TeamCity Behind a Proxy

OneDrive Offline Files and Windows 10

You just realized that in Windows 10 you cannot open OneDrive and see all the files up on OneDrive unless you have synced all the folders to your PC (imagine you didn’t upgrade to the 2 TB SSD on that new computer, so there is no way you can have all your OneDrive files synced).

Well, apparently, OneDrive for Windows 8 still has this feature (which is one of those that differentiated OneDrive from Dropbox or Google Drive). However, OneDrive in Windows 10 has it disabled…. something about some users were all confused about it.

The good news is that reportedly in Windows 10 Redstone update (in June 2016), the offline files support will be again available on the OneDrive for Windows 10 product. Yay! Now, if they could just add file revision history for *all* files and not just “Office” files, whatever that really includes…. then, welll, OneDrive would top Dropbox and Google Drive in quite a few ways (some have had some sync issues, but I think that’s becoming a thing of the past).

Alright, that news is great and all, but what if you want to be able to see all your OneDrive stuff *NOW* without having to have it synced locally. Here’s how to do it:

Map a network drive (from here: http://ift.tt/18gevIB)

1. Open up your OneDrive account online
2. Right-click on the “Files” button on the left of the screen and select “copy link address”.
3. Take the “cid” querystring value from that URL
4. Go to This PC > right click in the white space > Map Network Location > next next next > paste in “http://ift.tt/1RBvcki; followed by that “cid” querystring value from above > ok next ok ok ok… whatever
5. That effectively maps OneDrive as though it were a drive on your computer, meaning all your OneDrive files are viewable, downloadable, and accessible anytime you have an internet connection.

Pretty sweet workaround for now. Only downside is that the Offline Files feature in OneDrive does a better/faster job at caching things like the files/folders list as well as thumbnails (all the metadata).

Great Linx Upstart step-by step

Running Tomcat as a resilient service on Ubuntu 14.04

This is the best I’ve come across. Granted, I’ve not spent a ton of time having to look, but when I have it’s not been this clear.

You can just run pretty much anything you want in that last “exec….” part. Just route the output to /dev/null 2>&1 and you’re set.

Then run it with:
initctl start myservice
initctl stop myservice

create a file at /etc/init/myservice.conf with the following contents:

description “Tomcat 7 service”
#So that you remember what the services does

start on runlevel [2345]
# When the service should start. 2, 3, 4 and 5 are
# runlevels that are various flavours of system startup.

stop on runlevel [06]
# 0 is for system halt and 6 is for system reboot

respawn
# If the service is stopped otherwise than with a proper ‘stop’
# message (system halt or reboot), the service will restart automatically

respawn limit 3 10
# In case the service cannot boot properly (e.g. misconfiguration),
# this prevents the service to go crazy an reboot endlessly.
# 3 10 means “don’t respawn more than 3 times in 10 seconds”

pre-start exec /home/admin/init_casanovald.sh
# pre-start, post-start and pre-stop enable you
# to run stuff before or after starting a service

exec /var/lib/tomcat7/bin/catalina.sh run >> “/var/lib/tomcat7/logs/catalina.out” 2>&1
# This is where the service actually gets started. If you don’t
# redirect the messages, they end in /var/log/syslog.

Enable Data Deduplication on Windows 8.1

Recently I encountered the situation where I was needing to recover some data from an old test I had been doing with Storage Spaces on Windows Server 2012. However, my machine was running Windows 8.1. I really didn’t want to go through the process of setting up a new machine somewhere, so I figured I’d see if I could somehow enable Data Deduplication on 8.1.

I had been seeing a lot of files that had a size of, say, 1.82MB but a “size on disk of 0KB. That may be a giveaway that you’re looking at a disk that’s had data deduplication turned on.

Well, it works, and here’s where to go to find out how to do it:

http://ift.tt/1I3oYYE

Basically, you download the missing cabinet files (provided on that site) and then run 2 commands (note that first one is a one-liner, not a multi-liner):

dism /online /add-package /packagepath:Microsoft-Windows-VdsInterop-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.3.9600.16384.cab /packagepath:Microsoft-Windows-VdsInterop-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~6.3.9600.16384.cab /packagepath:Microsoft-Windows-FileServer-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.3.9600.16384.cab /packagepath:Microsoft-Windows-FileServer-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~6.3.9600.16384.cab /packagepath:Microsoft-Windows-Dedup-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.3.9600.16384.cab /packagepath:Microsoft-Windows-Dedup-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~6.3.9600.16384.cab

dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:Dedup-Core /all

Perforce Notes

Right after you install perforce server, it’s in a sort of initialization mode where there is no password for the default “root” user. Anybody can connect and act as that root user by simply connecting as the user “root”. So, you want to lock that down a bit. “p4 protect” is how you do this.

p4 protect may seem like where you would do user permissions. I guess you *could*, but it’s intended more as a sort of global permissions layer, where you can set some hard limits. By default all “users” will have “write” permission on everything in the instance. You can then later specify different permissions in the Perforce administration app via a client.

If you comment out the line that specifies “user” permissions in p4 protect, it will actually remove the line entirely, and only the “root” user will be able to connect at that point.. So I’m thinking of p4 protect as a sort of way to lock everyone but “root” out of the instance without messing with a full p4 client, e.g. you’re at the host console and you just need to quickly do something drastic without hosing lots of stuff.

Note, to connect with p4 connect to a specific port with a specific password you need to set some environment variables really quick before running “p4 protect”:
export P4PORT=1667
export P4PASSWD=Changeme41
– these assume the user is the OS user you’re running the p4 protect command under.

Installing Perforce on CentOS 6.7

Install CentOS minimal

Start NIC
ifup eth0

yum update
yum install nano

Stop and disable firewall (I assume you have some other firewall):
service firewall stop
chkconfig firewall off

disable selinux:
nan /etc/selinux/config
-change to ‘disabled’
-reboot

Set up the Perforce repo as described here: http://ift.tt/1PPCkd6

Install perforce server:
yum install perforce-server.x86_64

Set up a config file for an instance of perforce server that we’ll call “capnjosh1”:
cp /etc/perforce/p4dctl.conf.d/p4d.template /etc/perforce/p4dctl.conf.d/capnjosh1.conf

edit that new conf file:
replace %NAME% with “capnjosh1”
replace %ROOT% with where you want the files to be (/capnjosh1-p4root)
replace %PORT% with 1666

create the directory and make owned by the user perforce (automatically set up by the yum installation):
mkdir /capnjosh1-p4root
chown perforce:perforce /capnjosh-p4root/

Start perforce server:
service perforce-p4dctl start

Run p4 protect to set up core permissions:
p4 protect
-by default it’ll give the OS account ‘root’ full perforce access
(if you set to a different port besides 1666, you will have to set this environment variable “export P4PORT=1667”, or whatever port number you put)

If it doesn’t start, it’ll say as much… likely check your p4root folder and make sure it’s owned by the ‘perforce’ user.

Here’s what’s cool, if you want to add more perforce instances, just copy-paste that .conf file and change the name, port, and p4root path.

When you uninstall perforce, it’ll auto-rename your .conf files so they won’t get auto-loaded if you reinstall perforce again.

Configuring Confluence to Use Jira for Authentication when machines are behind a proxy

Here’s the key:

add the proxy configs to catalina.properties, just at the end, one per line. This is only mentioned in the Confluence-proxy article I found, but it works with Jira as well. Much cleaner.

/opt/atlassian/confluence/conf/catalinia.properties. Here’s what I added to the end of that file:

# Proxy Settings
http.proxyHost=10.22.1.2
http.proxyPort=8080
https.proxyHost=10.22.1.2
https.proxyPort=8080
http.nonProxyHosts=localhost\|10.22.18.45

NOTE: that nonProxyHosts doesn’t *seem* to work with wildcards, e.g. 10.*.*.*
When I did it this way I could never get Confluence to actually connect to Jira and Jira to connect to Confluence. You have to specify the entire IP address. Otherwise, you’ll get messages about “connection refused” or “the application doesn’t appear to be online”. Not very helpful at all, no sir.