LearnByDoingIT

  • This is a solid site and well referenced on the Internet for those looking for information on VPNs.  From the author of That One Privacy Site:

    There are some other good resources that cover privacy based topics quite well, but when I started down the path of retaking my own privacy, there was very little unbiased and reliable information with regard to VPNs.

    I started researching data about VPN services for my own knowledge, then posted the information online in the hopes the Internet might find my work useful for themselves.  Through the positive feedback and assistance those in the community offered, I’ve been able to take this step into compiling all of my related work in one location and moving away from the Google Spreadsheet that it was originally created on.

    Please enjoy my Simple VPN Comparison Chart, Detailed VPN Comparison Chart, VPN Reviews, and Commentary on how to choose the best VPN (for you).  Please also take a moment to read the FAQs!

    (I plan to add more content as time goes by, but for now the site focuses mainly on my VPN Comparison Project).

  • This is a post recommending utilizing Moodle menus as opposed to writing your own code.  If you prefer to customize your site in a manner that upgrading becomes nigh on impossible, please, do so without leaving a comment or reading further.

    New accountI had an amusing time reading the posts of folks who have hacked the PHP code, and brilliantly, they really can code elegantly, in various places to modify the sign in screen to replace “Surname” which is English (think across the water in either direction) with “Last Name” which is the US English version of what is required in that field.  Some of these hacks were worth seeing just to learn how simply one can change a great deal of code.  In addition, they were accurate and changed with various versions of Moodle. 

    HOWEVER, for all of the versions I read there was also an answer in the Moodle documentation.  Maybe it is that the answer references Language Packs and that deters folks.  I will argue that making a change that uses Moodle in a standard format does make updating much easier and straightforward, and well, as you might imagine, also fixes other language issues.

    If you are running a US site, in version 3.1.1+ (the documentation references v2.7 on)  one simply goes to Site Administration –> Language –> Language packs and installs the EN_US version of English and then sets it as the site default …

    Today’s Lesson

  • fedoraI have a HP ProBook 6570b as my work machine and while installing Cinnamon and Fedora 24 I found myself challenged to get WiFi working with the Broadcom WiFi adapter.

    How did I solve it?  Well, there were two likely methods that really are the same method, installing the WiFi drivers from the HP Support Site, however, they require a few additional dependencies, notably gcc and the kernel-devel packages.  And the instructions weren’t provided.  Just as I was determining what it was missing I happened across this command:

    wget http://git.io/vuLC7 -v -O fedora23_broadcom_wl_install.sh && sh ./fedora23_broadcom_wl_install.sh;

    The details of which are located here on a site which some browsers may not like as the site isn’t configured correctly.  Still, the script is available and easily understood from the documentation.

    The best part is I now have WiFi and it wasn’t so bad after all.

  • Fedora 24 is official. I decided to jump in on my production server as I had just risked everything taking care of the Ants.  Seriously, my Cisco, Server, and Printer/Scanner were infested in their temporary location.  They have never been so clean.

    I was going to go straight to FedUp like I had in the past; however, according to the documentation page:

    FedUp (FEDora UPgrader) was the official tool for upgrading between Fedora releases, until the introduction of the DNF system upgrade plugin. FedUp is now obsolete and should not be used in any circumstances.

    And I imagine I had been using it one or two updates too many, being slow to convert to DNF.  Installing the DNF upgrade plugin, which appears to be default is the recommended and supported way to upgrade from Fedora 23 to Fedora 24.

    I have also seen that you should be able to update to Fedora 24 Workstation using the Software app, although I haven’t tested it and my system is “headless”.

    Assuming you have backed up your system Smile, perhaps using deja-dup. Update your machine and install the DNF plugin

    $ sudo dnf upgrade --refresh

     

    $ sudo dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade

    Part 1 – download upgrades to prepare for the upgrade

    $ sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=24

    This command will begin downloading all of the upgrades for your machine locally to prepare for the upgrade. You may wish

    If you have issues when upgrading because of packages without updates, broken dependencies, or retired packages, add the --allowerasing flag when typing the above command. This will allow DNF to remove packages that may be blocking your system upgrade.

    Upgrading to Fedora 24: Starting upgrade

    Part 2 – Reboot and upgrade

    $ sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot

    Your system will restart after this. In past releases, the fedup tool would create a new option on the kernel selection / boot screen. With the new dnf-plugin-system-upgrade package, your system reboots into the current kernel installed for Fedora 23; this is normal. Shortly after the kernel selection screen, your system begins the upgrade process.

    Now might be a good time for a coffee break! Once it finishes, your system will restart and you’ll be able to log in to your newly upgraded Fedora 24 Workstation.

    I flew through without any issues, but if there are issues, check out the  DNF system upgrade wiki page as well as Fedora Magazine’s Upgrading Fedora 23 to Fedora 24 article.  I followed their directions for the most part and have put the salient ones in here so I can remember as I upgrade all my workstations.

  • I am running Moodle 3.1 (Build: 20160609); however, none of that matters.  I had errors restoring files as I reset my system for the next academic year which I do immediately before they send me packing for the summer season. 

    I got it to work last Friday but on Monday decided to start again from scratch and ran into the problem again and the forums simply didn’t help me.

    Both last Friday and Monday, with a fresh install and database I had the eror ‘error/invalidrestorefile’ crop up when attempting to restore backups files from a Server File Repository I had created on the server.  I tried all the suggestions in the folder, but so many seemed to end with “that fixed it” when the resolution should not have.  

    The trick to solving this is to see the patterns in the postings on http://moodle.org.  Most “magically” solved the problem and couldn’t really give developers any explanation.

    It doesn’t restore from the respository, not with “Import a backup file”, it appears to run into the 2MB limit and yet returns ‘error/invalidfilerestore’.  I did grin at the person who deleted PDFs, delete what you will, when you are under 2MB it works.   UNLESS, you simply waltz into the Front Page Restore and ADD the file to the backup location.  Yup, on the page below I was selecting the “Import a backup file” location when I needed to click on “Manage course backup area” [it also works in “User private backup area”], then select the Moodle “copy” to copy the file from the Repository to the appropriate backup area and THEN it restores just fine.

    Whew!  Somedays I should have more coffee and click less.

    Moodle File Restore