SysAdmin – Page 2 – LearnByDoingIT

Tiny Tiny RSS: Building my own RSS Reader

I finally setup my TinyTinyRSS server following the guidelines on LifeHacker outlined in this article. The original plan, when Google Reader shut down, was to have my own RSS server and not be beholden to someone disappearing.

Next on the list is to find a bookmarking tool that wouldn’t go away.

While I have the basic system setup and am going for coffee now I have a few things to still look at:

The feature set – read more about them here, the Android app, the Chrome extension, and more third-party supported apps.

I haven’t set it up for auto update. I am running the PHP update script in a terminal window for now. I think I may simply use the client to update itself by setting it as a pinned tab, it would update every 30 minutes then.

Open up your config.php file in a text editor, and scroll down “SIMPLE_UPDATE_MODE” and change its flag from “false” to “true.” This will make TTRSS update your feeds for you every 30 minutes (by default, you can change this in the Preferences) as long as you’re logged in. Set it as a pinned tab, and you’ll never have a problem.

And I have the final sheet of items I may look at someday, depending on whether I actually switch in the next 7 days from Feedly to it.

Additional Reading

Installing WiFi with Fedora 24 on HP ProBook 6570b

I 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.

Upgrading to Fedora 24

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.

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.

How to convert an entire MySQL database character set and collation to UTF-8?

I found myself in need of upgrading a number of older wordpress sites to change from the old latin1_swedish_ci to UTF-8, both the character set and collation. I utilized a command line SQL prompt to accomplish this. Modify the appropriate parameters “test” for your database, and “yourpasswordhere” with your password, ymmv, and have fun.

I am using Fedora 21 and MariaDB 10.0.15

(echo ‘ALTER DATABASE `'”test”‘` CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;’; mysql -u root –password=”yourpasswordhere” “test” -e “SHOW TABLES” –batch –skip-column-names | xargs -I{} echo ‘ALTER TABLE `'{}’` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;’ ) | mysql -u root –password=”yourpasswordhere” “test”

I don’t believe I needed to login twice; however, I was rewriting this from some notes and it worked, so I left it. Feel free to send me the shorter code. I always appreciate it.

Moodle “version 5.5.31 is required and you are running 5.5.5.10.0.X”

I received this error message upgrading an older Moodle installation this weekend to Fedora 21 and Moodle 2.8.2+.

Information on the forums on moodle.org was less than gratifying with little or no work done to explain an answer, merely pontificate about this or that, or my favorite, ask for more information.

Many folks posted less helpful information explaining that a number of 5.5.5.10.0 was indeed lower than 5.5.31 and one needed to upgrade to a newer version of MariaDB. I believe that is not constructive to a community.

Others posted a link back to the Moodle Bug Report https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-43604 which is when an earlier and unrelated bug was dealt with.

As always, the answer is intertwined in the method of operations, the question itself, not being snarky about version numbers.

An administrator with an older site, upgrading to a newer site, usually leaves the config.php alone. After all, how much is in there? Usually nothing. But with upgrades to MariaDB version 10.0 and above, one needs to change, per the Moodle documentation (which I skipped), the line regarding what database is being used from MySQL to MariaDB. That one fix allows the version number to be read quickly and the update to proceed.

I have tried to contribute and answer the posts I found online in the event they are running into the same simple fix I had to make. Be nice out there, your answer should resolve an issue.