Netplan - Dafuq is that?

Nothing like a side mission, suddenly becoming a requirement.

Well that's what happened. You see I woke up ready fix a stupid bug in one of my shitty apps. I had a strategy in place, I always do. Linux had other plans, a thing interestingly enough called a Netplan ( https://netplan.io/ )

After a scheduled power outage, machines were rebooted, some did not fare well, background updates had made changes, walked away and left a few challenges.

One machine, my primary boss battle had the following problem.

Help with curl from r/RASPBERRY_PI_PROJECTS

As for the other machine, the one thing I worried least about stopped behaving as it should, damn thing would not remember the network settings. The old school solution is to tell the Network Managers to suck it and edit /etc/network/interfaces directly, but I had spent some time playing with the Network Manager Command Line tool and figured, what the hell, let's try that.

Then I see this Netplan thing sitting in my wifi list. I don't have an access point called Netplan. My neighbors don't have one either, yet this machine was connected to it.

"Dafuq is a Netplan?" I asked, don't recall seeing this before, then did some reading.

Netplan is a utility for easily configuring networking on a Linux system. You simply create a YAML description of the required network interfaces and what each should be configured to do. From this description Netplan will generate all the necessary configuration for your chosen renderer tool.

"Fine!" I thought, "I'll try to use this instead"

It worked. Followed the instructions provided by this blog and fixed it. I have yet to understand Netplans' relationship with Network Manager or the reason for the failure.

Netplan setup is not bad at all and I like it. Just resent having to travel that road at such an impromptu moment.

The side mission was worth it though, now off to deal with the other boss fight

MP3 waveform using ffmpeg sample script

A quick and dirty script that can generate wavforms, from a folder containing mp3 files, using ffmpeg

#!/bin/bash
echo "*******************************"
echo "Begin render wavform";
echo "*******************************"

cd /home/user/path/to/mp3/

for i in *.mp3; do
 ffmpeg -y -i "$i" -filter_complex "compand,showwavespic=s=1200x120:colors=b2b2b2ff:" -frames:v 1  "${i%.mp3}.wavform.png";
 sleep 1;
done


echo "end"

exit

Wordpress Themes and wpcli wp cache flush

Ran into a Wordpress issue. Took a moment to resolve.

Came pretty close to nuking that Wordpress site, as restoring backup data did not change things.

The culprit however was caching.

Always flush that cache kids. See post below:

Wordpress themes and caching. from r/Wordpress

PM2 Imonit [screenshot]

Screenshot of the PM2 imonit legacy application.

Not much documentation available.

2 Wire 2701-B firmware upgrade. A sort of success ramble.

Pulled out an old 2 Wire 2701-B gateway modem to use as a replacement for a dead Linksys switch.

The modem original firmware version was 5.29.109.5

Problems:

• Devices could not connect to the 2 Wire WIFI in WPA or WPA2 mode. Didn't bother with WEP
• LAN performance was abysmal. Network connections would drop. 
• Local RDP experience was at dialup level.  

A horrible solution for a replacement switch..

Remember giving AT&T customer service a hard time about this device back in the day. I now remember why.

This is abandoned hardware. No support available. Locating firmware proved challenging. No DD WRT or Tomato support.

(Direct links to Google docs listed firmware downloads were ignored. Links that were a part of a discussion thread were explored).

Stumbled on an old site which led to a maybe compatible solution. A firmware for a much later model from a different provider.

2700-2701--QT04-6.1.5.48.2sp

Firmware incompatibility can and will permanently damage a device. Consider this before attempting.

The plunge:

The firmware successfully loaded then rebooted into a spiffy new interface.

...status section of the interface

The Bad:

Downgrading is no longer an option with this firmware.

DHCP Settings ip values not cleared when DHCP is disabled. Interferes with adjusting the LAN or WAN settings.

Trick: assign DHCP IP range to something other than the desired LAN / WAN ip.  Save with DHCP enabled. Then save with DHCP disabled.

WPA2 connection work but only with DHCP enabled. A less than desirable option.

Noise. Device attempts to connect DSL resulting in an annoying click on each failed attempt. Eventually times out.

Lights. Good lord the blinking lights. Fixed that up with some black tape.

The Good:

Ethernet performance improved dramatically. This was unexpected. Making it a more than adequate replacement.

Interface appears faster than the original. Not particularly useful, just interesting.

Port scan reveals 80, 443, 2869 (icslap) open.

Anyway:

Got lucky here, thought I'd share. Some poor soul with a similar device may find this blurb useful.