Category: Technology

Android Outlook Message Sending Failure

I’ve been getting a strange error when trying to send pictures within e-mail messages from my Android phone. I say a strange error because there’s literally one entry that comes back when you search for MessageDeliveryFailedException f5f0 — and no pointer at all as to what might have gone wrong. Just a non-delivery report popping into the Inbox on my phone:

     Technical details
     MessageDeliveryFailedException: Could not deliver the message [len=70, data=50005…C090005] sent at 8/25/2020 10:06:28 PM.Failure code: f5f0

I’ve got a reverse proxy with an application firewall and suspected that was the source of my problems. Mostly because errors caused within the Microsoft Exchange system are generally easy to find online. An oddball error is going to come from an oddball source. And I was right — my application proxy log shows an error each time I attempt to send one of the failed messages.

Edited /etc/httpd/conf.d/mod_security.conf and upped the SecRequestBodyNoFilesLimit. Once Apache HTTPD was restarted, I was able to send my messages without problem.

Discourse Censored Words List

It took an unexpectedly long time to find the censored word list in Discourse. I finally resorted to searching the PRs until I located one where the censored word list was replaced with ‘watched words’ … although there wasn’t any readily apparent watched word list in the configuration either. I was able to locate the meta post regarding the watched word implemented under that PR. It’s hiding under logs?! Under each action (block, censor, require approval, flag), there is a “show words” checkbox that displays the configured words.

ADO Notifications

I’ve been underwhelmed with the notifications I get from Azure DevOps – there are a lot of build-centric notifications, but I don’t use ADO for builds or deployment apart from playing around. And I really don’t care if the silly test project I set up to build and deploy a website worked, failed, or whatever. I was thinking about hooking whatever they’re calling Flow this week up to ADO and building notification workflows.

Fortunately, a coworker mentioned that you can customize notifications in ADO … which, I’d spent a few seconds poking around and didn’t see anything. But I spent more than a few seconds this time and happened across this little ellipsis on the card that pops up when I click the circle with my initials in it. More options!

A new menu flies out; and, look, there’s “Notifications”

Exactly as I’ve observed, there are a lot of build-centric alerts. So I created a new subscription.

Here’s a subscription that I hope will notify me when items assigned to me have updates to activity or comments.

Discourse in Docker on Fedora 32

I had to make a few tweaks in order to run the Discourse base Docker image. First, I got the following very clear error:

discourse docker this version of runc doesn't work on cgroups v2: unknown

I had to switch from cgroupv2 to cgroup

grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=0"

At which point I was at least able to run through the configuration. This yielded an access denied error attempting to create /shared/postgres:

Configuration file at updated successfully!

Updates successful. Rebuilding in 5 seconds.
Building app
Ensuring launcher is up to date
Fetching origin
Launcher is up-to-date
cd /pups && git pull && /pups/bin/pups --stdin
Already up to date.
I, [2020-08-11T18:15:03.664400 #1] INFO -- : Loading --stdin
I, [2020-08-11T18:15:03.672609 #1] INFO -- : > locale-gen $LANG && update-locale
I, [2020-08-11T18:15:03.746912 #1] INFO -- : Generating locales (this might take a while)...
Generation complete.

I, [2020-08-11T18:15:03.747838 #1] INFO -- : > mkdir -p /shared/postgres_run
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘/shared/postgres_run’: Permission denied
I, [2020-08-11T18:15:03.754890 #1] INFO -- :

FAILED
--------------------
Pups::ExecError: mkdir -p /shared/postgres_run failed with return #<Process::Status: pid 21 exit 1>
Location of failure: /pups/lib/pups/exec_command.rb:112:in `spawn'
exec failed with the params "mkdir -p /shared/postgres_run"
d98ee8471413ad77ab27ed3506f12c5c94a2b6902622faf4d88d5dbb51a10f63
** FAILED TO BOOTSTRAP ** please scroll up and look for earlier error messages, there may be more than one.
./discourse-doctor may help diagnose the problem.

Gut was that I encountered an SELinux problem. Turns out I was right. There’s a lot of reading you can do about SELinux and Docker — this, for one — but the quick and simple solution is to run the docker container in privileged mode (note: this may not be a good idea in your specific scenario. understand what privileged mode is and the risks it entails). To do so, edit the launcher script (/var/discourse/launcher in my case) and add  “–privileged” to user_args:

And finally (and this may well be a RTFM thing) — you’ve got to have your public DNS set up & whatever firewall rules to get traffic to the http:// website you are trying to build in order to use the LetsEncrypt SSL cert and configure HTTPS. It uses the file-based verification (i.e. create a file named xyz in /path/to/xyz.whatever on your web server, lets encrypt grabs the file and verifies it exists) which fails quite spectacularly when the Internet at large cannot access your about-to-be-a-discourse-server.

Exporting Microsoft Stream Transcript

Microsoft has changed the interface on Stream slightly, so my code to export the Stream transcript needed an update. since copy/paste doesn’t seem to work for everyone, the script is also available as a text file.

var objTranscriptionLines = window.angular.element(window.document.querySelectorAll('.transcript-list')).scope().$ctrl.transcriptLines;
var strRunningText = "";
for(var i = 0; i < objTranscriptionLines.length; i++){
    if( objTranscriptionLines[i] ){
        var strLineText = objTranscriptionLines[i].eventData.text;
        strRunningText = strRunningText + "\n" + strLineText;
    }
}
console.log(strRunningText);

Building LIB_MYSQLUDF_SYS On Fedora 31

I moved my MariaDB server to a new host and could not follow my previously working instructions to build lib_mysqludf_sys. The error indicated that my_atomic.h was not found.

[lisa@server03 lib_mysqludf_sys]# make
gcc -fPIC -Wall -I/usr/include/mysql/server -I. -shared lib_mysqludf_sys.c -o /usr/lib64/mariadb/plugin//lib_mysqludf_sys.so
In file included from /usr/include/mysql/server/my_sys.h:34,
from lib_mysqludf_sys.c:41:
/usr/include/mysql/server/my_pthread.h:26:10: fatal error: my_atomic.h: No such file or directory
26 | #include <my_atomic.h>
| ^~~~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.
make: *** [Makefile:4: install] Error 1

The missing file is located in /usr/include/mysql/server/private … so I had to include that file in the gcc command as well. My new Makefile reads as follows:

[lisa@server03 lib_mysqludf_sys]# cat Makefile
LIBDIR=/usr/lib64/mariadb/plugin/

install:
gcc -fPIC -Wall -I/usr/include/mysql/server -I/usr/include/mysql/server/private -I. -shared lib_mysqludf_sys.c -o $(LIBDIR)/lib_mysqludf_sys.so

I was then able to make and use install.sh to load it into MariaDB.

HTML Checkbox Adding and Removing Table Row

Here’s the JavaScript code I ended up using to add and remove rows from a table based on a checkbox selection (and only allowing one checkbox per group to be selected). The biggest change is that I added a name and ID to my TR for easier identification. 

$(document).on("change", "input[type='checkbox']", function () {
    var $objCheckbox = $(this);
    if ($objCheckbox.is(":checked")) {			// When checked, deactivate other checkboxes and add to sets to create table
        var objCheckboxGroup = "input:checkbox[tableselector='" + $objCheckbox.attr("tableselector") + "']";

        $(objCheckboxGroup).prop("disabled", true);
        $objCheckbox.prop("disabled", false);		// Allow checked box to be unchecked

        addSetToCreatingTable($objCheckbox.attr("setname"), $objCheckbox.attr("settype"), $objCheckbox.attr("goodcircuits") + "|" + $objCheckbox.attr("value"), $objCheckbox.attr("tableselector"));

    }
    else {							// When unchecked, active checkboxes and remove from sets to create table
        var objCheckboxGroup = "input:checkbox[name='" + $objCheckbox.attr("name") + "']";
        $(objCheckboxGroup).prop("disabled", false);	

        $("#" + $objCheckbox.attr('tableselector')).each(function(){ $(this).remove();})
}
});

What Can I sudo?

Some 90% of my Linux experience is on servers where I have root or root-equivalent access (i.e. I can sudo anything). In those cases, ‘what can I run under sudo’ was never a question. And I’d use something like “sudo less /etc/sudoers” to inspect what someone else was able to run when they questioned their access. In my new position, we have a lot of servers that we own too — the Engineering IT support group lets us spin up our own VMs, do whatever we want (within reason). But we have a few IT-managed servers with very restricted rights. And the commands I would use to perform functions (think systemctl restart httpd) aren’t in my sudoers access list. Luckily you can list out what you can run under sudo:

$ sudo -l
[sudo] password for useraccount:
Matching Defaults entries for useraccount on this host:
syslog=auth, loglinelen=0, syslog_goodpri=info, syslog_badpri=err,
logfile=/var/log/sudo.log

User useraccount may run the following commands on this host:
(ALL) /opt/lampp/lampp start, (ALL) /opt/lampp/lampp stop, (ALL)
/opt/lampp/lampp restart, (ALL) /usr/sbin/apachectl

And that is how I know to use apachectl instead of systemctl.

HTML Checkboxes To Add and Remove Values from Table

I am creating a web form where the user input sometimes cannot be resolved to a unique value. In those cases, I present the user a set of checkboxes with the options (yes, a radio button makes more sense because you can only select one. But I hate that radio buttons change selection when you hit an arrow key.).

When a selection is made, I need to (1) deactivate the checkboxes for the other options when a checkbox in the group is selected and (2) add information to a data table that is used in subsequent activities.

When a selection is cleared, I need to (1) activate the checkboxes within the group and (2) remove the right row from the data table.

Below is the HTML code that achieves this. Now I just need to map this test page into the actual web code. There’s a post with the actual code I ended up using in production too.

<html>
<head><title>Adding And Removing From Table</title></head>
<body>

<div name="divCircuitClarifications" id="divCircuitClarifications">
  <h3>My-Sample-Circuit-A</h3>
    <input type="checkbox" value="123" tableselector="SampleCircuitA" name="SampleCircuitA[]" /><label>123</label>
    <input type="checkbox" value="234" tableselector="SampleCircuitA" name="SampleCircuitA[]" /><label>234</label>
    <input type="checkbox" value="345" tableselector="SampleCircuitA" name="SampleCircuitA[]" /><label>345</label>
<P>
  <h3>My-Sample-Circuit-B</h3>
    <input type="checkbox" value="abc" tableselector="SampleCircuitB" name="SampleCircuitB[]" /><label>abc</label>
    <input type="checkbox" value="bcd" tableselector="SampleCircuitB" name="SampleCircuitB[]" /><label>bcd</label>
    <input type="checkbox" value="cde" tableselector="SampleCircuitB" name="SampleCircuitB[]" /><label>cde</label>
<P>
  <h3>My-Sample-Circuit-C</h3>
    <input type="checkbox" value="Cabc" tableselector="SampleCircuitC" name="SampleCircuitC[]" /><label>abc</label>
    <input type="checkbox" value="Cbcd" tableselector="SampleCircuitC" name="SampleCircuitC[]" /><label>bcd</label>
    <input type="checkbox" value="Ccde" tableselector="SampleCircuitC" name="SampleCircuitC[]" /><label>cde</label>
<P>
</div>

<div id="divResultTable" name="divResultTable">
<table border="1" padding="1" name="tableSetsToCreate" id="tableSetsToCreate">
	<thead><tr><th>ECCKT</th><th>Circuit ID</th></tr></thead>
	<tbody></tbody>
</table>


<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.1/jquery.min.js"></script>

<script>
	$("input:checkbox").on('click', function() {
	  	var $objCheckbox = $(this);
	  	if ($objCheckbox.is(":checked")) {			// When checked, deactivate other checkboxes and add to sets to create table
	    		var objCheckboxGroup = "input:checkbox[tableselector='" + $objCheckbox.attr("tableselector") + "']";
	
	    		$(objCheckboxGroup).prop("disabled", true);
	    		$objCheckbox.prop("disabled", false);		// Allow checked box to be unchecked

	                var strTableRowString = '<tr><td>' + $objCheckbox.attr("tableselector") + '</td><td>' + $objCheckbox.val() + '</td>\n';
	                $('#tableSetsToCreate tbody').append(strTableRowString);
	  	}
		else {							// When unchecked, active checkboxes and remove from sets to create table
	    		var objCheckboxGroup = "input:checkbox[name='" + $objCheckbox.attr("name") + "']";
	    		$(objCheckboxGroup).prop("disabled", false);	

			$("tr:contains('" + $objCheckbox.attr('tableselector') + "')").each(function(){ $(this).remove();})
  		}
	});
</script>
</body>

Web Stats

Since my website has a lot of information about Microsoft Teams, I can see when a lot of new Teams users came online during the lockdown. Now that people are returning to offices (and, I expect, are more familiar with the platform), I’m starting to see fewer search engine referrals. But I’m still 3-4x the numbers I’d seen pre-lockdown.