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A short while back, I was handed a repository with code written in Laravel, incomplete, and somewhat sketchy. with the purpose of taking a look at the code and deciding whether i would take it or not.

To give you the lowdown FIRST, while first researching Laravel, I started by investigating the limitations, my first google search sent me in the direction of a blog post by Beau Beauchamp, a developer who seems familiar with the framework.

I obviously didn’t take his word for it, I don’t really know who he is, so i gave myself a 2 day intensive Laravel course, unfortunately he was somewhat right.

The following two paragraphs are from his blog post, they don’t tell you much, but are better explained as I go

Laravel prides itself as the framework for “artisans”. The impression is that Laravel is the framework for people who don’t really know how to code and don’t want to learn. I get it.

Laravel is not PHP, per se, it uses an “expressive” syntax or what has been coined as “syntactic sugar” to hide things from you that it thinks “artisans” don’t need to worry about.

Having no experience with Laravel, and plenty of experience in PHP, the 2 day course i mentioned earlier left me with the following impressions, I was Impressed by how massive it is (Implementing plenty of features with very few lines), impressed by how simple and easy it is (Truly made for people who don’t want to learn programming). and thinking that this is basically a great framework for a simple straight forward website, but once you are looking to give the website more edge, a competitive advantage, or creating complex functionality, the framework is pretty restrictive and not so scalable.

yes, caching can help with the scalability part, but the degree caching helps with depends on the nature of the website, and for this particular purpose, it is not a perfect solution.

So should we throw the existing code away ?

My answer is NO, if i do end up taking this job, I plan to launch with the Laravel code, then extend the software with good old plain old PHP, with the database acting as the API between the new system and the old system, this way, the website owner can have a functional website where he can promote and advertise, and dip his toes in the water while a different system slowly takes this system’s place as it gets developed.

After updating the existing code from Laravel 7 to Laravel 9 (Overhead), running a security audit for the code, A varnish or nginx proxy should sit in the middle, and new code should run transparently through the proxy, when that happens, I am not even restricted to the same virtual machine running Laravel, I can have 2 virtual machines running different tools acting as one website, transparently, without the user ever knowing.

The front end with react

The other issue I have with this project is with react and react-native, which are the front ends of both web and mobile applications.

React is a very cool framework, but there is quite a bit of controversy around it and around Ajax in general when it comes to Search Engine optimization (SEO), in a statement by google ten years ago, googlebot is now able to read a website the same way a web browser does, and I have seen that they do see it that way from ten years ago when they were providing tools telling people what pages on their websites were having horizontal scroll bars, but regardless of that statement, the fact that most websites that appear in my search results are not Ajax, and that HTML and CSS still run most of the popular websites does raise some concerns, entering into a very competitive market dictates that every inch of a competitive advantage is vital to our success.

So, first let me get the advantages and disadvantages of Laravel out of the way, then get into the technicalities and how the new system should co-exist with Laravel and react.

Pros

• Laravel is a very mature framework, but very opinionated, opinionated means the designers of the framework expect you to create your website in one specific way, and as long as you are within those lines, you can make things work, what mature and popular means is that when you don’t see those lines, someone online has probably mentioned how to do it with Laravel.
• Laravel is not the greatest in backwards compatibility, so when a new release comes out, it is not just PHP that you need to worry about, it is also Laravel, and from people’s experiences online, things tend to either break or become buggy when a major release of Laravel is out
• Laravel is heavy, very heavy, and to deal with that, the developers have come up with workarounds, mainly caching, which lends itself to certain websites more than others, sometimes caching can have so little benefit, and sometimes it is a magic recipe for super snappy
• Laravel is based on symphony, and works great with react, but even though google has claimed that their spider treats

My Seagate ST3000DM001 failed me, it was no longer detected by the BIOS, when the PC starts, you can feel the disk spinning, and the head moving in the usual way, but after spending a minute waiting for it to be detected on the post screen, the computer simply ignores it (Does not detect it) and boots without it. meaning the operating system does not detect it !

Before i blame Seagate (I prefer western digital in general), this drives is more than 5 years old, was only used for storage, and never ran any software, but still, more than 5 years old.

2- Diagnosis

the most likely cause seems to be the PCB board as the BIOS does not detect the disk altogether, nonetheless, I have had excellent results with the freezer trick before (Even though the freezer trick is not something that is suitable for this type of malfunction, the freezer helps with mechanical issues often denoted by unhealthy sounds coming from the drive). so I froze it (Within a bag to avoid condensation), and tried it a day later, but absolutely nothing was different, no surprise there.

I also, for no reason whatsoever, removed the LID and took a look inside, no idea what i was expecting to find, but i did anyways, everything looks normal inside, and hopefully no significant dust went in there.

So i decided it was most likely the board, considered this my diagnosis, and will now act accordingly

3- Work

3.1 – Find a donor board

Before looking online for a board, I took a look at the drives I had at home, turned out I do not have two of the same drive, but i do have a 2TB ST2000DM001 which had the exact board (100687658 Rev: C) ! obviously, the BIOS on the board is different between the two boards, so that has to be flipped from one board to the other (Basic soldering skills required), but otherwise, the boards are identical between the 2TB and the 3TB, I might end up losing both in this operation, but getting the data out is certainly worth the try

3.2 – Copy the data from the donor 2TB drive to a third drive (western digital 2TB drive)

To begin with, I started by finding a similarly sized hard drive to copy the data that resides on the donor disks before i take its board out, luckily, I found a western digital green drive of identical size and sector size, namely a (Western Digital Green WD20EARX), this third disk is to make sure i don’t lose any data from the 2TB donor drive, so here is how it is done

After connecting both disks to a Linux PC, I identified which disk is which using the fdisk command

fdisk -l

Now that i know which one is the source and which the destination, I started the process of copying the data from the donor (2TB), to third disk (The western digital).

by moving the data on the 2TB drive (The healthy one) to a similarly sized drive , this copy procedure is the simplest task, with both connected to a Linux machine I used my favorite cloning tool (Nop, not DD, I switched to PV the moment i first tried it).

pv < /dev/sdd > /dev/sdf

Now, All i can do is wait for 4:30 hours (According to PV), then come back, take the drives out, and start the surgery. it is copying at 115MB/s probably because the WD is a green drive that uses SMR recording.

Now that it is done copying, I took out the boards (Few screws), de-soldered the bios chip as you can see in the video, and soldered the one from the 3TB board onto the donor board and the one from the 2TB board onto the presumably malfunctioning board

the disk BIOS chip is the one branded winbond and has 8 pins (usually the only chip with 8 pins).

out of curiosity, I connected the 2TB drive (Now With the bad board after the swap), and it worked ! this is defiantly bad news, the problem was not the board after all ! connecting the 3TB disk yielded the same old problem exactly !

NOTE: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

It is a rather old PC, 4th Gen intel at best, I have this motherboard with an Intel Xeon XPU, and 64GB of ram, so it is worth a try, I will start by ordering this TPM module from Amazon (here)

Once i receive it, I will come back and explain the whole experience, and if this works out of the box with windows 11, or if i need to fiddle with anything

The original firmware based on debian did come with a DLNA server, in this post, I am only dealing with openWRT (You need to change the firmware due to a serious security issue on the NAS drive as shown here)

In openWRT, i recommend you install libffmpeg-full before miniDLNA, since miniDLNA will install libffmpeg-mini which will conflict

opkg update
opkg install libffmpeg-full
opkg install minidlna luci-app-minidlna

Once the above are done, you can setup your DLNA server from the web interface of openWRT

I would recommend that the database and log files be on the data partition to save space, something you can manually set from within the web interface

to rebuild that database (re-index the files), you will need to stop miniDLNA, run the update and then start the server again

service minidlna stop
minidlnad -R
service minidlna start

After an apt-get upgrade, phpmyadmin stopped working, I would see a blank page that sets a session cookie but does not show a login screen , just a blank page and the source of the page is also blank

So, i added the following line to my config.inc.php

$cfg['environment'] = 'development';

An right after, the following appeared

Array ( [type] => 1 [message] => Uncaught TypeError: PhpMyAdmin\ConfigStorage\Relation::__construct(): Argument #1 ($dbi) must be of type PhpMyAdmin\DatabaseInterface, null given, called in /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/Twig/RelationExtension.php on line 22 and defined in /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/ConfigStorage/Relation.php:62 Stack trace: #0 /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/Twig/RelationExtension.php(22): PhpMyAdmin\ConfigStorage\Relation->__construct() #1 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/ExtensionSet.php(426): PhpMyAdmin\Twig\RelationExtension->getFunctions() #2 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/ExtensionSet.php(411): Twig\ExtensionSet->initExtension() #3 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/ExtensionSet.php(385): Twig\ExtensionSet->initExtensions() #4 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/Environment.php(810): Twig\ExtensionSet->getUnaryOperators() #5 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/Lexer.php(457): Twig\Environment->getUnaryOperators() #6 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/Lexer.php(108): Twig\Lexer->getOperatorRegex() #7 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/Environment.php(466): Twig\Lexer->__construct() #8 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/Environment.php(516): Twig\Environment->tokenize() #9 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/Environment.php(348): Twig\Environment->compileSource() #10 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/Environment.php(309): Twig\Environment->loadTemplate() #11 /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/Template.php(123): Twig\Environment->load() #12 /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/Template.php(156): PhpMyAdmin\Template->load() #13 /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/Core.php(145): PhpMyAdmin\Template->render() #14 /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/Config.php(684): PhpMyAdmin\Core::fatalError() #15 /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/Common.php(169): PhpMyAdmin\Config->checkPermissions() #16 /var/www/html/pma2/index.php(48): PhpMyAdmin\Common::run() #17 {main} thrown [file] => /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/ConfigStorage/Relation.php [line] => 62 ) 

Turns out, this is an incompatibility (related to session storage) that has only been fixed in the 5.2 snapshot, download that version of phpmyadmin and everything should be fine

This is probably very easy to use on windows, but i could not find a windows machine,

A quick solution that was not very clear at first was as follows, before you do this, make sure you have unmounted the SD card !

apt-get install exfat-utils

And then run the command

sudo exfatfsck /dev/mmcblk0p1

Got a few of the following error, and answered yes to all

ERROR: unknown entry type 0xc1.
Fix (Y/N)? y

And that was that

Reload

firewall-cmd --reload

Dealing with zones

* firewall-cmd --get-zones <- Show all zone names
* firewall-cmd --list-all-zones <- Detailed info about all zones
* firewall-cmd --zone=zone-name --list-all <- show everything about a certain zone
* firewall-cmd --get-default-zone <- What is the current default zone
* firewall-cmd --set-default-zone zone-name <- set new default zone
* firewall-cmd --get-active-zones <- List the active zones and the interfaces assigned to them
* firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --change-interface=enp1s0 <- connect the public zone to eth0, REQUIERS RELOAD

I haven’t played any games in 20 years, up until early this month, I played a simple game on my phone, nice, but I’m not addicted, no urge to pick up the phone

So, having no windows PC of my own, i decided to install the open source supertuxkart on my debian (gnome) machine

the game is a joke compared to modern day graphics and physics, but it is fun, with things like bombs and banana skins and stuff, i don’t think i will be playing it often, but there you have it

Like the name implies, this is a cheat sheet to quickly find the command you need, they are ordered by the frequency a command is used, or at least what i think is going to be needed more frequently, I have also grouped them by function

The container name in the examples is mycontainer, it is just a name that you will need to replace with your own container name, the container ID here is always 12345abcdef

Command	Arguments	What it does
============>	Containers – list
docker container ls		Display running containers
docker container ls -a	a: also show containers that are not running	Display all containers, running or not
docker ps	Show running containers	PS is the same as LS but older
============>	Containers – Run
docker run --name mycontainer -i -t imagename	1- The name of the container to run (mycontainer) 2- The i flag indicating you’d like to open an interactive SSH session to the container. The i flag does not close the SSH session even if the container is not attached. 3- The t flag allocates a pseudo-TTY which much be used to run commands interactively. 4- The base image to create the container from (imagename).	Runs the container, and leaves you on a shell prompt that executes commands on that container (As if you have ssh-ed into it)
docker run --name mycontainer -d imagename	-d for running the container in the background
docker stop my_container		Stop the running container
docker exec -it mycontainer /bin/bash	-it flag allows you to run a container in interactive mode	If this doesn’t work, you may not have bash installed, you can try the next command Gives you access to the shell, much like opening an SSH session to the container
docker exec -it username/mycontainer /bin/sh
ctrl+p followed by ctrl+q		Detach from container

Sometimes, accessing a container throght the command line may not be enough, there is a chance you want to access it for file transfer for example, in that case, you want port 22 exposed, and you want to be connected to it like you would connect to a virtual machine

As usual, I will start by getting to the bottom of it, then explain everything

first, you need to first shrink the file system, then the partition where the filesystem resides, replace /dev/sda4 with whatever you partition is named

1- Shrinking the filesystem

Unmount the partition to be resized,

umount /mountpoint

otherwise you will get a message such as

Filesystem at /dev/sda4 is mounted on /mountpoint; on-line resizing required
On-line shrinking from 30453104 to 98098 not supported.

The following commands are relevant to the program resize2fs, they are hands on examples of use, take a close look at the description of what each does before you proceed by picking how you want to use the command.

* Show the minimum size we can squeeze this partition to without losing data
resize2fs -P /dev/sda4
* do the filesystem resize to the MINIMUM possible size (the number you ended up with in the previous command)
resize2fs -M /dev/sda4

The command above moves all data to the beginning of the filesystem/drive, then shrinks it to the smallest possible size.

2- Shrinking the partition

2.1- Find the boundaries of the file system with fdisk

3- You are DONE

If this is it, why is there much more in this tutorial, Simply put, what is above does very little explaining, if you want to understand what we did, you will need a bit more

the assumption, I have a partition that only has 5% data, I would like to shrink the partition to ten percent of it’s size.

Unlike windows, where your luck of where the data resides, you can always shrink a Linux partition to whatever size fits the data that is on it (without losing data)

in this tutorial, I will assume the partition is /dev/sda4, you will need to replace that with whatever your partition is.

1- collecting information about our partition

fdisk /dev/sda
then the p command for print

df -h
this should show you all the partitions, info about them and where they are mounted and how much space is used

the file system can be shrunk with resize2fs

the command “resize2fs -M” should first move the data to the beginning of the drive, then shrink it

first, how large is the file system ATM
tune2fs -l /dev/sda2 then multiply by block size