Chassis.io Timeout Issue

TL:DR -> Try enabling Virtualization in your BIOS.

I’m trying out http://chassis.io as a way to easily setup a WordPress development environment on Windows. It’s actually quite easy and everything works almost exactly like the Chassis Get Started guide describes.

However, I ran into a timeout issue when attempting to boot up the Virtual Machine using vagrant up. On first run the process installed necessary dependencies and wired most things up. However, it hung for a considerable amount of time when booting up the virtual machine. Eventually it told me that it had timed out. It didn’t start the virtual machine.

VT-x/AMD-V hardware acceleration is not available on your system

Hrmm… I wonder why it’s timing out. Chassis.io uses Vagrant and VirtualBox. So I spun up VirtualBox to see if I could manually start the VM myself. As it turns out, I could not. VirtualBox threw up the following error:

VirtualBox - Error
VT-x/AMD-V hardware acceleration is not available on your system. Your 64-bit guest will fail to detect a 64-bit CPU and will not be able to boot.

Well, that’s nice… (Hint: it’s not nice).

First Try: Disabling Hyper-V

I did some searching. I found a number of posts that indicated the solution was to disable Hyper-V. It sounds like this works for a lot of people. Scott Hanselman actually wrote up a post about how to “Switch easily between VirtualBox and Hyper-V with a BCDEdit boot Entry in Windows 8.1“. I tried this approach. It did not work for me (you can remove a bcdEdit entry using bcdedit /delete {ENTRYGUID} btw).

Second Try: Enabling Virtualization via BIOS

During my search I stumbled upon this SuperUser answer. The answer indicated that, depending on your system, Virtualization could be enabled via the BIOS.

In my case, enabling Virtualization via BIOS involved booting to the UEFI Firmware Settings. I’ve outlined the steps below.

  1. Hold down the Shift key while you click Restart. This will cause your computer to bring up a special menu.

    Hold Down Shift and Restart
    Hold down “SHIFT” and click Restart
  2. Next you need to navigate the option screens to find “UEFI Firmware Settings”
    1. Select “Troubleshoot”
    2. Select “Advanced options”
    3. Select “UEFI Firmware Settings”
    4. Restart

    Steps to UEFI Firmware Settings
    Steps to UEFI Firmware Settings
  3. This will reboot you into your PC’s UEFI settings which looks a lot like a typical BIOS menu.
  4. Enable Virtualization
    Your system may be different. My system had a “Virtualization” setting located under the “Security” tab. Once I located the “Virtualization” setting I noticed that “Intel (R) Virtualization Technology” was indeed set to Disabled. I enabled it, saved the setting, and restarted my machine.

    Enable Virtualization via BIOS
    Enable Virtualization via BIOS

After enabling “Virtualization” I tried to start the VirtualBox VM one more time. BOOM. It worked. I ran vagrant up via a ConEmu console and… success.

In Conclusion

Chassis.io is a pretty sweet project. If your system is setup correctly then Chassis.io “just works”. In my case my system needed “Virtualization” enabled via a UEFI Firmware Setting.

Have a stupendous day! 🙂

Hide the Action Center Icon in Windows 10

It’s the little things in life that annoy me. Things like Microsoft’s Edge browser icon re-appearing on my taskbar. Or, when Windows decides to update just before a meeting. I find these kinds of things to be very annoying. That’s why I was a smidgen irked when the Windows 10 Action Center icon popped up on my taskbar and showed no signs of leaving peacefully.

For those of you who do not know what the Action Center Icon in Windows 10 is then allow Leonardo to enlighten you.

Windows 10 Action Center Icon
aRGGG win10 icon, I’ll kill you!

And only now, at the end, do you see your mistake.

Remove the Action Center Icon

Now that we are all aware of the horribleness that is this awful Action Center icon we can set off on our quest to destr… err remove it.

  1. Open the Windows menu
  2. Search for Turn system icons on or off **
  3.  Find the Action Center icon.
    1. If you are not sure where the Action Center icon is, let the WoW splash screen show you.

      Turn system icons on or off list
      DESTROY…
  4. Turn if off
  5. Rejoice in the boundless fruits of your labor.

**Alternatively, if you are old school and hate things like convenience, you can navigate to this setting section via the Control Panel. So hop on in your Conestoga Wagon and navigate to Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization > Taskbar and Navigation > Turn system icons on or off.

List Updatable/Upgradable Packages in Ubuntu Server

A little while ago I setup a GitLab box using Ubuntu Server. When I log in to the server it shows me a short message about available updates. The message looks something like this:

Welcome to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.4.0-24-generic x86_64)

 * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com/

7 packages can be updated.
0 updates are security updates.

I know that I can update these packages by running `sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade` however, I’d like to know what I’m updating before I do it. In the past you could accomplish this by performing a “dry-run” of the command. This essentially showed you the output of the command without actually performing any updates. That worked alright – but honestly, I just want a list of the packages – not the entire output of the command.

Listing the Upgradable Packages

I stumbled upon this answer (made just a few days ago) by AskUbuntu user “doru“. Turns out that getting a list of updatable/upgradable packages is pretty easy. You just run this:

sudo apt list --upgradable

The list --upgradable command will list out all the packages that you can update, what their current versions are, and what the new version is. Boom! That’s exactly what I wanted.

Tell Git to ignore changes to a versioned file

There are times when you do not want git to track changes to a versioned file. In these cases you can update the git index so that it assumes the file is unchanged. This will only affect your local repo and it will take affect until you tell git otherwise.

Tell Git to Not Track Changes

You can tell git to not track changes by using

git update-index --assume-unchanged <file>

Tell Git to Track Changes (Again)

And when you want git to track changes again you can use

git update-index --no-assume-unchanged <file>

CIDR Slash Notation and Subnet Masks

I wrote a quick utility to help me figure out the available IP Address range when given a specific IPv4 address and slash number. You know something that looks like this: 192.168.0.0/16. The utility should tell you the range of IP addresses that covers.

I’m not saying I’m a master of CIDR Slash Notation or Subnet masks… but this seems to be providing good results 🙂

Checkout the Calculator

GitLab on Ubuntu Server with WiFi

Over the weekend I spent some time setting up GitLab on Ubuntu Server using a WiFi card. For those of you who do not know what GitLab is, check it out. I stumbled upon GitLab several years ago when I was looking for a self-hosted GitHub alternative. Since then, GitLab has greatly improved, and setting it up is fairly easy.

Setting up Ubuntu Server

First, you are going to want to obtain the Ubuntu Server install. You can download this from the Ubuntu Website.

The second step I took was to find an old desktop I wasn’t using anymore. This is going to be my server. I installed a PCI-E WiFi card in the sucker, because, honestly I’m too lazy to run the network cable.

Note: I tried to setup the server multiple times using just the WiFi card. I wouldn’t recommend it as it was a very frustrating process. I’d highly recommend hooking your new server up via an Ethernet cable at least until you setup the WiFi. It’s far easier and saves a ton of time.

After I hooked up my server with the Ethernet cable I booted to the Ubuntu Install disc and began the installation process. The process itself is really quite simple. There are a few questions you have to answer but the whole thing should be over in less than 30 minutes. I just overwrote everything on the hard disk. After it’s done installing it’s going to ask you to remove the installation media. At that point it should reboot, load up, and show the login screen.

Note: Ubuntu Server does not come with a GUI. Everything is done via the command line. You can install a GUI if you want, but there isn’t a GUI packaged in.

Now that I had Ubuntu Server installed I went ahead and logged in. The first thing it showed me was that there were some updates to be installed. So I ran the following commands to update the system:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Getting WiFi up and Running on Ubuntu Server

Now that the system was updated I wanted to get the WiFi working. In order to get the WiFi working I used nmcli. nmcli is a command line tool that comes with the Network Manager package. Some people might not like using this tool because I believe it installs some GUI dependencies. Honestly, nmcli was the easiest method I found to get the WiFi working, so I don’t really care about the small amount of dependencies that the Network Manager package comes with.

sudo apt install network-manager

Alright. I had the network-manager package installed. Now to connect to my WiFi network.

I read through the “man” page for nmcli. It looks like I can get a list of wifi access points in the area by running the following command.

nmcli device wifi list

Yes! That actually gave me a list of WiFi access points in my area. I saw my home network listed. I was so happy to see this because it meant I didn’t need to configure anything else. The Ubuntu server had recognized my wireless card and the card was working. That made me so happy… 🙂

Next step would be to actually connect to my WiFi access point. According to the nmcli man page I can connect using nmcli device wifi connect. My access point requires a key, and it looks like nmcli supports connecting to an access point with a key… so this is a good thing.

nmcli device wifi connect MyAccessPoint password 123456789ACB

Boom! I ran that sucker and it actually worked! I had been struggling and struggling with this before – nmcli is like my new favorite thing ever. EVER.

At this point I rebooted the server and disconnected the Ethernet cable. I wanted to see if the server would automatically connect to the WiFi access point on boot. It seemed to take a long time to start. After it started up I logged in. I tried to ping google.com. No dice. I waited a few moments and tried again… it worked!

I made sure OpenSSH was installed on the server so that I could manage it from another computer.

My WiFi was now working on the Ubuntu Server. It was connected to my home network, and it automatically connected after the server was turned on.

Setting Up GitLab on Ubuntu Server

Now that I had the WiFi connected I wanted to get GitLab all setup. Luckily, the folks at GitLab have made this incredibly easy. They have a great guide setup here. There are really only a few commands you need to run and then you are good to go. Let’s go ahead and list those commands really quick.

Install the Dependencies
sudo apt-get install curl openssh-server ca-certificates postfix

These are things that GitLab needs in order to run successfully.

Add the GitLab package server and install the package.
curl -sS https://packages.gitlab.com/install/repositories/gitlab/gitlab-ce/script.deb.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt-get install gitlab-ce

I used the above command. However, GitLab mentions an alternative if you aren’t comfortable with a piped script. You can find the alternative on their guide page.

Configure and Start GitLab
sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure

The people behind GitLab have really made it incredibly easy to get this up and running. Now you just need to login to your new GitLab server. When you first visit the page you will be asked to create a new password. This password can be used in conjunction with the “root” username to login to the system.

Finishing Touches

That should be it. Your GitLab server is setup and working. You’ve setup the WiFi card so the server is connected to your network. You’ve got OpenSSH installed so you can manage the server from another machine. You’ve installed GitLab so you can host your own internal Git repositories (as well as collaborate with others on your team etc…).

The last things I would do:

  1. Change your GitLab username from “root” to something else. You can do this within the GitLab interface.
  2. Setup your router so that it always assigns a certain IP address to your server. This way you don’t have to worry about static IP addresses on the Ubuntu Server itself.
  3. Update your internal DNS so that you can refer to your GitLab server by an actual domain name. I set mine up as “gitlab.jeremysawesome.com”.
  4. Download PuTTY on your Windows machine so that you can remote manage your server.
    1. Optionally hook this up with ConEmu 🙂
    2. Optionally update with the Solarized theme for PuTTY.
  5. Set your server up somewhere inconspicuous. Hey, you’ve got a WiFi server. Throw it somewhere out of the way.

Alright – that’s it. This post ended up being a bit longer than I thought, however I’m glad I’ve got it documented it. (Even if there wasn’t much to document).

GIT CLI SSH PassPhrase

I use the GIT command line interface a lot. It helps me keep my Git repositories looking sharp and clean. Interactive rebase auto-squashing with posh-git+ConEmu ftw!

However, from time to time I will notice that the GIT cli is asking me for my SSH RSA passphrase more often than I’d like. Sometimes it even asks on every pull. That’s annoying.

It is possible, however, to only enter your passphrase once per session. Setting this up should be as simple as doing the following:

  1. Add the “bin/” folder of your GIT install to your $PATH. This will allow you to reference ssh-agent in your powershell environment.
  2. From your Powershell environment run
    ssh-agent
  3. Now run
    ssh-add

Excellent! That should be it. Now you should be able to push, pull all you want without having to insert your passphrase more than once per session.

Launch Programs as Domain User from Non-Domain Computer

So I found this amazing post that has helped me a ton:

http://codebetter.com/jameskovacs/2009/10/12/tip-how-to-run-programs-as-a-domain-user-from-a-non-domain-computer/

I am constantly referring to that post in order to get the correct commands for launching something (like ManStu) as a domain user.

So, I figured I would post the command here just in case that post goes away (as posts on the internet tend to do).

The command is:

runas /netonly /user:domain\username <program you want to run>

Example:

runas /netonly /user:domain\username "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\120\Tools\Binn\ManagementStudio\Ssms.exe"

Accessing Direct Messages from Disabled Users in Slack

Slack is awesome. I love it. You love it. Everyone loves it. If you don’t love it than that is probably because you haven’t heard about it. So.. go hear about it. Yep – now you love it too. You’re welcome.

One of the cool things about Slack is that it archives all of your conversations. So you can refer to (and search through) previous conversations you’ve had. This morning I was going to do just that, look up an old conversation I had with a previous team member. However, I couldn’t find his name anywhere via the normal slack interface. Because I couldn’t find his name I figured that he must’ve been deleted and my conversations were lost forever… :sad_panda:

But – don’t despair! As it turns out, you can’t actually delete a user in Slack. You can, however, disable a user. And the cool thing about disabled users is that you can still access the messages you’ve sent to them.

Accessing the messages is simple. Find the People & user groups link in the Slack interface. If you cannot see it then you might have to click the ⋮ More link. On the People & user groups page find and open the Filter menu. Click on the checkbox to Show deactivated accounts. Find the user you want, click on their portrait, and finally, click the Message icon. This will bring up the Message Archives for that user.

Boom sauce. You can now view your archived direct messages from previous members of your team.

Another Option:
Access Archived Messages via Search

It is also possible to access messages from a disabled user using the Slack search functionality. In order to do this you can simply enter from:@userName (where username is the name of the user you are looking for) in the Slack search bar. The search results should actually show you messages from the disabled user.

Note: Keep in mind. If you are using Free Slack then you are limited to 10k messages. It’s possible that the messages you wish to find are beyond the 10k limit.

Specify Name and Port for Website Project in IISExpress

When using IISExpress to develop a Website project it is nice to have a specific machine name and port to refer to.

You can specify the machine name and port by editing the binding in the IISExpress applicationhost.config file. The following information was gleaned from this answer on StackOverflow.

  1. Open your applicationhost.config file. It most probably will be %userprofile%\Documents\IISExpress\config\applicationhost.config, but inspect the output from iisexpress.exe to be sure.
  2. Locate your WebSite entry and add following binding with your machine name.
         <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation=":50333:your-machine-name" />
    
  3. Restart IIS Express

I actually specified my machine name as well as the local domain.

bindingInformation=":8013:my-machine-name.my-domain.local"

This seems to be working just fine for me. If you are wanting to actually share that url for others to access (maybe within your own work network) you might have to run this in a administrator command prompt as specified in this StackOverflow answer:

netsh http add urlacl url=http://vaidesg:8080/ user=everyone