environment (confirmed for versions 6.2 and newer) running the free/community editions without and enterprise subscription.

Cause

The cause of this issue results from not having a Proxmox Enterprise subscription/license. These errors are caused by apt-get attempting to procure updates from the subscription enterprise proxmox repository, but because the node or cluster does not have a valid enterprise subscription, the update fails and produces an error.

Solution

Access the shell for the node/virtualization host producing the error and run the following command:

cp /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-enterprise.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-enterprise.list.backup && echo -e "#$(cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-enterprise.list)" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-enterprise.list

This command copies the repository sources list, renames the original as a backup so the system does not use it, then comments out the line of the list for the enterprise repository.

Once this command runs successfully, you should be able to either (a) wait for the scheduled updates to try to run again or (b) manually search for and install updates using apt-get update/upgrade. Either way, no errors should be produced.


Additional Reading

https://dannyda.com/2020/06/19/how-to-fix-proxmox-pve6-1-26-1-7-update-failedfailed-to-fetch-401-unauthorized-task-error-command-apt-get-update-failed-exit-code-100/