Category: Servers & Hosts

“Bitlocker Drive Encryption Service”: Thankfully, this is a Microsoft thing, thanks for not letting us know

10/27/2015 Aaron Belchamber No Comments

Recently, my computer started slowing down.  I heard nightmares about hackers encrypting data on drives and only unlocking the drives if you pay a ransom.  How nice.

Then, after Ctrl+Alt+Del and checking on programs running, I’ve started to see “Bitlocker Drive Encryption Service”.  Sounds scary.  Apparently, it’s part of Microsoft Windows.  How many times have you seen a program running in Windows and wondered if your virus protection didn’t catch something.  Are your keystrokes currently being listened to?!  These days, you can’t be too careful.  Or paranoid.

Thankfully, there is some information about Bitlocker here.  Microsoft does provide documentation as well, learn more about Bitlocker by clicking here.


Virtual Box: Adding new user to your dev server’s sudo users

10/04/2015 Aaron Belchamber No Comments

Log in to your server as root.  At the server’s command line, type “visudo”.

Scroll down file and add any usernames you want sudo access:
“new_user    ALL=(ALL) ALL”

Find out more about “sudo” here.


Virtual Box on Windows 10: New strange error causing failure to launch VM due to virus protection

09/20/2015 Aaron Belchamber No Comments

Virtual Box on Windows 10 suddenly throwing new error “VERR_LDR_MISMATCH_NATIVE”.

If you encounter this, deactivate your virus protection and firewall and try to restart.  Seems to work fine after turning virus protection back on again but whitelisting all Virtual Box apps should prevent this from happening in the future.  It’s confirmed that even though I use Avast for this particular server the same issue for McAfee and Norton have been reported.


Updating to Windows 10 with Virtual Box? You might need to reinstall Virtual Box

09/07/2015 Aaron Belchamber No Comments

On one of my separate dev servers I figured it was as good of a time as any to upgrade to Windows 10.  It was a seamless update, kudos to Microsoft, but when I started up Virtual Box instance running on it, my network adapters were throwing strange errors.  I won’t bore you with the details, I just expected it to work and escape the wrath of Microsoft’s omnipotent presence.

I actually uninstalled Virtual Box the reinstalled it, enough angry web developers out there said this fixed it.  It didn’t.  Then I had to fanangle the /etc/network/interfaces file AND the network adapter settings on each VM to get to work properly again.  Who’s to say it wasn’t the firewall on the Windows server and why am I running Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora and CentOS VMs on Windows 10, you might ask?  Because those are the flavors I encounter most on live sites, so I like to set up as close of an environment I will encounter on my host and Virtual Box has been so reliable to deploy a new virtual server in less than 20 minutes with everything you need — MySQL, Apache, PHP, and all the PHP libraries, Virtualmin, and Webmin all ready to go.

So for documentation purposes, if you upgrade to Windows 10 and expect Virtual Box to keep humming, you may run into a few hiccups, it took me over an hour to get it to be visible on my LAN and accessible again so I could dev locally.  I remember back in 2005 devving sites on remote servers thinking how slow it was, not devving your site locally first is like pushing a race car instead of driving it — without using your hands!  Oh well, I’m not the strongest server admin, I’m more about the software and systems, so here are my latest settings that got VB and all VMs to work.

Below, you will see how I have 3 servers on different local IP addresses, each with a different web project.  Here are all the main settings that are easy enough to duplicate if needed!  Bridged Adapter is key, but I was reminded that it must still be the second adapter, not the first.  Why?  Good question, perhaps someone with more technical knowledge could enlighten us all?!  Any insight would be appreciated!

Latest VM VirtualBox network interfaces adapter setting 1 Latest VM VirtualBox network interfaces adapter setting 2 Latest VM VirtualBox network interfaces adapter setting 3

 

Here’s the cat /etc/network/interfaces:  Latest VM VirtualBox network interfaces file configuration


Latest Virtual Box checklist instructions and resources to deploy new local WordPress and Symfony dev server in less than 15 minutes

07/26/2015 Aaron Belchamber No Comments

These local web development servers are fast and free to set up.  I always set them up on another computer so they’re available on  my local home network without slowing my own computer down.  Be careful setting this up on the same computer you want to use to write code, unless you have a blazing fast computer.  Even if you have an 8 core loaded with RAM, I still wouldn’t install dev sites on the machine I also use to write code, edit video and produce 3D animations it just slows you down, and besides, if you can afford a nice machine, use your old computer as a dev or buy a $500 box to avoid clogging your desktop and slowing your computer down to the point it’d be almost as slow as developing websites on your remote host — the world’s worst, most inefficient and unsafe way to develop websites.

Here’s a quick run through of my latest checklist instructions and resources to install a new local dev server (web development server) to run WordPress, Symfony, and OpenERP.  This also includes installing Webmin.  Once you find a reliable dev server that you set up, keep everything updated and you should be great to clone a server to create fresh new dev servers for multiple projects fast and easily.

It’s always a good idea to go through the steps and set up a new Virtual Machine in “Virtual Box” just in case you have to install a new flavor of Linux.  As you can see, CentOS and Ubuntu are my favorites, but you should always try and set up a Linux OS closest to the version you are running on your live host and there always seems to be a new technical challenge, especially if your company uses advanced firewalls.

Installing Ubuntu

Good overview to install Ubuntu on VirtualBox:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Nov2yDIk-4

Settings > Network:  Bridge Adapter
Run, choose file — ubuntu-14… -server-i386

System for 64 bit go to Acceleration

Setting up static:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaM9nLvyYDA

Login
sudo nano /etc/network/interface

Change in this file:  inet dhcp to “inet static”

address 192.168.0.13  <- your desired internal dev IP  ->

(Note the pattern with the masks where zeroes are below)
netmask: 255.255.255.0
network:  192.168.0.0
broadcast 192.168.0.255
gateway  192.168.0.1  <- router ->

dns-nameservers  192.168.0.1
sudo reboot

log back in

ifconfig
ping www.google.com

Install webmin on your virtual machine:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

at top of file:

#webmin
deb http://download.webmin.com/download/repository  sarge contrib
deb http://webmin.mirror.somersettechsolutions.co.uk/repository sarge contrib
Ctrl-X

wget http://www.webmin.com/jcameron-key.asc
sudo apt-key a add jcameron-key.asc
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install webmin

then go to your internal dev IP you set above:  192.168.0.13:10000

=========

Installing Virtualmin

On FRESH INSTALL CentOS:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERM-Ty0jjjQ

Log in:
sudo yum -y update
sudo yum -y install perl
sudo yum install wget

wget http://softwaer.virtualmin.com/gpl/scripts/install.sh

sudo sh install.sh

http://IP_Address:10000

Setting up multiple IP for VMs:

Network Adapter Settings — can have 4 adapters

Set 1 to
NAT – VirtualBox runs own DHCP
Port Forwarding is available, but leave

Set 2 to
Bridged

Promiscuous Mode – will decode packets not meant for machine — select “Allow All”
Leave MAC address set.

Notes:

Internal Network — available to other VMs inside
Host only:   127.0.0.1
Generic Driver:  Any OS can recognize