xcr.jp

Woke up face down on my uncharged mobile phone.
Went to Lowes and bought some nice planks to put on top of a broken glass table I found.
Discovered one of my push button hood pins on the Dodge don’t work right, the fun way.
Bought bright green tie down straps for the Dodge.
Verbally assaulted another human because he was coughing and touching all the power tool models.
Reported him to the manager who took it very seriously.
Sanded said wood and finished the table.
Reloaded my burner laptop.
Organized my cable crates.
Had a Zoom call on burner laptop with yet another solar company.
Signed an agreement for a solar power system for the house.
Reloaded my burner laptop.
Ate pizza rolls.
Added gravel to where the gutter dumps water.
I want Olive Garden.

I did something really really dumb last night….

I made my new Plex VM on my ESXi environment that I recently stood up on an R820 with 1tb of ram to move away from my old R910 with 256 gigs.  Anyways, I got all the automated stuff working right at the system level so all I needed to do was export the config from the source server. I connected directly to the source server and loaded XFCE4 and Filezilla so I could have the lazy GUI for SSH transfer of the files between the two since there were some plugins I wasn’t going to bring over. Before I started the transfer I had to destroy the test config on the destination server which I started to do through Filezilla which is just telling Filezilla to delete everything in /var/lib/plexmediaserver and that started out fine. It was slow. When you delete through Filezilla it deletes everything item by item. Delete this file, ok it’s deleted, now delete that file, ok that is deleted X thousands of files. I stopped that process and decided to just use the terminal to delete. I opened it and ran rm -r /var/lib/plexmediaserver.

It completed in about 30 seconds.

It was the wrong server. It was the source server. So all those months of tuning and tweaking gone. Shit.

A few perks though. My actual library data is fine. My Plex is a fresh install. I got to turn off the R910 immediately because there was no going back. Now my server room is noticeably cooler because that massive system is off.

My PLEX host has RAM, it’s currently a Dell R910 with 256 gigs of ram. I don’t want to murder my twin 1tb SSD’s doing all that fancy transcoding so I have mine use 50 gigs of ram as a temporary folder. You can use much less but I on average with 3 streams going am using less than 20 gigs of ram for the system so I can spare the memory.

Here’s how to accomplish this on Ubuntu.

sudo mkdir /mnt/plexdisk
sudo mount -t tmpfs -o rw,size=50G tmpfs /mnt/plexdisk

verify it’s mounted
df -h

before we make it a forever change, make a backup cause one mistake can be bad.
sudo cp -v /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.backup

make it mount on boot
sudo nano /etc/fstab

Add this to the bottom then CTL+X to exit and save
tmpfs  /mnt/plexdisk  tmpfs  rw,size=50G  0   0

Reboot if you want.

Now to the PLEX interface.

Under server settings navigate to Transcoder

Set the Transcoder temporary directory to /mnt/plexdisk

either reboot or just restart the PLEX service

systemctl restart plexmediaserver.service or whatever you called it.

I learned the hard way that my Dell PowerEdge R910 with 48 cores and 256 gigs of ram doesn’t support VT-x… It runs Ubuntu Server 18.04 currently and I decided to put Virtual Box on it because that has the easiest work around to get virtualization going on an unsupported processor. Virtualization is enabled in the BIOS, I’m not an idiot.

To get those VMs going anyways I had to lie to the software using the following command and I used one of the following processors since you don’t need to tell it to be a Xeon for a basic Domain Controller or backup appliance. You may need to disable USB on the VM also.

VBoxManage modifyvm “<VM name>” –cpu-profile “Intel Xeon X5482 3.20GHz”
VBoxManage modifyvm “<VM name>” –cpu-profile “Intel Core i5-3570”
VBoxManage modifyvm “<VM name>” –cpu-profile “Intel Core i7-2635QM”
VBoxManage modifyvm “<VM name>” –cpu-profile “Intel Core i7-3960X”
VBoxManage modifyvm “<VM name>” –cpu-profile “Intel Core i7-5600U”
VBoxManage modifyvm “<VM name>” –cpu-profile “Intel Core i7-6700K”

Welp, I’m nowhere near my server which runs Debian and I want to iDRAC in to do things but I forgot the password or never set it but I’m cheap and buy used so I guess I’ll just reset it remotely…. Here’s how.

sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install -y ipmitool

Now that that’s loaded. I specifically want to reset the password for a user with admin rights so I need a list of users.

ipmitool user list 2

in the dump look under Channel Priv Limit. Find your user with ADMINISTRATOR listed and not the ID number. If you’re just resetting root then odds are it’s ID 2.

ipmitool user set password 2 #####

Replace ##### with what you want your password to be. Password changes are instant, go back to the GUI and you can sign in.

I guess YouTube needs a site for your Google AdSense to be created. I for some reason at the time of posting have 1800+ subscribers on the YouTube so why not right?

Here’s my dumbest video lately.

Making a new file server is great, everyone loves a brand new server with all the old cat videos Karen has pasted randomly throughout it(maybe enable data dedupe to save some space). This use case is for when you have an old file server that has been migrated to a new file server and you want the \\newservername\share to work but also want \\oldservername\share to work but it won’t unless there’s a server name alias.

Now the right way is to do something with group policy and update their mapped drives to your new server but there’s all that “I know more than IT does” and “I do what I want..WHY DOES IT BREAK EVERYTHING?” users so….

Verify the machine account no longer exists in AD, delete if you must as long as that system is no longer active. If it is then you’re just boned, this will not work.

From Admin CMD(ideally from that server):

NETDOM COMPUTERNAME [yournewserver] /add:[oldserver.windrammer.net]

Actually type COMPUTERNAME then the new server name.

Use this when you and your friendly companies both on Office 365 want to share free/busy information for better meeting scheduling. PowerShell method at the bottom.

On the cool tenant

From the Office 365 admin center dashboard, go to Admin > Exchange.
Go to Organization > Sharing.
Under Organization Sharing, click New .
In New organization relationship, in the Relationship name box, type a friendly name for the organization relationship as “Cool Guys to Other Guys”
In the Domains to share with box, type the domain for the external Office 365 or Exchange on-premises organization as xcr.jp(if there are additional domains in the org they will automatically populate).
Select the Enable calendar free/busy information sharing check box to turn on calendar sharing with the domains. Set the sharing level for calendar free/busy information and set which users can share calendar free/busy information.
To set the free/busy access level, select one of the following:

-Calendar free/busy information with time only.
-Calendar free/busy with time, subject, and location.

Click save to create the organization relationship.
Once the setup is completed, Organization relationship should show up the following information auto populated into it.
Also make sure that all the federated domains are well populated into the Organization relationship.

On the Other Guys tenant:

From the Office 365 admin center dashboard, go to Admin > Exchange.
Go to organization > sharing.
Under Organization Sharing, click New .
In new organization relationship, in the Relationship name box, type a friendly name for the organization relationship as “Other Guys to Cool Guys”
In the Domains to share with box, type the domain for the external Office 365 or Exchange on-premises organization as windrammer.net(if there are additional domains in the org they will automatically populate)
Select the Enable calendar free/busy information sharing check box to turn on calendar sharing with the domains. Set the sharing level for calendar free/busy information and set which users can share calendar free/busy information.
To set the free/busy access level, select one of the following:

Calendar free/busy information with time only.
Calendar free/busy with time, subject, and location.
Click save to create the organization relationship.
Once the setup is completed, Organization relationship should show up the following information auto populated into it.
Also make sure that all the federated domains are well populated into the Organization relationship.

OR POWERSHELL!!!!

From the Cool Guys tenant
New-OrganizationRelationship -Name “Other Guys to Cool Guys” -DomainNames “xcr..jp” -FreeBusyAccessEnabled $true -FreeBusyAccessLevel LimitedDetails

From the Other Guys tenant
New-OrganizationRelationship -Name “Cool Guys to Other Guys” -DomainNames “windrammer.net” -FreeBusyAccessEnabled $true -FreeBusyAccessLevel LimitedDetails

Recently the I had a need to add additional systems to a DFS-R group but discovered replication in general was broken. Ran the report and was told this: “A database problem is blocking replication on volume D:” Lucky for me I deal with shitty systems regularly and this was just another Monday. Here’s the 5 lines you need then wait a little bit(maybe a few hours depending on file count) for replication to catch up and go.

• net stop dfsr
• icacls “D:\System Volume Information” /grant “Domain Admins”:F
• cd “D:\System Volume Information”move DFSR D:\DFSR_backup
• icacls “D:\System Volume Information” /remove:g “Domain Admins”
• net start dfsr

I just woke up from a weird dream and wanted to keep the memory. Before I start, I haven’t heard from her in almost 2 months except for her saying one time to give her time. So this next bit is completely out of nowhere.

I don’t have a reason why but I didn’t question it either. Her kids came to stay with me for a week before school started and I absolutely loved every minute of it. The girl is a huge book worm and loves to read so day 1 we went to the library and she picked out a stack of books that I’d never heard of but we got them and her brother picked out one about monkeys and one about tigers. On the drive home the girl discovered my noise canceling range headphones in the back seat of my car and said her mom had some just like them(they were actually mine that I left there and got a new set so we could have a matching set). I said that’s cool. So for the rest of the week she wore them always. Her brother wanted some headphones too so I gave him my gaming headset and he used it on his Nintendo DS but it has a super long cord and he got it caught a handful of times and clotheslined himself once which was super funny. The week flew by with going to parks and RC cars in the back yard and playing a game called “Will it float?” Which resulted in a lot of Lego in my pool, swimming, watching movies at home before bed and a whole lot of videogames or YouTube of other people playing videogames. They had their own room but a few nights they slept in mine which meant the world to me. They lived off pizza, mac&cheese, gogurt, fries and rice. I made every effort to just be normal and not think about them leaving soon but the time came where the boy told me his mom was on her way to get them and she’d be there soon. I told them I needed to talk to them. Well I told the boy and had to motion to the girl to take her headphones off. I told them I love them both very much and I miss them every day they aren’t around and I’m sorry I can’t be there with them but they can always call or text me if they ask their mom first. They both just sat there looking at me like I was crazy. Then the daughter just says “why?” I tried to talk about that because their mom and I weren’t together that meant I wouldn’t be their dad and her son just looked down the rest of the time. I reminded them both I will always be here for them and I want updates from them all the time. Then headlights flashed by the window and we all knew that meant mom was here, they gave me a big hug and I woke up.

God Dammit.