rubycoloredglasses

There has been a lot of hype concerning crypto currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum recently. I even had some of my own minor gains through an account I have with Coinbase.com.

I haven’t been much into the zeitgeist of Bitcoin investment, or even the possibilities of blockchain methods used for real-world applications other than currency, until now.

Here are my notes for configuring a new Ubuntu server with a single user with sudo rights, with the ‘root’ user login disabled in the SSHd configuration.

This guide assumes that you have just created a server from the web interface of a service like Linode or Digital Ocean, and you know the root password.

I ran into an issue where we were mocking HTTP responses 400+ in our Rspec tests, which resulted in our application logging an error and a stack trace. When we expect errors because we’re using WebMock to emulate an HTTP 500 response, logging the stack trace involved can be too verbose.

I’ve been using a Wordpress site for my blog for years, but that has become cumbersome, especially when you have to deal with your website being exploited due to holes in one of the many plugins that your site is relying on.

Recently I learned a few of the basic commands needed to use the GNU screen command to keep a command line session running even after I’ve disconnected from a remote VPS. I learned this specifically so that I could keep irssi running and logged into a specific IRC channel, so I could return to the session and view the history of messages that I had missed.

I tried to flash the TP-Link TL-WDR4300 router with a custom OpenWRT image recently, and after doing so I was unable to connect to the device like I expected.

Here is how you can recover / un-brick the device.

Often open source projects or organizations use an IRC channel on FreeNode to provide support to users and/or developers. I’m trying to retain familiarity with the command line, rather than become completely dependent on GUI applications, so I’ve decided to use IRSSI instead of Pidgin or Adium (Mac OS X).

Here are some Gems we recommend that you checkout.

I am adding a script to our server using Ansible. The roles are all setup to support multiple Wordpress websites based on the dictionary defined in ansible/group_vars/wordpress_sites.yml, as my Ansible configuration is based on Trellis.

I recently was running into issues with Vagrant where I’d start the virtual machine using the ‘vagrant up’ command, but I’d receive an error when trying to use vagrant ssh.

$ vagrant ssh
ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host