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Linux

Background

I have been with PlusNet for over two years now and am a happy camper as far as fiber optic broadband is concerned but as I am no longer on a broadband contract with PlusNet and had no intention of going on one, so the only way I could get a change to my ageing router was by purchasing a new one.

Hence I started reading about my options and soon enough realised that an old router can be given new lease of life using DD-WRT. Equally soon-ish I also realised that the router from PlusNet - TG582n - is quite rubbish and does not play nice with any of the open source firmwares.

So I figured that if I have to just play around a bit, I might as well start with something cheaper and cheaper is what I found in the TP-Link router TL-WR841n at just £16.00. You can't get any cheaper than that in my opinion. OK, so now that we have established that I am cheap and my new router is cheap, let's move on to interesting stuff.

I had read that TP-Link router and specifically TL-WR841n plays nicely with DD-WRT but it was only after I had my new toy did I realise that these things also come in hardware version and while interwebs is filled with instructions on installing DD-WRT for upto v9, when it comes to v11 in Europe, it can be a bit tricky to proceed. There are some instructions in forums1 but nothing that walks one end to end hence this post.

Swap File to create extra memory

While renewing my LetsEncrypt certificate, I found myself in a strange situation where the certbot won't run asking me to update pip and then each time I tried updating pip it failed with the error error: command 'x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc' failed with exit status 4.

It turns out that this happens due to low memory and with my digitalocean droplet being the cheapest one this was bound to happen sooner rather than later. Fortunately there is a way around it as explained below.

Use of following commands will ensure that the swap file is created which in turn will help avoid the 'error: command 'x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc' failed with exit status 4'.

Following commands will create a swap file:

Grav - CMS with a difference

While I love Ghost as a blogging platform, it is not best placed for things other than blogs - after all that is the basic idea behind creation of this wonderful tool.

As I wanted to host a static website using tools that don't require a database or rely on php, I went searching on interwebs. I came across a lot of options and the most popular one appears to be Jekyll and it's variants (Nikola and such) but they require a lot of terminal activity which won't go well for regular end user responsible for maintaining content of the static website in question.So I continued looking and came across this wonderful project called Grav.

Grav is super fast, very pretty and extremely easy to deploy and maintain. Additionally, it has very good documentation.

The key features that I absolutely loved are as below:

Ethercalc

Ethercalc is good tool which can be selfhosted. It is fairly simple to do so. Though it will be available for anyone who has the URL because there is no inbuilt login mechanism.

Fix for PHP Issues after upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04.1 (Xenial)

After updating from Ubuntu 14.04, the php and Apache stopped being friends and one of the WordPress site I maintain went all white and admin page was just showing php code. This is apparently because of a known issue in 16.04 with upgrade to php7 as shown on the ubuntu forum here.

Using the guidance from this link and with some more of duckduckgo search later, I managed to resolve the problem thus:

Tomcat 8.5.4 on Fedora behind Nginx

Install Oracle Java

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#install jdk
wget --no-cookies --no-check-certificate --header "Cookie: gpw_e24=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oracle.com%2F; oraclelicense=accept-securebackup-cookie" "http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/8u102-b14/jdk-8u102-linux-i586.rpm"
#install jre
wget --no-cookies --no-check-certificate --header "Cookie: gpw_e24=http://www.oracle.com/ oraclelicense=accept-securebackup-cookie" "http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/8u102-b14/jre-8u102-linux-i586.rpm"
#enable firefox plugin
alternatives --install /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so libjavaplugin.so /usr/java/jdk1.8.0_102/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so 20000

Tip

URL for JDK and JRE is best obtained directly from oracle website

The complete walkthrough of my blogger to ghost migration

The 7 Year Itch

It can't possibly be a coincidence that this is the 7th year since I started blogging on blogger and therefore it is very likely to be a strong case of the 7 year itch syndrome but whichever way you look at it, divorce was inevitable given blogger had just stopped inspiring me.

I have been fiddling with different blogging platforms while getting accused of neglecting my sweet and loving family...😢. Ghost caught my fancy three weeks back. The last post was the beginning of our courtship and this post tells the tale of how a casual fling turned into marital commitment. 😂

To start a fresh blog, choosing any platform is easy and straight forward but to move from one platform to another is - umm... lets just say a very involved process - rewarding but involved.

Love can move mountains!!!

A complete migration from blogger to WordPress would have been way simpler. I know this as I have done it in past and it appeared like moving to Ghost would require migrating to a WordPress instance anyway. There was - I must admit - a temptation to call WordPress the home but that wouldn't have made a great love-story now - would it?

However, the much publicised WordPress route to Ghost migration did not work for me and eventually after a lot of manual copying, pasting, cleaning, pruning, hiding, reading and learning later, the self-hosted blog is all complete.