pikedom.com – Notes to future me…

Enable GIMP Layer Effects Plugin

November 11, 2018 Andy 0

The other day I was following an YouTube video on how to create your own logo. During the video they used a Bevel and Emboss layer function I didn’t seem to have. Looks like you should simple go to: Layer –> Layer Effects Turns out you need to install it as a plugin. You can find out more about the effect and how to use them here but they include: Bevel and Emboss Color Overlay Drop Shadow Gradient Overlay Inner Glow Inner Shadow Outer Glow Pattern Overlay Reapply Effects Satin Being an Arch Linux user I prefer to use Pacman/Yaourt […]

Installing Eclipse IDE on Arch Linux

October 30, 2018 Andy 0

I recently updated my OS (Manjaro i3) and noticed Netbeans had been updated to 9.0. Keen to see what new features they had added, I promptly took a look! Sadly there were no new features at all! In fact, many features have been removed! It turns out Netbeans is going through some changes due to Oracle donating it to the Apache open source License. This move makes sense long-term in my opinion as it was in direct competition with Oracles JDeveloper IDE. Short-term however its made Netbeans kind of useless. As such I’ve decided to move back to Eclispe after […]

Migrate GitLab Instance to new Host

May 17, 2018 Andy 0

Here I migrate a GitLab installation from one server to another. The hostname and IP addresses will be different. Both were installed from the Omnibus version. However, currently the exact version numbers differ. In order to migrate successfully, both versions must be exactly the same type and version. For example, both installed using the Omnibus version and exactly the same version number. If you are unsure whether you installed the Omnibus version, you can confirm with the below command. This will fail if not. If it returns output similar to the below, you have the Omnibus version. It also shows […]

Install and Configure GitLab on Ubuntu 16.04

May 17, 2018 Andy 0

Dependencies Run to the below command to install the GitLab dependencies. When prompted, select Internet Site when configuring Postfix. Enter the FQDN. Installing GitLab GitLab provides a bash script that add their repository for you. Just download it and run it. Now you can install the GitLab package using the apt-get package manager. Configuring GitLab You need to first edit the configuration file. I added the following line to define my primary hostname and URL. I also enabled letsencrypt. If you do, make sure the DNS is setup already. This will auto-renew at 3:30 AM every seventh day. Now run […]

The Quick Start Guide to vcsh/mr Setup

April 30, 2018 Andy 0

I recently wrote a post about how to install configure vcsh and mr to convienently manage and use all your repositories. However for demostration this was quite a manual and long process. To achieve a very similar outcome in a much shorter time, you could use the provided template and customise from there. The below will use vcsh to clone the git repository to mr.git in the ~/.config/vcsh/repo.d/ directory. The above repository is not owned by me so I can not push changes to it. As such you will need to edit the configuration and point it to your repository. […]

Managing dot files with vcsh and myrepo

April 30, 2018 Andy 0

Ever wanted to manage all those ~/.conf files with Git? Probably not but if you know anything about Git, the advantages are obvious. Is it even possible though you may ask!?! To do so would mean separating the working tree from the actual git repository. Fortunately Git allows for just that. By default, when you create a non-bare repository, you end up with the actual repository, a .git directory being created in the directory you want to track. The directory you want to track is actually called the working tree. The repository itself is a load of files (objects really) […]

The Ultimate vim Configuration On Manjaro i3

April 28, 2018 Andy 0

vim is an awesome text editor (and more) but a good configuration can be a bit of a pain and personally I don’t have enough time to dedicate to it. The default vim configuration with Manjaro i3 is actually pretty good but I really like The Ultimate Vim Configuration. Install Installation is simply on any Linux-based OS where Git is already present. Install for a List of Users The below installs it for the users andy and root. You must make sure all users have read access to/opt/vim_runtime when you are installing it for multiple users. Your user will need […]

Clam Anti Virus on Arch Linux

March 28, 2018 Andy 0

Install Clam with: To update the virus definitions, run: You will also need to start and enable the clamam-freshclam.service to get the latest definitions at boot. Make sure you have already run sudo freshclam before starting and enabling the clamav-daemon. If not, stop it and run. It is recommended to add the additional signatures from the AUR package, clamav-unofficial-sigs: Make sure the below is uncommented: Then to install and enable these unofficial signatures: To update the unofficial signatures, run: Lastly, scan for viruses:

Apache not Logging Correct IP when behind Incapsula WAF

March 26, 2018 Andy 0

Incapsula is a great resource to help protect your web site from unwanted traffic and attacks. It is a cloud-based application delivery platform, providing among other things: Content Delivery Network (CDN) Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Mitigation Web Application Firewall (WAF) Incapsula acts as a proxy, sitting in front of the nodes its protecting. The DNS points to Incapsula which hides the IP address to your site. Incapsula analyses the traffic and removes any unwanted requests before passing it on to the web node. As with any proxy-based system, the proxy rewrites the the X-Forwarded-For header information with the originating […]

MS SQL Maintenance Plan not Deleting Previous Backups

March 14, 2018 Andy 0

I don’t normally include Windows related stuff here because…….well…..its Windows! But this one irritated me so much, I thought I’d share in case anyone else was experiencing this problem. So I’m using SQL server 2012 to backup all my databases. I have a daily backup running every night at midnight. I also have a maintenance plan in place to delete backups older than 3 days. The backup has been working fine but the problem that the maintenance plan was not deleting any old backups. Frustratingly there was not much to go on in the logs. Below are my successful settings. […]