Best posts made by EddieJennings

I plan on mainly posting content on Saturdays or Sundays, but for the opening week, I made a few things.

Click over to the channel and check it out, should the below interest you.

• What is an IT Generalist?
• Determining Software Costs: Don't forget the cost of keeping software current!
• What is music theory, and why is it awesome?
• Setting up a private network in Hyper-V

I've never had much use for Cortana, other than practicing my disable-and-remove-useless-programs skill.

I finally got around to getting a little WordPress site going in my lab, and I've decided to make it the new home of www.eddiejennings.net. Enjoy!

Over time I'll try to find good ways of making some content from previous iterations of my blog (and podcast) available.

Sometimes for malware, you have to nuke and start over.

@scottalanmiller said in Congrats to Eddie - New Linux Admin:

@EddieJennings has put in so much work learning and teaching Linux administration. It's awesome to see him moving up to a Fortune 100 Linux Admin! Congrats Eddie!

Thank you Scott! I haven’t been this excited about a job opportunity since I was able to land my first position from the career change.

It cannot be stated enough how important community is. Since joining ML in 2016, all of you have effectively been my IT mentors.

Hard drive from xbyte arrived a day early.

<rant>
What boils my blood more than anything:

User: HELP HELP. . . but not right now.
</rant>

@dustinb3403 said in I can't even:

hah...

https://i.imgur.com/khO8zDB.png

If he's running out of stroage just direct him to https://downloadmorestorage.com/.

Just signed a litter accepting a promotion effective 9/22. Not bad for a Friday

@scotth said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

3 sites down this morning. Power, I need power.

Small victories in life are often the sweetest! As of about 10 AM today, I paid off my car loan. The taste of freedom being being debt-free is so nice.

Tomorrow seemed quite far away in September (proposal date). Wedding ceremony is 24 hours and 30 minutes away

124 mile round-trip commute ended today. Fully remote gig starts on 12/12

I happened upon noticing that RedHat Summit 2020 will be online due to COVID-19 and appears to have no registration fee! I've never attended RedHat Summit, and looking into it last year showed it was beyond my financial means at the time.

I figure attending their virtual conference will be a good way to get a taste of what's available to see if it's worth trying to attend next year's conference in person, barring whatever disaster 2021 brings.

https://www.redhat.com/en/summit

I've found myself starting to make some How-To videos for my little Youtube project. I figured I'd share the ones relevant to IT here.

Since we know that Windows Server 2019 uses a non-GUI installation by default (default determined by the fact that the GUI has an extra "Desktop Experience" attached to its name), here's a little How-To for doing a quick ADDS deployment from just PowerShell. If you're new to Windows administration, you might find this useful

Youtube Video

Writing to the ever-growing list of stuff I need to fix, thanks to MangoCon and the community in general.

We all know the horror stories of IPODs and such, as well as small business infrastructure built around having a SAN that makes zero sense. For those with experience deploying SAN, what would be examples of proper use of SAN? What kind of storage needs would warrant the consideration of deploying a SAN?

Inching toward freedom. I'm spinning up my company's first Vultr instance (which will eventually become our FreePBX server).

I found a blog post a while back which helped me overcome the problem of installing the Unifi Controller with the current MongoDB. I made a script a little while back that documented the process and tried to automate much of it. I've since updated the script some, and I figure I'd share it.

Note: this script only installs the software. It does not enable the service or do any firewall configuration.

https://gitlab.com/EddieJennings/ubiquiti/-/blob/master/install_unifi_controller_ubuntu.sh

For anyone new to scripting with BASH, here's the break-down of what it does and why I made certain decisions about how to handle things. Note that I've omitted most of the echo statements, which tell the user what's going on as it happens.

MONGO_DL="https://repo.mongodb.org/apt/ubuntu/dists/focal/mongodb-org/5.0/multiverse/binary-amd64/mongodb-org-server_5.0.2_amd64.deb"
UNIFI_DL="https://dl.ui.com/unifi/6.2.26/unifi_sysvinit_all.deb"
MONGO_FILE="/tmp/$(echo $MONGO_DL | rev | cut -d '/' -f 1 | rev)"
UNIFI_FILE="/tmp/$(echo $UNIFI_DL | rev | cut -d '/' -f 1 | rev)"
INSTALLER_LOG_FILE="/tmp/unifi_installer_$(date +%F).log"
WAITING_MESSAGE="This may take a moment."

I set a few variables here. The main two that you would want to periodically update are MONGO_DL and UNIFI_DL as you'll want to have the most current installer. Also these variables are used to create some file paths used for the installation. You'll notice I'm doing everything in /tmp. This allows for easy cleanup, as if the system is rebooted, the files will be deleted (and temporary stuff should live in /tmp).

if [ "$(whoami)" != "root" ]; then
	echo "You must run this script using sudo or"
	echo "be logged in as root.  Exiting."
	exit 1
fi

Since we're installing things, this needs to be run as root (either being logged in as root or using sudo). I decided to check to see if the account running the script was not root, and if true, then exit the script.

apt install -y wget openjdk-8-jre-headless jsvc binutils > $INSTALLER_LOG_FILE 2>&1

Next we install the dependencies for both this script and the Unifi controller. I use 2>&1 so that both standard output and standard error gets redirected to the log file.

if [ -f "$MONGO_FILE" ]
	then
		echo "$MONGO_FILE was found. Continuing."
		echo ""
	else
		echo "$MONGO_FILE was not found.  Downloading now."
		echo "Downloading Mongodb Community installer. $(echo $WAITING_MESSAGE)"
		echo ""
		wget -O $MONGO_FILE  $MONGO_DL 2>> $INSTALLER_LOG_FILE
		
fi

This block checks to see if the MongoDB installer file exists in /tmp and if not, wget downloads the file to the /tmp directory. I wanted to redirect the output of wget's downloading of the file, and since that output is actually standard error rather than standard output 2>>is necessary to redirect and append to the log file.

if [ -f "$UNIFI_FILE" ]
	then
		echo "$UNIFI_FILE was found. Continuing."
		echo ""
	else
		echo "$UNIFI_FILE was not found.  Downloading now."
		echo "Downloading the Unifi Controller installer. $(echo $WAITING_MESSAGE)"
		echo ""
		wget -O $UNIFI_FILE $UNIFI_DL 2>> $INSTALLER_LOG_FILE
		
fi

And I repeat this process for the Unifi Controller installer.

dpkg -i $MONGO_FILE >> $INSTALLER_LOG_FILE 2>&1

Finally, we start installing stuff beginning with MongoDB.

dpkg --ignore-depends=mongodb-org-server -i $UNIFI_FILE >> $INSTALLER_LOG_FILE 2>&1

Next we install the Unifi Controller. I specifically tell dkpg to ignore the mongodb-org-server dependency, since if MongoDB greater than version 4 is installed, the Unifi Controller install will fail. Such a requirement is probably by design; however, for my lab, I wanted to see if I can use the most current MongoDB. I have not had any problems with the current MongoDB; however, that's something to think about whether or not you want to do for production.

dkpg output and any errors it throws are then logged.

echo "################" | tee -a $INSTALLER_LOG_FILE
echo "# **Reminder** #" | tee -a $INSTALLER_LOG_FILE
echo "################" | tee -a $INSTALLER_LOG_FILE
echo "" | tee -a $INSTALLER_LOG_FILE
echo "##############################################################" | tee -a $INSTALLER_LOG_FILE
echo "# Edit the /var/lib/dpkg/status file, and remove the         #" | tee -a $INSTALLER_LOG_FILE
echo "# 'mongodb-org-server (<< 4.0.0)' requirement in the depends #" | tee -a $INSTALLER_LOG_FILE
echo "# section as shown below.                                    #" | tee -a $INSTALLER_LOG_FILE
echo "##############################################################" | tee -a $INSTALLER_LOG_FILE
echo ""  | tee -a $INSTALLER_LOG_FILE
grep -A 10 -i "Package: unifi" /var/lib/dpkg/status | grep --color=always -B 10 -i "mongodb-org-server (<< 4.0.0)"  | tee -a $INSTALLER_LOG_FILE
echo ""

The last section of the script is a suggestion to the user, and I wanted both the output to display to the user as well as be logged; thus, I piped the echo statements to the tee command.

This final step probably isn't necessary, but since we're explicitly ignoring the MongoDB dependency, I figure it would be a good idea to remove it from /var/lib/dpkg/status file. Also, the above blog post follows that step. To date, I haven't figured out a reliable way to automate this piece. One day, I might come up with it.

Hopefully this script will be useful to someone.