Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology
Not so long ago, I got the above message while running sudo apt upgrade on an Ubuntu Server system. This was not the first time that this kind of thing happened to me, so I started searching the web for a solution. You do get to see complaints about advertising, but these are never useful.
Accordingly, here are some possible ways of remediating the situation:
sudo systemctl mask apt-news.service
sudo systemctl mask esm-cache.service
sudo mv /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf
/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf.disabled
ubuntu-advantage-tools package, which contains the /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf file.ubuntu-pro-client package.In my case, it may have been the penultimate option on the list that I chose. In any case, I was rid of the unwanted message.
Recently, VirtualBox gained fuller support for Windows 11 and I successively set up a new Windows 11 virtual machine that I hope will supplant a Windows 10 counterpart in time. The setup itself was streamlined but I ran into such stability issues that I set the new VM aside until a new version of VirtualBox got released. That has happened with the appearance of version 7.0.2 but Windows 11 remains prone to freezing on my Linux Mint machine. Thankfully, that now is much less frequent but the need for added stability remains outstanding.
While I was thinking about trying our Virtualbox 7.0.0, I remembered a QEMU machine that I had running Windows 11. Though QEMU proved more limited than VirtualBox when it came to having easy availability of functionality like moving data in and out of the virtual machine or support for sound, there was no problem with TPM support or system stability. Since it did contain some useful data, I wondered about converting its virtual hard disk to VirtualBox format and it is easy to do. First, you need to install qemu-img and other utilities as follows:
sudo apt-get install qemu-utils
With that in place, executing a command like the following performs the required conversion. Here, the -O switch specifies the required file type of vdi in this case.
qemu-img convert -O vdi [virtual hard disk].qcow2 [virtual hard disk].vdi
While I have yet to mount it on the new Virtualbox Windows 11 virtual machine, it is good to have the old virtual hard disk available for doing so. The thought of using it as a boot drive in VirtualBox did enter my mind but the required change of drivers and other incompatibilities dissuaded me from doing so.
Recently, a message appear on some web servers that I have that exhorted me to upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04.1 using the do-release-upgrade command. In the interests of remaining current, I did just that to get another message, one like the following:
The upgrade needs a total of [amount of space with units] free space on disk `/boot`.
Please free at least an additional [amount of space with units] of disk space on `/boot`.
Empty your trash and remove temporary packages of former installations
using `sudo apt-get clean`.
Using sudo apt-get clean did not resolve the problem so the advice given was of no use. The actual problem was that there were too many old kernels cluttering up /boot and searching around the web provided that wisdom. What also came up was a single command for fixing the problem. However, removing the wrong kernel can trash a system so I took a more cautious approach. First, I listed the kernels to be removed and checked that they did not include the currently running one. This was done with the following command (broken up over several lines for clarity using the backslash character to denote continuation) and running uname -r found the details of the running kernel:
dpkg -l linux-{image,headers}-"[0-9]*" \
| awk '/ii/{print $2}' \
| grep -ve "$(uname -r \
| sed -r 's/-[a-z]+//')"
The dpkg command listed the installed kernels with awk, grep and sed filtering out unwanted sections of the text. The awk command takes the tabular output from dpkg and turns it into a list. The -v switch on the grep command gets the lines that do not match the search expression created by the sed command, while the -e switch makes grep look for patterns. The sed command removes all letters from the output of the uname command, where the -r switch produces the kernel release details, to leave on the release number of the current kernel. On being satisfied that nothing untoward would happen, the full command below (also broken up over several lines for clarity using the backslash character to denote continuation) could be executed.
sudo apt purge $(dpkg -l linux-{image,headers}-"[0-9]*" \
| awk '/ii/{print $2}' \
| grep -ve "$(uname -r \
| sed -r 's/-[a-z]+//')")
This apt to purge the unwanted kernels, thus freeing up enough space for the upgrade to continue. That happened without significant incident though there were some remediations needed on the PHP side to get the website working smoothly again.
My primary use for Ansible is doing system updates using the inbuilt apt module. Recently, I updated my main system to Linux Mint 21 and a few things like Ansible stopped working. Removing instances that I had added with pip3 sorted the problem but I then ran playbooks manually only for various warning messages to appear that I had not noticed before. What follows below is one of these.
[WARNING]: The value True (type bool) in a string field was converted to u'True' (type string). If this does not look like what you expect, quote the entire value to ensure it does not change.
The message is not so clear in some ways, not least because it had me looking for a boolean value of True when it should have been yes. A search on the web revealed something about the apt module that surprised me.: the value of the upgrade parameter is a string when others like it take boolean values of yes or no. Thus, I had passed a bareword of yes when it should have been declared in quotes as “yes”. To my mind, this is an inconsistency but I have changed things anyway to get rid of the message.
One should not do a new PC build in the middle of a heatwave if you do not want to be concerned about how fast fans are spinning and how hot things are getting. Yet, that is what I did last month after delaying the act for numerous months.
My efforts mean that I have a system built around an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU and a Gigabyte X570 Aorus Pro with 64 GB of memory and things are settling down after the initial upheaval. That also meant some adjustments to the CPU fan profile in the BIOS for quieter running while the the use of Be Quiet! Dark Rock 4 cooler also helps as does a Be Quiet! Silent Wings 3 case fan. All are components from trusted brands though I wonder how much abuse they got during their installation and subsequent running in.
Fan noise is a non-quantitative indicator of heat levels as much as touch so more quantitative means are in order. Aside from using a thermocouple device, there are in-built sensors too. My using Linux Mint means that I have the sensors command from the lm-sensors package for checking on CPU and other temperatures though hddtemp is what you need for checking on the same for hard drives. The latter can be used as follows:
sudo hddtemp /dev/sda /dev/sdb
This has to happen using administrator access and a list of drives needs to be provided because it cannot find them by itself. In my case, I have no mechanical hard drives installed in non-NAS systems and I even got to replacing a 6 TB Western Digital Green disk with an 8 TB SSD but I got the following when I tried checking on things with hddtemp:
WARNING: Drive /dev/sda doesn't seem to have a temperature sensor.
WARNING: This doesn't mean it hasn't got one.
WARNING: If you are sure it has one, please contact me ([email protected]).
WARNING: See --help, --debug and --drivebase options.
/dev/sda: Samsung SSD 870 QVO 8TB: no sensor
The cause of the message for me was that there is no entry for Samsung SSD 870 QVO 8TB in /etc/hddtemp.db so that needed to be added there. Before that could be rectified, I needed to get some additional information using smartmontools and these needed to be installed using the following command:
sudo apt-get install smartmontools
What I needed to do was check the drive’s SMART data output for extra information and that was achieved using the following command:
sudo smartctl /dev/sda -a | grep -i Temp
What this does is to look for the temperature information from smartctl output using the grep command with output from the first being passed to the second through a pipe. This yielded the following:
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0032 072 050 000 Old_age Always - 28
The first number in the above (190) is the thermal sensor’s attribute identifier and that was needed in what got added to /etc/hddtemp.db. The following command added the necessary data to the aforementioned file:
echo \"Samsung SSD 870 QVO 8TB\" 190 C \"Samsung SSD 870 QVO 8TB\" | sudo tee -a /etc/hddtemp.db
Here, the output of the echo command was passed to the tee command for adding to the end of the file. In the echo command output, the first part is the name of the drive, the second is the heat sensor identifier, the third is the temperature scale (C for Celsius or F for Fahrenheit) and the last part is the label (it can be anything that you like but I kept it the same as the name). On re-running the hddtemp command, I got output like the following so all was as I needed it to be.
/dev/sda: Samsung SSD 870 QVO 8TB: 28°C
Since then, temperatures may have cooled and the weather become more like what we usually get but I am still keeping an eye on things, especially when the system is put under load using Perl, R, Python or SAS. There may be further modifications such as changing the case or even adding water cooling, not least to have a cooler power supply unit, but nothing is being rushed as I monitor things to my satisfaction.
The Flatpak concept offers a useful way of getting the latest version of software like LibreOffice or GIMP on Linux machines because repositories are managed conservatively when it comes to the versions of included software. Ubuntu has Snaps, which are similar in concept. Both options bundle dependencies with the packaged software so that its operation can use later versions of system libraries that what may be available with a particular distribution.
However, even Flatpak depends on what is available through the repositories for a distribution as I found when a software update needed a version of the tool. The solution was to add PPA using the following command and agreeing to the prompts that arise (answering Y, in other words):
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alexlarsson/flatpak
With the new PPA instated, the usual apt commands were used to update the Flatpak package and continue with the required updates. Since then, all has gone smoothly as expected.
This year has seen some optimisation being applied to my web presences guided by the results of GTMetrix scans. It was then that I realised how slow things were, so server loads were reduced. Anything that slowed response times, such as WordPress plugins, got removed. Usage of Matomo also was curtailed in favour of Google Analytics while HTML, CSS and JS minification followed. What had yet to happen was a search for a faster server. Now, another website has been moved onto a virtual private server (VPS) to see how that would go.
Speed was not the only consideration since security was a factor too. After all, a VPS is more locked away from other users than a folder on a shared server. There also is the added sense of control, so Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates can be added using the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Certbot. That avoids the expense of using an SSL certificate provided through my shared hosting provider and a successful transition for my travel website may mean that this one undergoes the same move.
For the VPS, I chose Ubuntu 18.04 as its operating system and it came with the LAMP stack already in place. Have offload development websites, the mix of Apache, MySQL and PHP is more familiar to me than anything using Nginx or Python. It also means that .htaccess files become more useful than they were on my previous Nginx-based platform. Having full access to the operating system by means of SSH helps too and should mean that I have fewer calls on technical support since I can do more for myself. Any extra tinkering should not affect others either, since this type of setup is well known to me and having an offline counterpart means that anything riskier is tried there beforehand.
Naturally, there were niggles to overcome with the move. The first to fix was to make the MySQL instance accept calls from outside the server so that I could migrate data there from elsewhere and I even got my shared hosting setup to start using the new database to see what performance boost it might give. To make all this happen, I first found the location of the relevant my.cnf configuration file using the following command:
find / -name my.cnf
Once I had the right file, I commented out the following line that it contained and restarted the database service afterwards using another command to stop the appearance of any error 111 messages:
bind-address 127.0.0.1
service mysql restart
After that, things worked as required and I moved onto another matter: uploading the requisite files. That meant installing an FTP server so I chose proftpd since I knew that well from previous tinkering. Once that was in place, file transfer commenced.
When that was done, I could do some testing to see if I had an active web server that loaded the website. Along the way, I also instated some Apache modules like mod-rewrite using the a2enmod command, restarting Apache each time I enabled another module.
Then, I discovered that Textpattern needed php-7.2-xml installed, so the following command was executed to do this:
apt install php7.2-xml
Then, the following line was uncommented in the correct php.ini configuration file that I found using the same method as that described already for the my.cnf configuration and that was followed by yet another Apache restart:
extension=php_xmlrpc.dll
Addressing the above issues yielded enough success for me to change the IP address in my Cloudflare dashboard so it pointed at the VPS and not the shared server. The changeover happened seamlessly without having to await DNS updates as once would have been the case. It had the added advantage of making both WordPress and Textpattern work fully.
With everything working to my satisfaction, I then followed the instructions on Certbot to set up my new Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate. Aside from a tweak to a configuration file and another Apache restart, the process was more automated than I had expected so I was ready to embark on some fine-tuning to embed the new security arrangements. That meant updating .htaccess files and Textpattern has its own, so the following addition was needed there:
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
This complemented what was already in the main .htaccess file and WordPress allows you to include http(s) in the address it uses, so that was another task completed. The general .htaccess only needed the following lines to be added:
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.assortedexplorations.com/$1 [R,L]
What all these achieve is to redirect insecure connections to secure ones for every visitor to the website. After that, internal hyperlinks without https needed updating along with any forms so that a padlock sign could be shown for all pages.
With the main work completed, it was time to sort out a lingering niggle regarding the appearance of an FTP login page every time a WordPress installation or update was requested. The main solution was to make the web server account the owner of the files and directories, but the following line was added to wp-config.php as part of the fix even if it probably is not necessary:
define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');
There also was the non-operation of WP Cron and that was addressed using WP-CLI and a script from Bjorn Johansen. To make double sure of its effectiveness, the following was added to wp-config.php to turn off the usual WP-Cron behaviour:
define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true);
Intriguingly, WP-CLI offers a long list of possible commands that are worth investigating. A few have been examined but more await attention.
Before those, I still need to get my new VPS to send emails. So far, sendmail has been installed, the hostname changed from localhost and the server restarted. More investigations are needed but what I have not is faster than what was there before, so the effort has been rewarded already.
Having moved beyond the slow response and larger memory footprint of Firefox ESR, I am using Firefox Developer Edition in its place even if it means living without a status bar at the bottom of the window. Hopefully, someone will create an equivalent of the old add-on bar extensions that worked before the release of Firefox Quantum.
Firefox Developer Edition may be pre-release software with some extras for web developers like being able to to drill into an HTML element and see its properties but I am finding it stable enough for everyday use. It is speedy too, which helps, and it has its own profile so it can co-exist on the same machine as regular releases of Firefox like its ESR and Quantum variants.
Installation takes a little added effort though and there are various options available. My chosen method involved Ubuntu Make. Installing this involves setting up a new PPA as the first step and the following commands added the software to my system:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-desktop/ubuntu-make
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-make
With the above completed, it was simple to install Firefox Developer edition using the following command:
umake web firefox-dev
Where things got a bit more complicated was getting entries added to the Cinnamon Menu and Docky. The former was sorted using the cinnamon-menu-editor command but the latter needed some tinkering with my firefox-developer.desktop file found in .local/share/applications/ within my user area to get the right icon shown. Discovering this took me into .gconf/apps/docky-2/Docky/Interface/DockPreferences/%gconf.xml where I found the location of the firefox-developer.desktop that needed changing. Once this was completed, there was nothing else to do from the operating system side.
Within Firefox itself, I opted to turn off warnings about password logins on non-https websites by going to about:config using the address bar, then looking for security.insecure_field_warning.contextual.enabled and changing its value from True to False. Some may decry this but there are some local websites on my machine that need attention at times. Otherwise, Firefox is installed with user access so I can update it as if it were a Windows or MacOS application and that is useful given that there are frequent new releases. All is going as I want it so far.
This is how I got around problem that occurred when I was updating a virtualised Ubuntu 16.04 instance that I have. My usual way to do this is using apt-get or apt from the command line and the process halted because a pre-removal script for the upgrade of avahi-dnsconf failed. The cause was its not disabling the avahi daemon beforehand so I need to execute the following command before repeating the operation:
sudo systemctl disable avahi-daemon
Once the upgrade had completed, then it was time to re-enable the service using the following command:
sudo systemctl enable avahi-daemon
Ideally, this would completed without such manual intervention and there is a bug report for the unexpected behaviour. Hopefully, it will be sorted soon but these steps will fix things for now.
There was a time when the only recommended way to upgrade Linux Mint from one version to another was to do a fresh installation with back-ups of data and a list of the installed applications created from a special tool.
Even so, it never stopped me doing my own style of in situ upgrade though some might see that as a risky option. More often than not, that actually worked without causing major problems in a time when Linux Mint releases were more tightly tied to Ubuntu’s own six-monthly cycle.
In recent years, Linux Mint’s releases have kept in line with Ubuntu’s Long Term Support (LTS) editions instead. That means that any major change comes only every two years with minor releases in between those. The latter are delivered through Linux Mint’s Update Manager so the process is a simple one to implement. Still, upgrades are not forced on you so it is left to your discretion as to when you need to upgrade since all main and interim versions get the same extended level of support. In fact, the recommendation is not to upgrade at all unless something is broken on your own installation.
For a number of reasons, I stuck with that advice by sticking on my main machine with Linux Mint 17.3 instead of upgrading to Linux Mint 18. The fact that I broke things on another machine using an older method of upgrading provided even more encouragement.
However, I subsequently discovered another means of upgrading between major versions of Linux Mint that had some endorsement from the project. There still are warnings about testing a live DVD version of Linux Mint on your PC first and backing up your data beforehand. Another task is ensuring that you are upgraded from a fully up to data Linux Mint 17.3 installation.
When you are ready, you can install mintupgrade using the following command:
sudo apt-get install mintupgrade
When that is installed, there is a sequence of tasks that you need to do. The first of these is to simulate an upgrade to test for the appearance of untoward messages and resolve them. Repeating any checking until all is well gets a recommendation. The command is as follows:
mintupgrade check
Once you are happy that the system is ready, the next step is to download the updated packages so they are on your machine ahead of their installation. Only then should you begin the upgrade process. The two commands that you need to execute are below:
mintupgrade download
mintupgrade upgrade
Once these have completed, you can restart your system. In my case the whole process worked well with only my PHP installation needing attention. A clash between different versions of the scripting interpretor was addressed by removing the older one since PHP 7 is best kept for sake of testing. Beyond that, a reinstallation of VMware Player and the move from version 18 to version 18.1, there hardly was anything more to do and there was next to no real disruption. That is just as well since I depend heavily on my main PC these days. The backup option of a full installation would have left me clearing up things for a few days afterwards since I use a bespoke selection of software.