Tinkering

To setup Apache Guacamole I’ll be following the install guide here:

https://guacamole.apache.org/doc/gug/installing-guacamole.html

Looks like the first step is to have a working Java Servlet, which I don’t have. I’m going with Apache Tomcat as it’s been around forever so there is lots of documentation. Also, Ubuntu has package files which always makes things easier.

‘apt search tomcat’ shows me that Tomcat 9 is the version that Ubuntu has included with LTS 22. So I’ll just do ‘apt install tomcat9’, and see how far that gets me.

The following NEW packages will be installed:
  ca-certificates-java default-jre-headless java-common libeclipse-jdt-core-java libgraphite2-3 libharfbuzz0b libpcsclite1 libtcnative-1 libtomcat9-java openjdk-11-jre-headless tomcat9 tomcat9-common
0 upgraded, 12 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

That gets me the above packages, and once that install is finished, I’m going to install the suggested packages. They all look useful…

Suggested packages:
  default-jre pcscd libnss-mdns fonts-dejavu-extra fonts-ipafont-gothic fonts-ipafont-mincho fonts-wqy-microhei | fonts-wqy-zenhei fonts-indic tomcat9-admin tomcat9-docs tomcat9-examples tomcat9-user

After that finished I confirm that Tomcat is running with ‘systemctl status tomcat9’, and then point my browser to the webserver’s internal IP on port 8080 and I see this lovely message.

That was much easier than I expected. I think that’s it for day one as it’s 6 am and I’m almost done with my shift.

Looking at the logs it’s been down since October 22, 2023. I’m not sure if that is when my fiber IP changed, or when the line from the fiber jack to the router in the basement broke. The line quite working right before I had to work from home, so I just put the wifi router directly into the fiber jack so I could work, and I just yesterday got around to fixing that. I ended up just replacing RJ45 connectors on both ends of the cable.

After the box was back on the internet, I updated my current public IP with namecheap and started running updates on Ubuntu. I didn’t realize when you run ‘apt upgrade’ that it will move you to the latest LTS version, so I spent about half an hour figuring out why Apache would not start. Turns out one of the several warning messages I clicked through was telling me it was going to install PHP 8.1, and remove 7.6. Since I made sure to tell it not to update any of my config files, this caused Apache to crash when trying to start. I just had to disable the old module and enable the new one.

So the site is back up but just a quick run through certbot and it’s secure again too!

All this is in preparation for me to setup Apache Guacamole on the site. This should allow be to get around all the filtering at work so I can remote into my home computer and work on things I can’t on my work PC. My next post will probably be about setting that up. It i fairly complicated. No prebuilt apt packages.

I finally bought a new router to keep the site up. My old one kept breaking the firewall rule, so the sure had been offline for months. I bought an Asus this time. Wifi 6, whatever that is.

I’ve been trying to figure out why my SSL cert wouldn’t renew with certbot. I haven’t put much effort into it until today. Turns out my router wasn’t actually forwarding ports, so the site was completely down. I of course could load it locally, and didn’t realize it wasn’t on the internet. lol. Simple fix, I had to delete the port forwarding entries and re-add them. I hope that doesn’t mean my router is getting too old, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

No wonder we don’t understand each other. Damn fools got an n for a p, and a p for an r.

If you delete too many message threads, it’ll display them as bubbles instead of a list. It doesn’t appear to be something I can change.

Posts are installed and the dinning room is way more level. Note I did not say level, just more level. Hundred year old house, blah blah blah.

I saw white duct tape at the drug store and grabbed it right after they finished, so this happened. Not sure if I’ll leave it, or add more.

The guys came and installed the new concrete pads for the support posts. They dug down a couple feet and put some pretty good sized pads in. The basement floor is only like an inch think of concrete, so the posts weren’t really doing much anyway. They don’t guarantee that they can get the steel beam bent back into place, but it won’t get any worse.

They’ll come back in 7-10 days and install the posts.

The new house came with a security and camera system. 2 TB NVR. I had to reset the thing to get into it, which was surprisingly simple. There was a switch wired to the mother board. I just had to hold it for like 30 seconds while powered on the device. Seems to be an embedded system. I’m not really seeing familiar logos on the board or anything, so I will probably stop with just having a working NVR, and not try to put linux on it.