Installing ColdFusion 2016 on Windows Server 2016

As you may know from attempting it, running the ColdFusion 2016 installer as downloaded from the Adobe site throws an error as below on a Windows Server 2016 machine.

Looking into it and as per https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2225089, ColdFusion 2016 doesn’t support Windows Server 2016 at the time of writing (see https://helpx.adobe.com/pdf/coldfusion2016-support-matrix.pdf) but ColdFusion Express 2016 seems to work (requires no installation, see https://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/installing/installing-coldfusion-express.html) so it appears to be an installer-only issue.

Workaround for it is relatively simple:

• Install Java on the machine – I went with Java 8 update 31
• Run the exe as downloaded from the Adobe site from a command prompt window ran as administrator

C:\...\Downloads>ColdFusion_2016_WWEJ_win64.exe LAX_VM C:\Java8\jre1.8.0_31\bin\java.exe

And everything installed as normal. I have yet only been as far as confirming the service run and accessing the ColdFusion web Admin console so there might be some some surprises but the installation at last worked.

Handy Python Utilities

Storm SSH – command line tool to manage your ssh connections

Cheat – create and view interactive cheatsheets on the command-line

 

Dell XPS, Windows 8.1 and DisplayLink D3100 Docking Station

So I am now the happy owner of a new Dell XPS 15 running Windows 8.1, along with a D3100 docking station.

Now, the problem is, the drivers provided by Dell with the D3100 docking station (DisplayLink) refuse to install. I get the license agreement windows and click on OK, nothing happens and the folder for the DisplayLink software isn’t even created  as it should under C:\Program Files\DisplayLink Core Software\.

I tried every single version of the Dell drivers supporting Windows 8.1 and a lot of the drivers provided by DisplayLink themselves, trying to boot into Safe Mode to install, running the DisplayLink uninstaller and trying again… All without any luck until I came across this post entry on the DisplayLink forums – http://www.displaylink.org/forum/showthread.php?p=77416

And I finally got the DisplayLink software and drivers to install by running the 7.4M2 driver from the DisplayLink website in Windows 7 compatibility mode (otherwise it still doesn’t work) and I have at least an image on my stand alone monitor when I plug in the docking station! I haven’t gone through any further set-up of the extended display of of yet but will update this post when I do.

Virtualbox/Ubuntu 14.04 Hypervisor

Quick notes on setting up Virtualbox on a Ubuntu 14.04 install to manage remotely (like an hypervisor) using phpvirtualbox.

This is the most complete guide – https://www.liberiangeek.net/2014/09/install-virtualbox-headless-ubuntu-14-04-server-manage-phpvirtualbox/

Take note of the Grub installation issue (happens to me every time on VM install) – http://superuser.com/questions/176050/ubuntu-server-installed-from-usb-puts-grub-on-the-usb-drive-instead-of-the-hard

And cherry on the cake, a handy script to start your VMs at boot automatically – http://techblog.glendaleacademy.org/virtualbox/creating-an-auto-start-stop-script-for-virtualbox

Network scanner – AngryIP

Very easy to install and use, I use it to figure out the IPs of machines on my network that have static IPs (and don’t register a DHCP lease on the router status page) or quickly figure out what services run on which machine – http://angryip.org/

MSSQL Server Installs – Enabling remote connections

Just because it gets me every time!

• Open the Windows Firewall for the port (default port 1433) – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175043.aspx
• Enable TCP/IP for the given server using SQL Server Configuration Manager (turned off by default)

Just because I found it so funny

http://9gag.com/gag/anXEbe0

Tiny Core Linux 5.X and mounting Samba drives

I was fighting for a while to mount a network drive on my Tiny Core Linux box running v5.4 with the following error

mount error(13): Permission denied
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs)

The command I was trying was:

sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.1.103/share /mnt/popcorn -o username=$USER,password=$PASSWORD

After a lot of googling, it turns out that as per http://office-supply-liberation.blogspot.ie/2014/01/asus-ac66r-wireless-router-mounting.html, I need to add another option! Weird, since Tiny Core Linux 4.X mounts the exact same drive without requiring the option.

So the command that works is:

sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.1.103/share /mnt/popcorn -o username=$USER,password=$PASSWORD,sec=ntlmv2

Setting up a NAS server with Tiny Core Linux 5.4

Makes sense, since the whole OS runs from a USB key, no need to waste hard drive space for an OS to do the few things I want a NAS to do, namely mount my existing NTFS drives (2 data drives, 2 backup drives), share the data drives on my LAN via samba and run a few rsync jobs to keep the backup drives in sync with the data drives.

I could have used (and considered) NAS4free but I want to keep my data on NTFS drives (because if the machine fails, I can pick up the drives, mount them in an external USB enclosure and access my data from any machine I have lying around) and NTFS works in nearly everything. Problem with NAS4Free from that prospective is that NTFS is not recommended. I tried it and was able to mount and share my drives fine but running rsync just blew up the box and triggered a reboot.

I have already covered most of the work in a previous post, copying the Tiny Core Linux ISO to a USB key, installing it and setting up SSH.

After that, type “blkid” in the terminal to view which disks are available to be mounted, install ntfs-3g and mount the drives with the command “sudo ntfs-3g /dev/sde1 /mnt/data1”. I decided to add to the /opt/bootlocal.sh file the commands to create a /shares folder, then subfolders for each drive as well as the mount commands for each drive. Do not put those into the /home folder (as I did inadvertently the first time around) because then your data will be backed up and fill your USB drive and RAM to capacity (when you hit that issue by the way, just plug your USB into a Linux box, explode the mydata.tgz file, remove the folder and boot from the USB again)!

Samba again is covered in my previous post. Next on my list is rsync, FTP access and web utilities…

Rsync is pretty straightforward, install the rsync.tcz package and run the backup commands from /opt/bootlocal.sh. The FTP package is bftpd.tcz and the config file is /usr/local/etc/bftpd.conf. I just tweaked the settings to allow root access and set the default home directory to /usr/local/apache2/htdocs (since I only want FTP access to maintain my web files). Install the apache2.tcz and apache2-mod-php5.tcz for web access and php support.

Now I was looking for a web interface to display info on the drives (space, temperature…) and phpsysinfo fits the bill perfectly. Now to get smart info, I had to install the smartmontools.tcz package and because phpsysinfo doesn’t seem to be able to run the smartctl command with enough rights, enable cron in the boot options to run smartctl as a cron job and output to a text file that phpsysinfo can then read.

As an added bonus, I installed MiniGal Nano to display all my home pics through a web interface. I had to fight with the apache-mod-php5 package to be able to enable the gd library, for which I had to install the XLibs.tcz, gt2k.tcz, libiconv.tcz and libpng.tcz. Now the version of the libpng library bundled with the 5.x version doesn’t match the version required by apache-mod-php5 and I had to (from another computer) replace the libpng.tcz with the one from version 4.x (which I downloaded from http://ftp.vim.org/ibiblio/distributions/tinycorelinux/4.x/x86/tcz/libpng.tcz). But I got it working in the end and it was worth the trouble shooting! And to top it up, a nice landing page using the Deep template.

Tiny Core Linux v5.3 and a new webserver set-up

My little HP Thinclient is still going strong and I decided to upgrade my USB-powered web server to the latest version (5.3) of Tiny Core Linux. As part of the process and rather to upgrade all the components as they were, I decided to review my set-up and go for as small and resource efficient as possible. I don’t like the WordPress latest upgrades to the UI and admin sections and I still had occasional problems with the SQL database getting corrupted after powercuts and other sudden power downs.

As my landing page, I went for a very nice free bootstrap theme – http://startbootstrap.com/template-overviews/freelancer/ running on nginx. For convenience’s sake, I also installed Droopy (http://stackp.online.fr/?p=28, nice piece of software to allow me to upload files directly on my web server through a web page, as content for my blog or just when on the go to retrieve later) and the best blog platform I could find around, Ghost. Both are served to the outside world through proxies set-up in nginx.

I will detail the steps of the set-up in future posts.