Andrew Hale: IT Talk & Other Topics

Within the last few months, my local grocery chain (Publix), announced that they're offering a Publix Delivery service, powered by Instacart. I've been looking for a second job with a flexible schedule so I signed up thinking I could just do it on the weekends. I signed up, got accepted, and immediately realized it wasn't going to work for me. More after the jump.

I've recently switched to using a Mac as my main workstation at work and there's definitely been a learning curve. On my Windows box (which I still have for running RSAT tools and local Hyper-V VMs), I had an SSH & SFTP client with my frequent connections already configured. I've been trying to replicate this, so I've written some info on managing SSH connections, SSH Keys and configuring "profiles" of sorts for boxes that I access commonly. 

My wife is more into Dave Ramsey than I am. However, I've recently been watching some of the clips on YouTube from his show, The Dave Ramsey Show. Sometimes, I definitely agree with him and his advice makes a lot of sense. Other times, I disagree. In this case, his advice to one caller makes sense, but I don't think that it's universal. The advice was regarding the use of Debit- and Credit-Cards.

One thing that I enjoy is interviewing and hiring. It's something I'm very interested in. I'm often reading guides on how to write a good resume or watching Youtube videos about how to crush a job interview. Another aspect of this is sharing this information and helping others apply it for themselves. I consider myself a regular contributor to the /r/sysadminresumes and /r/Resume subreddits, as well as The Workforce section of Stack Exchange (The Workforce covers much more than resumes though). Throughout my time of looking at a LOT of resumes, I notice that a lot of people make the same mistakes. Below is my advice for making your own resume better.

As part of my inheritance at a new role, I've got a Gitlab server running on an Ubuntu VM. The program I support at the college has student teams managing their projects on this Git server. I was hoping to wait until next summer to migrate to a different Git solution (like a University-hosted GitHub Enterprise solution that's been floated around), but due to security concerns, my Gitlab server can't wait that long. In this post, I need to update the Gitlab package and move it to a new VM. I'll be updating to Gitlab v10 and moving the entire thing to a RHEL v7 VM in our University's hosting environment.

A few years back, I had a medical event that lead to some loss of motor-skill on my left-side. My minor disability hasn't held me back professionally, though it did severely impact my typing. My average WPM went from ~90 to ~15. Through the last few years, I've gotten it back up to 25-30. I remember spending months looking for typing game that I could "play" to help practice my typing. Unsurprisingly, nearly all of the games I found were meant for small children who were learning to type.

Generally, backing up an SQL DB and restoring it is relatively straightforward. Most of the guides talk about backing up and restoring a DB on the same host. Some might talk about pulling down a backup from a remote location and restoring it locally. But, what about when both of your servers are remote and you're SSH'd into one of them? This took me a bit of digging the first time I did this so I wanted to put this information in one place, whether it's for someone like you who's Googling or for myself in a couple years when I have to do this again.

Recently, I had a user who informed me that Windows Photos was missing and that she was used to using it to review pictures. Photos is the Windows 10 application meant to replace the trusty old Windows Photo Viewer. The Photos application comes with Windows 10 by default but can be downloaded separately from the Windows Store. It was working fine with other accounts on the computer. Whenever trying to open the Windows Store to download and install the Photos application, the error "You'll need a new app to open this ms-windows store." Using Powershell, I managed to get it working. Read below to see how you can fix this as well.

"Life puts the best things on the other side of fear." - Will Smith I know this might sound dumb but when I lost my job this past Spring, a YouTube video of Will Smith talking about going skydiving is what kept me going. I mean, technically it only lessened my spiral into depression but the lesson he talks about after the experience genuinely brought me to tears. I don't know why it popped up in my "suggested videos" but I heard what he said when I needed it most. In the interview, Mr Smith explains his experience of going skydiving for the first time. He describes drunkenly agreeing to go with his friends the next morning, despite being deathly afraid of heights. He describes the anxiety of laying awake that night over the thought of jumping out of an airplane, hoping others from his group would chicken out too. He describes the fear he felt when getting in the van at the airport. He details the plane ride and standing at the doorway of the open plane 14,0...

I've written about how, from a budgeting perspective, food is my household's weakest link. To combat this, I started looking at meal planning apps or services since we save more money when we stick to a menu, particularly a monthly menu. My wife and I spent a solid 6-7 hours exploring Pepperplate and could not get it to meet our needs. I'd like to talk about what we didn't like so as to help someone else out in a similar situation.

There's a radio commercial that plays on a couple of our local radio stations that goes something like "Do you want to learn how to make up to $10,000 a month in Real Estate? With a small investment in yourself, I can teach you how to make amazing money flipping houses with other people's money in your spare time. " That's not a direct quote but it's a good example of a sketchy get-rich-quick scheme. I've known stuff like that is BS but I finally understand why. In order to make money, you either have to put in money or time. Anything that promises making nothing into something is complete and utter BS.

You may have heard of some of these, but I'd like to talk a bit about some online gig services that you can use to make money from home. These are simple jobs you can do online from home and you choose your own hours. You're not going to get rich from any of these services, but they can be effective ways to monetize your off-time, should you desire. I'll talk about the services themselves, but I'll also offer my experience with them.

I've had a case on my phone for years. My Palm Centro and Pre were deemed tough enough to go caseless, but when my devices started coming with glass screens, on went a case. As the devices got more premium, the level of protection I wanted from my cases increased. For proof, at one point, I had the Otterbox Defender and then some Military-grade Pelican Voyager case on my iPhone 5. When I bought a new phone last year, I decided that I wanted to go for less case. The only protection I had on my iPhone 7 Plus was a tempered glass screen protector and Apple's leather case. The screen-protector + slim case combo has thus far served my phone well. However, some drops had taken their toll on the screen protector. I faced the decision to either buy another tempered glass protector or go with a TPU protector.

Making money is great. Budgeting is fantastic. However, cutting down your finances will always be more effective than making more money.  Now, this isn't going to be some list of stupid Pinterest ideas that recycle garbage or some easier-said-than-done-post about buying the cheapest things you can. I don't know you or your circumstances, needs, limits, etc. So, instead of trying to tell you what you NEED to do, I'm going to discuss what has worked or is working for my wife and I. If you'd like to follow along and do the same things, I'm happy to help: That's why I write. Let's dive in.

The Bluetooth controller from the PlayStation 3 is a very popular controller to use, particularly for RetroPie. It works well with the RPi's onboard Bluetooth, once the respective driver package has been installed. I happened to have a PS3 that's been nothing but acting as a glorified Blu-Ray player, so I'm putting the wireless controller to good use. Frankly, I got it working over Bluetooth by accident. After reproducing my steps though, I can now instruct how it's done.

I started a new job a couple months ago. Back at the local university, where I should've stayed. Anyway, my job has me supporting Macs (among many other things), which I have only a little experience with. I'm no stranger to iPhones, iPads, AppleTVs, etc. I just haven't had a lot of seat time with a Mac. Most of the people on my new team haven't either. To fill that need, I volunteered to become the Mac expert for my team. I've either found a great need I can fill on my team or I've just made a huge mistake. Thus far, I believe it's the former. I was tasked with researching Apple training options for IT staff. The criteria was that it had to be more advanced than how-to-use-a-Mac. After doing a bit of digging here's what I found for Apple Training geared towards IT operations. 

I've been fired and laid-off. No matter how you cut it, losing your job is scary. Even if it's an awful job that you're relieved to never have to deal with again, losing all or half of your income sources is usually scary. What are you going to do? How long will it take to find work again? How will you pay your bills in the mean time? I'd like to talk about how you can budget in a way that will not only boost your savings potential but it will make you less dependent on your job so should that ax drop or that pink slip come, you won't need to worry nearly as much, if at all. For the scenario of this article, I'll be talking about what my wife and I did to our finances to protect ourselves from the event of losing a job.

I know, I don't write much about money, but next to IT and cars/motorcycles, I think about money a lot. Over this past year and a half, my wife and I have learned a lot about how to manage our money effectively. In order to understand and appreciate where we are now, let me explain where we were.

When I bought my first RPi, I bought a kit that included a cheap clear case. It works but I wanted something nicer looking for sitting on my TV stand in my living room. It was love at first sight for the FLIRC case. I'd like to talk about it below.

Ever since Nintendo announced that they were stopping production of the NES Classic (after what felt like months of purposely under-producing to drive up the demand/price), I've been wanting to get another Raspberry Pi and setup RetroPie on it to play the games of my childhood. Well, I recently celebrated a birthday and got a few Amazon gift cards (which I enjoy very much), so I pulled the trigger on a second RPi, which I'm dedicating specifically to RetroPie and duties. In this article, I'd like to go over configuring the RetroPie. I'm going to assume that you've already got your ROMs and I will not be covering the installation of RetroPie in this post. If you've ever setup an RPi, it's the same process. If you have not and this is your first time, then check out my recent post about the process  (It's titled for installing CentOS v7, but the process is the same for installing just about any OS to the Raspberry Pi).

In PHP, or any other coding language, a function is a reusable piece of code that you can call on throughout your application or script. PHP has over 1000 built in functions.

Sometimes when we're coding, we want to do something that would be very tedious. This is where loops come in. Loops repeat a series of instructions for you for a specified number of times.

I shared fake news yesterday. There. I admit it. I shared the latest fan renderings of the upcoming Jeep Wrangler pickup, which were presented in such a way that made it sound like it was the official design released by Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, or FCA, Jeep's parent company. Like many times before it and many times after, this was just a couple renderings of what fans of the Wrangler believe the new small-pickup will look like. My shared content sparked a discussion among friends over two things. 1) Critique of the design and 2) Relevance of fan renderings. I'd like to discuss these two things.

Back to more PHP, you may be wondering how PHP stores information. It can call or modify information in an SQL database, but we'll cover that later. So far, we know that we can save individual bits of information as variables. Let's look at Arrays. An Array is a list, and it allows you to save more than one bit of information within a single variable. Array Syntax A very simple array, could simply be a shopping list, like the example below. <?php       $SampleArray = array("Egg", "Tomato", "Beans");     ?>   An array starts with a variable, and then is followed by the =, just like we've done before. However, the array() portion of the statement is where we can put in multiple values. These could be strings, numbers, and/or previously declared variables. The information within the ellipses are separated by commas and each string is within double quotes, just like we've seen with past variable declarations or echo statements....

The phrase "Flow Control" might sound weird, as though we're talking about fluids or money. It sounds vague and almost clinical. While "Flow Control" might be something to think about for a variety of other topics, we're going to look at the flow control of data in PHP. As mentioned in the introductory post, lines of PHP code are referred to as statements. When we explored some of the syntax in the last post, the lines of code for declaring variables, performing mathematical operations, or echoing strings were all statements. Below, let's look at the statements we'd use to control the flow of information within a PHP script. Co mparisons Comparisons in PHP are done with Comparison Operators. I've listed the symbols below. > Greater than < Less than >= Greater than or equal to <= Less than or equal to == Equal to != Not equal to For example, below, we're going to see a PHP statement stating that 6 is less than ...

Have you had an idea for an application? Perhaps you have an idea for a web-app. Maybe you have a niche problem you'd like to solve, or maybe you just want to learn more about programming and software development. PHP is very capable and it's easy to get started. This is the first in a series of posts teaching PHP. I'll also have posts on SQL so you can work with information in databases and Git so you can use version control for your code. So, why PHP?

As much as I enjoy my iOS devices, I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Palm, specifically WebOS. My first smartphone was a Palm Centro. The Centro was a blocky, modern redesign of what was essentially a Treo 650 and it ran Palm's aging PalmOS operating system. I chose the Palm over the Blackberry Curve and Motorola Q (running Windows Mobile), because PalmOS was more "hackable". When Palm changed the game, I fell in love with the Pre, and their new WebOS. I was originally going to write a quick bit tossing in my $0.02 about the ever-raging Android vs iOS debate, but writing a mobile phone history lesson seems like a more productive use of my time. Some trademark features of WebOS live on in current iterations of iOS and Android so I'll talk about those afterwards.

If you hate math, you're gonna have a bad time: I'll let you know that right now. You might not have noticed but you've used RSA encryption before. It gets it's name from the MIT scientists Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman who invented the algorithm. Let's take a look at how RSA encryption works.

As mentioned before, I'm setting up a LAMP stack using Cent OS v7 on my Raspberry Pi 3. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. The A for Apache could also be E for Nginx (pronounced like Engine-Ecks) and the P for PHP could also be P for Perl or Python. This software together forms what's referred to as a "stack", which is simply a common development term for a set of software that works together for a specific application. In this post, I'll be covering the installation and initial configuration of Apache, MySQL and PHP.

I could write several articles on using the Linux command line. However, while reinventing a wheel can be fun sometimes, my best sources that I've used have been the Command Line course on Code Academy , LinuxCommand.org , and the Unix Visual Quickstart Guide . Between those three sources and plenty of practice, you'll get the hang of it pretty quickly. Practice means breaking stuff and figuring out how to fix it. One of my college instructors once told us that Wisdom comes from Experience and Experience comes from Pain. Breaking stuff can be painful but it's only bad if you don't learn from the experience.

You, my one reader, may have noticed that my Quick Look posts come in bursts. The reason behind that is actually a simple one. I tend to get job interviews in bursts. I'll go months without hearing anything from any of the gigs I apply to and then suddenly, I have 6 interviews in 2 weeks. Often in nearly all of my interviews, there's one thing that I get asked about and I bomb hard. I remember an interview a while back where I was grilled about SysPrep, a tool that I haven't had to use in my experience (except for once some months ago). During that same interview, I mentioned DFS without being an expert in it, which was a mistake. The interviewer promptly asked me to explain DFS and what I could do with it. It was bad. Also in that interview, I found out that I didn't understand the difference between replication and backups. That interview was the worst one, but even my best interviews will have one tech question that I'm not sure about.

You may not realize it but you've very likely used LDAP. If you've signed onto a computer at a business or a school/college campus within the last 30 years then you almost definitely have. LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. It's an open standard being supported by companies such as Microsoft, Apple, IBM, etc. I've already described DNS as akin to a phonebook for the internet. However, LDAP is like a company-wide phonebook. LDAP is the protocol for a special database that's been designed to store attributes about users, services, etc.

SELinux stands for Security Enhanced Linux and was developed, in part, by the NSA. Eventually, SELinux was released under open-source license and has made it's way into a number of Linux distributions.

You know how after you've signed on to your workstation, you can open up your Outlook or Lync without having to sign into them? Or, you can pull up your company's intranet without having to sign your username and password again? That's something called single-sign-on (SSO) and it's made possible by Kerberos. Kerberos is a security protocol for authentication. According to Greek mythology, Kerberos was the three-headed dog that guarded the gates of Hades.

I touched on SSH configuration in my post about performing the initial configuration on my CentOS Pi . Aside from one tweak to the config file, there wasn't a lot to do. In this post, I'm going to dive a bit deeper into how SSH Keys work, how to set it up in your environment, and then I'll dive a bit deeper into locking down the SSH configuration.

I've recently gotten a Raspberry Pi 3 and I've installed the ARM build of CentOS v7 on it so that I can have a small server to play around with some web stuff. My experience in IT has been largely Windows Server focused (AD, Exchange, System Center, etc.), storage, virtualization, backups, etc. Not much Linux or development exposure. I'd like to learn more about that area of IT, so I picked up a Pi and am creating an environment at home to learn more about Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL and Git. In this post, I'm going to talk about the initial configuration of CentOS after you've installed it on your Pi.

I've had plenty of exposure to Linux over my years of working with computers but I have a confession: I've never used the Vi editor until recently. I bought a Raspberry Pi 3 to build a small Web-dev environment and reacquaint myself with Linux. I installed an ARM build of CentOS v7 on it and when I went to go through the initial configuration, I learned real quick that nano was not installed by default. Nano has always been my text editor of choice since the entirety of my Linux experience has been Ubuntu or Debian, (which is why I've installed CentOS). This isn't going to be a deep dive into Vi, just a basic intro to how to use it.

I have a particular interest in smart home technology. I live in an apartment currently so I don't have any "smart" devices deployed in my own home, but I follow the industry to see where things are going. As a bit of a smart home nerd, I was admittedly excited for the 2017 HGTV Smart Home special. However, I was disappointed.

The Raspberry Pi is awesome. If you're like me, you bought one to tool around with for educational purposes. You can run Kodi or gaming console emulators on it or you can combine some together for a tiny OpenStack cluster. At, $50-$60, they're easy on the wallet and running off of 5v USB power makes them pretty energy efficient. Sure, it's only a 1Ghz ARM processor which limits your OS choices but I'd rather have a Pi than running an old Dell PowerEdge or HP Proliant that I bought off of Craigslist. Instead of installing the usual Raspbian OS, this guide is on installing CentOS 7. However, the process described below is relatively universal to whatever OS you want to install on your Pi.

If you're in IT then you've likely heard of DNS. Most of us aren't experts in it but perhaps you'd like to know more about it. I'll go over a quick intro to how DNS works at a very high level and then wrap up with a description of the different types of records, or types of information, that comprise DNS.

I've been carrying a pen as part of my (mostly) every-day-carry, or EDC, for a couple years now. I bought the Zebra F-701 and after a few other pen purchases, the 701 is still my favorite of all. At first, I just wanted a pen that looked nice and for the moments I needed to sign something. I recall attending meetings when I worked at the university where the attendees were asked to sign-in on the attendance sheet: I tended to be the only one that didn't have a pen so I felt unprepared when I had to ask one of the other attendees if I could borrow theirs. Once I started college, I found myself using a pen much more often, so it had to be comfortable, relatively inexpensive (nice pens can cost hundreds of dollars), and still stylish enough to live in the pocket of a dress shirt.

Autonomous vehicles are the future. There’s really no stopping the progress of technology from moving forward. Before I dive into the topic, I’d like to straighten out some confusion around the terms. An autonomous vehicle isn’t the same as a self-driving vehicle. The two terms sound the same but an autonomous vehicle can navigate and transport goods and/or people with no input from a human driver or operator. A self-driving vehicle is one where parts of the driving experience are automated but still requires input from a human operator. A fully autonomous car isn’t available for public consumption, though companies such as Google and Uber have made headlines for testing prototypes. Meanwhile, vehicles available for the public have had some automated features and the advances in those features have happened very quickly. For example, Ford now offers adaptive cruise control (which allows the car to adjust its speed if it comes too close to another car in front of it), blind spot monitor...

If you're a computer guy (or gal), you probably already know what a Solid State Drive (aka, an SSD) is and the main thing most people who know about them only know that they're faster because they use memory chips rather than spinning platters in traditional HDDs. Have you ever wondered how they really work though? If you're not a computer guy (or gal), then lets bring you up to speed (pun intended) with why people are ditching spinning disks for SSDs.

Hard Disk Drives (aka HDDs) have been around for quite sometime. If I had to guess, I'd say that the main demographic of my blog already knows roughly how a HDD works but for those who don't, that's OK. Computer parts are a commodity. It's easier to replace than it is to repair, so why does anyone need to understand how spinning disks work? If you're working with storage (IE, administering a SAN), it pays to understand how they work. Lets dive in.

My employer and I recently parted ways and I'm more relieved than anything. I'd made mistakes accepting that job and I'd made mistakes in how I handled the culture shock of that job, so I thought I'd take a bit to explain what I took away from the situation.

I'm not a penny pincher or a tight-wad. However, I, like many others, do enjoy saving money. My wife and I had started getting serious about our budgeting last year (with great results) so we've been looking for ways to trim some of our bills some more to maximize savings.