All posts by Mooky Desai

Technology

Minecraft 1.17 Java Error

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I downloaded the new 1.17 jar and updated my server as I have done numerous times. I received the error below this time around:

Error: LinkageError occurred while loading main class net.minecraft.server.Main
java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: net/minecraft/server/Main has been compiled by a more recent version of the Java Runtime (class file version 60.0), this version of the Java Runtime only recognizes class file versions up to 55.0

I updated my java version using the commands below.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linuxuprising/java
sudo apt update
sudo apt install oracle-java16-installer --install-recommends

After updating it, it started up with no problems.

Uncategorized

Galaxy S21 Ultra – Pic from Video

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I bought a shiny new Galaxy S21 Ultra the other day and wanted to try out the “Pic from Video” feature. After pulling my hair out a few times, I resorted to Googling. The hair pulling resumed.

The short answer here is:

Go to Camera

Select Video mode

Click the 5th Icon on the top

Scroll that bar to the right and select 8K/24 (see below)

Shoot your video

From here, Samsung says…”Go to Gallery and click the little icon”…YOU CANT (but dont pull your hair out).

Once you are in the Gallery, click the 3 little dots (ellipses) in the bottom right

Select “Open in Video Player”

NOW, if you click on your screen, you will see a little icon on the top right of the screen and you can pause your video and click the icon to capture a pic.

Hope that helps. Good luck!

Rants

Fabwerx – Sun Valley

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This is a long winded 1 Star Review. They have way too many projects going on and also manufacture stuff. One small shop, not enough people, horrible customer service. You will wait and wait and wait and wait. They dont answer phones, dont respond to emails, string you along…and then post on their social media like they turn things around “while you wait”. Dont fall for it.

About 6 months ago I bought a spankin’ new Polaris Pro XP 4 SXS (UTV). I jokingly call it the red rocket. In my constant obsessive quest to customize every vehicle I own, I pre-ordered a sweet new cage with roof, optional rear chase lights, front windshield, and any other option you could get on it. I subsequently bought a bunch of other lighting accessories to mount on the cage. Bunch of lights from Baja Designs, a few thing from KC HiLites, and some 5150 187 whips.

I was looking around the internet and came across this video from UTV Source and a company called Fabwerx was doing a full custom build on a PRO XP 4. Turns out, the shop just happened right around the corner from me so I stopped by. I met with Thad the owner, told him that I had a cage and bunch of accessories that I wanted him to install for me. He gave me a reasonable price and he told me to let him know when I had the cage.

Fast forward about a month and I got word that my cage would be ready in a couple of weeks. This is where the fun began.

I called him, left numerous messages, I emailed him, I stopped by the shop (he wasnt there), so I hit him up on Instagram where I saw him helping people out “while they wait”. He mentioned he was busy and would let me know when he could “fit me in”. Crickets. Hit him up again. Same story, “we are crazy busy. Ill check the cal and let you know”. Crickets. Pinged him AGAIN, he said sorry, crazy busy, ill call you tomorrow. I think you know how that went. I tried calling again, no answer. I finally just said, hey I’m not trying to waste either of our time. If you cant do it, just let me know. I got the “crazy busy” speech yet again. I felt like I was dealing with Dory at this point. I was frustrated and sent him a last chance text saying, “maybe IG DM’s, emails, and/or phone calls arent the proper way to schedule a cage install with you. Can you let me know how all your customers schedule work with you?”. I finally got an honest text from him saying, “Honestly, we are swamped, try these other shops in Simi Valley or Santa Clarita”. Finally some honesty out of this guy.

I replied back saying thanks for being honest, if you could have told me that a month ago, I could have had my cage on already. “Good luck”.

His response? “Sorry pal. good luck to you too” followed by a thumbs down emoji. As if I had rubbed him the wrong way. Super classy.

He gets minus stars. I would stay clear away from this place. They do good design and fab work but getting them to do anything in a timely fashion wont happen. Besides, there are plenty of other places that can do the same thing. SDR Motorsports has much better design and engineering if you ask me. I have another friend that has a Turbo S and ordered a cage and much more Fabwerx. Same story. He had to wait over 2 months to get his cage and then another month to get a slot to install it. And this was for a cage they sold readily through UTV source all day long.

Speaking of UTV Source, remember that video? Watch the video and you will see how frustrated the owner is by the time he picked up his UTV. The 1st video was posted July 15th. The “reveal” video was posted September 20th. “A tornado that spun out of control”. I dont think it was a good spin personally.

Im going to try a couple of other shops around my area. Ill update this when I get my cage installed.

UPDATE: 3/4/2021

SDR Motorsports recommended a few shops to me. One was DirtDirect Motorsports in the San Fernando Valley. They are right by the San Fernando Mission, in fact. I had a brief conversation with Raul, he provided me with a reasonable quote, gave me a date to bring the car and parts and BOOM, that was that. They are very knowledgeable, informative, and helpful and exactly what you want when you are about to drop thousands on upgrades for your baby. They have had my car for about 2 weeks and even worked directly with SDR to obtain some missing parts from their kit. I cant say enough good things about these guys. I called numerous shops to get my project off the ground, these guys are by FAR the best. Big thanks to Tim @ SDR for being a great business owner too. It took quite some time to get my kit but he has always been very responsive and goes the extra mile to make sure you are taken care of.

Happy off-roading everyone. Stay safe out there.

Uncategorized

Chakros.com

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Completely fraudulent website. Dont order anything from this place. I was looking for a winch for my UTV, it showed on in a Google shopping search at a great price. I ordered it using PayPal and it never showed up but my bank account was charged. All the information in the PayPal transaction had foreign characters (Chinese?), the email address never responded and the tracking information showed that it was delivered on a date BEFORE the ship date. I have filed a claim through PayPal but not holding my breath. Again, http://www.chakros.com…looks like they primarily sell jewelry…TOTAL FRAUD.

UPDATE (3/4/2021): PayPal determined that this was, in fact, a fraudulent website with numerous complaints and refunded me in full.

Technology

Terraform on Windows 101

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Create a folder called “bin” in %USERPROFILE%

Start–>Run–>%USERPROFILE%–>create a folder called “bin”

Download Terraform

https://www.terraform.io/downloads.html
Save the .exe in the “bin” folder you created

Set Windows “PATH” Variable

System Properties–>Environment Variables
Highight PATH
Click “Edit”
Click “New”
Add %USERPROFILE%\bin

Create a user in AWS for Terraform

In AWS, go to IAM
Create a user called “terraform”
programmatic access only
Attach existing policies directly
Administrator access (proceed with caution!)
Copy the Access Key ID (save to credentials store like KeePass or an excel spreadsheet for now)
Copy the Secret Access Key (save to credentials store)
Or download the .CSV and grab the values

Create a folder called .aws on your PC

Make sure to add a “.” at the end of the folder name or it will throw an error

Create a credentials file

Create a new file called “credentials” in the .aws directory (remove the extension)
Using the ID and Key from above, make it look like this:
Line 1: [default]
Line 2: aws_access_key_id=your_key_id_here
Line 3: aws_secret_access_key=your_access_key_here
Save the file (again, make sure to remove the .txt extension or it wont work)

Download and install Git for Windows

https://gitforwindows.org

Create a folder called TF_Code for your working files

I created mine on my desktop

Open Git Bash, navigate to your working directory

cd desktop
cd TF_Code

Make the directory a Git repository

git init

Create a new file with VI

vi first_code.tf
Line 1: provider “aws” {
Line 2: profile = “default”
Line 3: region = “us-west-2”
Line 4: }
Line 6: resource “aws_s3_bucket” “tf_course” {
Line 7: bucket = “tf-course-uniqueID”
Line 8: acl = “private”
Line 9: }

Commit the code

git add first_code.tf
git commit -m “some commit message”

Try Terraform! (in Git Bash)

terraform init
Downloads and Initializes plugins

Apply the code

terraform apply
yes (to perform the actions)

Check your AWS account (S3), you should see a new S3 bucket!

Delete the bucket

terraform plan -destroy -out=example.plan
terraform apply example.plan

Your bucket will now be deleted!

To recreate the bucket, just run the ‘terraform apply’ command again, say yes, and…BOOM, your bucket is created again!

Hope that helps. Good luck and happy computing!

Technology

SSH from PuTTY to GCP Compute Engine

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First off, if you are trying to securely connect to your enterprise production network and instances, there are better (safer) methods (architectures) to do this. OSLogin or federating your Azure AD for instance, might be more secure and scalable. I run a pointless website (this one) with nothing to really lose across a handful of instances. This is a hobby.

Second, I recently got a dose of humble pie when trying to use PuTTY on Windows to connect to a Ubuntu instance in GCP. I was generally using gCloud command-line for getting my app running but I got a wild hair up my ass this morning to try and just use PuTTY to avoid the step of logging into Google Cloud (via Chrome) for administration. I am fairly use to AWS where I just create an instance, download the .pem file, convert it to a ppk with PuTTYgen, and then use that along with the default login (ec2-user or ubuntu) to connect to my minecraft and web servers. GCP was a little different.

Once I read a few docs from Google searches, it became much more apparent vs reading the GCP docs. Here is how I did it.

Download PuTTYgen if you dont have it already.

Launch PuTTYgen.

Click on “Generate“. I used a 2048 bit RSA key.

Move your mouse around the box to generate a key.

In the “Key comment” field, replace the data there with a username you want to use to connect to your Compute Engine instance (highlighted)

Copy the ENTIRE contents of the public key (the data in the “public key for pasting…”) box. It should end with the username you want to connect with if you scroll down.

Click on “Save Private Key” and select a location/path that is secure (and one that you will remember!).

Create a new Compute Engine instance or go to an existing instance. From the VM instances page, click on the instance name. In my case it was “minecraft001”.

At the top of the page, click on “Edit“.

Scroll almost all the way to the bottom and you will see an “SSH Keys” section.

Click on “show and edit“

Click on “+ Add Item“

Paste in the key data you copied from PuTTYgen from the step above.

  • You will notice that it extracts the username from your key on the left. This is the username you will use from PuTTY.

On the same page, click on “Save” at the bottom of the page.

On the VM instance details page, find the “External IP” section and copy the IP address (the cascaded window icon will add it to your buffer).

Now open or go back to your PuTTY client (not PuTTYgen).

Paste the IP address into your PuTTY client.

On the left side of the PuTTY client, scroll down to the “Connection” section and click the “+” to expand it

Click the “+” next to the “SSH” section

HIGHLIGHT the “Auth” section. Dont expand it.


Click on “Browse…“

Find the Private Key file you saved from earlier (should have a .ppk file extension). Double click to select and use it.

Scroll back up and highlight the Session category.

From here you can either name your connection and Save it under “saved sessions“…or just click the “Open” button.

It should make a connection to your Compute Instance and ask for a username. Supply the username you specified in the step above and voila! I used “jonny” in my example.

That’s it! Happy computing!

Technology

Pushing Docker Containers to GitHub

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I recently went through the process of building a dockerfile from scratch. I wont get into the details of that process but I did come across an error when trying to publish my package to GitHub Packages.

I tried to do a sudo docker push docker.pkg.github.com/mookyd/mymooky/mymooky:latest (my repo) and was thrown the error:

unauthorized: Your request could not be authenticated by the GitHub Packages service. Please ensure your access token is valid and has the appropriate scopes configured.

Its pretty clear what needed to happen but I thought my credentials would be enough since I wasnt using a script per se. I used docker login and provided my username and password and tried the command again. Same error.

After doing some reading, I discovered that you need to pass a “Personal Access Token” as a password. I generated a PAT under Settings–> Developer Settings –> Personal Access Tokens. I gave the token the access to the repo and to read and write packages. I then used docker login and passed the token string to login. After that, I was able to use docker push to upload my image.

Technology

Minikube on VirtualBox on Ubuntu on VirtualBox

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I recently needed a small lab environment to sharpen my Kubernetes skills. I setup Minikube on an Ubuntu VM running 18.04.4 LTS (bionic). This VM was created on my Windows Desktop in VirtualBox. Confused yet? Some of the commands can leave your environment insecure so do not do this in your Production Internet facing environment.

To get started, I downloaded and installed VirtualBox onto my Windows PC. I then created an Ubuntu 18.04 VM and make sure the number of vCPUs on your VM is greater than or equal to 2.

First step is to update your VM.

  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https (if using 1.4 or earlier)
  • sudo apt-get upgrade

Install VirtualBox on your Ubuntu VM

  • sudo apt install virtualbox virtualbox-ext-pack

Download Minikube

  • wget https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64

Make it executable

  • sudo chmod +x minikube-linux-amd64

Move it so its in path

  • sudo mv minikube-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/minikube

Download kubectl

  • curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/curl -s https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/stable.txt/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl

Make it executable

  • chmod +x ./kubectl
  • sudo mv ./kubectl /usr/local/bin/kubectl

Check that its working properly

  • kubectl version -o json

I received an error saying docker wasn’t in $PATH. You may or may not see this error.

Install docker

  • curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com/ | sh

Start Minikube

  • sudo minikube start –vm-driver=virtualbox

Start the Kubernetes Dashboard

  • minikube dashboard
  • minikube dashboard –url

If you want to view the dashboard remotely, you will need to run the following commands:

  • sudo kubectl proxy –address=’0.0.0.0′ –disable-filter=true

You will get a message saying “Starting to serve on [::]:8001”

Hopefully this helps. If you get stuck or have a way to optimize this, please comment below.

Kudos to https://computingforgeeks.com/how-to-install-minikube-on-ubuntu-18-04/ for helping me get started.

Construction

Valves vs Diverters

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Ignorance is bliss.

Valve – the thing that opens and closes to let the water start flowing to your bathroom.

Diverter – the thing that reroutes your flowing water from your bathtub spigot to the shower head. Remember that little thing you used to pull up on and the shower would come on? That’s a diverter that diverted the water from your bathtub faucet to your shower.

Valve with integrated diverter – Allows you to turn on water and send it from the tub to the shower all in one fancy unit.

Trim – The actual KNOBS. The actual VALVES and DIVERTERS go in the wall and you never see them after the tile is on (rough in). The trim is the pretty shiny piece that makes the valves and diverters move. Dont confuse these with escutcheons. Escutcheons are the big plates that cover the ugly holes in the tile. You usually have one over the shower arm as well. They are sometimes referred to as flanges too (or cover plates).

Settings – The Shower, The bathtub faucet, The handheld shower…are all “settings”. If you want to run the shower and the handheld together, that is considered another “setting”.

I am in the process of renovating my house. While we are planning on doing the entire house, we started with our guest bathroom. It has a traditional bathtub with shower design. I wanted to give my daughters a little bench seat and a hand shower to use so they have a safe bathing environment as they grow up and learn about female hygiene. Adding a hand shower seemed like a straight forward thing to do.

I took a quick trip to Pacific Sales and the salesman was super helpful. He helped me piece together a kit that would accommodate my requirements. It was like 9 different pieces. I thought I needed like 3.

What was all this stuff I came home with? It turns out, while it was a good kit, I could have streamlined my design if I had some better knowledge of how this stuff works. Hopefully this post helps someone else in the same boat.

Valves vs Diverters. I called my plumber once my bathroom was demo’d and he looked at all the parts and said, “you want to do WHAT?”. We had a few colorful conversations after he told me I had the wrong parts. It turns out, I didnt. That super helpful sales guy was right…kinda.

He had sold me 2 little “thingies” I had to “turn”. One would open the water, and the other would tell it where to go. When I got everything, there were 2 handles on one of them and another knob handle thingie. 3 knobs. WTF!?

It turns out, I had bought a fancy new “ThermoStatic” valve with “Volume Control”. Thermostatic just means you can turn the dial to the temp you like and leave it there for the rest of your life. Every time you get back in the shower, you dont have to worry about temperature knob…just how much water (volume) you want to come out (the other knob). Two separate “thingies” to turn. One for temp, one for volume. Much unlike the one handle we are used to that you turn all the way to the left for hot water and keep in the middle for warm. With that, you get full blast water whether you like it or not. Or maybe a trickle of cold if you need that sort of thing.

While this thing was cool, I found out after the fact, that I could have had something cooler! I could have just got a valve with an integrated 3 setting diverter, This would have allowed me to just have one control in my shower instead of 2! Proving again, ignorance is bliss.

Good luck with your remodel.

Technology

Cisco Hyperflex – #700-905 – Notes

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Intro to Hyper-Convergence

Started out with local storage

Couldn’t expand

Moved to centralized storage

Server availability issues

Moved to virt and converged for clusters

FlexPods, VersaStacks…chassis had limitations

Back to local storage

Scales similar to cloud

No limits

Intro to HX platform

Based on C-series

Wizard-based installer

Converged Nodes – Disk, network, cpu, memory

Data Platform

StorFS – Distributed File System

Springpath is underlying backbone

Ensures copy data is always there

High performance networking is used by StorFS log structured FS

Communication channel for VMs and management etc

FIs are hardware management platform

HX Software is not supported on C-Series

HX Installer is a VM (OVA) – requires existing vCenter

Expansion is easy and non-disruptive

Cloud Center

Intersight

Cisco Container Platform

HX Flavors and use cases

HX Edge

2-4 Nodes (ROBO) – No FI needed

HX

Converged

Compute-Only

Up to 32 converged nodes with up to an additional 32 compute only nodes

SFF Drives

Either all flash or 2.5 spinning drives

LFF Spinning – 6 or 8TB

HX240 M5

6-12 of LFF in one server

Caching and housekeeping drives are still SFF Flash in back

HK – 240GB Flash

Caching – 3.2 TB SSD

HX 3.5 introduced stretch cluster for LFF drives

HX Edge 3 node HX 220 based connected directly to ToR switches with no FI

Managed through a centralized vCenter

Central backup site (LFF Cluster) with Veeam

3.0 introduced Hyper-V support

3.5 introduced LFF Drives support but no stretch or edge for Hyper-V

Scaling and Expanding a Deployment

Scales from 3 – 64 nodes

Node – Additional memory and compute

Converged Node – includes storage

3.5 added Hyper-V supprt and stretch clusters

Node must be compatible

Storage type

Size

Generation

Chassis size

Similar in ram and compute

You can introduce M5 to M4 but not vice versa

Use HX Installer to expand

Use config file

Provide creds

UCSM/Hypervisor/vCetner

Select cluster to expand

Select unassociated server from list

Provide IP info

Provide Name

Add VLANs

Start install

Go to HX Connect

View added node

Data is automatically distributed to new disks on new nodes

You can leverage numerous platforms for compute only node

Must be connected to same domain

Must have HX Data Platform installed via Installer

Mounts HX storage via NFS

Disks are not added to shared pool (for datastore creation)

CVM on compute only require

1 vcpu

512 MB RAM

Software Components Overview

StorFS – Distributed Log-structured file system

Writes sequentially, uses pointers – increases performance

Index has references to blocks for files across the distributed log

New blocks are written, old are deleted and housekeeping occurs.

File system index is stored in memory of  a controller VM.

Runs on every node in HX cluster

Logs caching compression duplication

Disks are passed through to CVM

Space is presented as NFS

HX220

CVM needs 48 GB RAM and 10.8 GHz

HX240

CVM needs 72 GB RAM and 10.8 GHz

HX 240 LFF 78 GB RAM and 10.8 GHz

CVM is doing cluster management

HX management

HX Connect management interface

HTML 5 GUI

Monitoring capability/Utilization monitoring

Replication

Clone

Upgrades

CVM CLI – not all commands are supported through GUI

CVM CLI is ubuntu VM – connect via SSH

stcli command

IOvisor (vib) – responsible for data distro

captures data and sends to any available node for caching

Not dependent on CVM so if CVM fails, fs ops will be directed to appropriate node

VAAI is used in CVM and Hypervisor

Allows direct FS ops on a Datastore (StorFS ops)

Allows for snaps and clones (much faster) using FS

Distributed File System

StorFS

When deploying

Select RF2 or RF3

Caching Tier

In all-flash systems

Not used for read cache

In all systems

Write cache works the same way

All flash

Hybrid

Caches writes as it gets distributed

De-stages writes

Split between active and passive

Active – caches fata

Passive – moves data to capacity drives

Number of cache level segments depends on RF factor

2 for RF 2

3 for RF 3

Hybrid systems

Write cache still works the same

Caching drive is ALSO use for read caching

Frequently used

Recently used

VDI mode

Only caches most frequently accessed

Not most recently accessed

Hardware component Overview

3 tier storage

Memory Cache – volatile

Controller VM, File system metadata

Cache Drive

SAS SSD, NVMe SSD or Optane

Capacity tier

All spinning or all flash

Hybrid (blue bezel) or all flash (orange bezel)

2 chassis types

HX220 (1U) M5 (Dual Intel Skylake Platinum’s)

10 Drives

Min6 max 8 capacity

Cache drive is front mounted

M.2 drive installs esx (internal)

Housekeeping (logs, storage)

HX240 (2U) M5 (Dual Intel Skylake Platinum’s)

Cache is on back

Capacity and housekeeping on front

Min 6 up to 23 capacity drives

Up to 2 graphics cards

Memory channels

6 per proc

2 sticks per channel

Max 128 per stick

16, 32, 64, 128

6 or 12 sticks per CPU for optimal performance

If M type procs, 1.5TB per CPU (total 3TB)

1.2TB

1.8 TB for hybrid

(cost effective)

960 and 3.8 TB for all flash (performance/density)

Network:

VIC1227

Dual 10G

VIC 1387

Dual 40G

Fis

6248s, 6296, 6332, 6332-16UP

UCSM

Other Notes:

Can you install HX without network?

No

Can you use install software as NTP server?

No. 2.0 and 2.1 disables it after 15 mins

Can I install vCenter on HX?

Yes. With 4 nodes with earlier versions.

Should storage VLAN be layer 3?

No

Can you setup multiple VLANs in UCSM during install?

Yes but you have to rename them

Are jumbo frames required?

No but enable them

HX Tech Brief – An App, Any Cloud, Any Scale

ROBO – HX Edge/Nexus

Private – HX/ACI (private cloud)

Intersite federates management

Edge leverages Intersite as cloud witness

Public – Cisco Container Platform on top of HX for Kubernetes aaS with HX in Prem

Cloud center – model apps/deploy consistently

App dynamics – performance/application transaction visibility

CWOM – optimizes resource utilization for underlying infra

Tetration – workload protection – enforce versions at the host level

HX Edge 2-4 nodes (up to 2000 sites) – Intersight can deploy in parallel to multiple sites

HX – 32nodes –> 32 more compute nodes

Installation Notes:

Deploy/Launch Data platform installer – OVA – can be on a SE laptop

Root:Cisco123

Create new:

Customize your workflow

Run UCSM config (unless you have edge (no Fis)

Check everything else

Create cluster

Cluster expansion:

In UCSM, validate PID and make sure its unassociated/no profile

In installer:

Supply UCSM name/creds

vCenter creds

Hypervisor creds

Select cluster to expand

Select server

Provide VLAN configs

Use ; for multiple VLANs

Enable iSCSI/FC if needed

For mgt VLAN and Data VLAN

Provide IP for esxi host

Provide IP for storage controller