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Centos 7.6 Minimal Post Install Change

I’m working on a project at a customer location this week and this particular project required me to install Centos 7+.  Being an Ubuntu guy, I kicked and moaned for about 3 whole seconds and started the install.  It went as smooth as you’d expect, however, I was greeted with no network connectivity once Centos rebooted.  Mentally, I thought it was needing VMWare drivers or something but as it turns out, I just needed to enable the network interface.

vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-<cardname>

Now change ONBOOT=No to ONBOOT=Yes

Then simply reboot and make sure you can get connected to the network.

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2017 Goals

You are under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.

This quote hit a cord with me late in the year.  I knew something had to change. Politics, Facebook, job, hobbies, kids, wife, family, were all fighting each other for a time slot.  My sleep schedule oddly wasn’t very picky and for quite some time my wife considered me to be on the the sleepless elite but from around November to now, I’m just tired. My body needs to rest and reset.

Like most people, I suppose, I set some goals for myself this year.  Some of them I had and failed in 2016 but want to dedicate some time to them nonetheless.

Here they are (in no particular order):

  • Read 1 book a month for entertainment, not specifically work related.
  • Learn to code in python.
  • Become an AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional.
  • Ditch Facebook.
  • Lose 50 pounds.
  • Implement retirement savings plan.
  • Learn to be patient with my kids.

Laying these out in such a pubic fashion will hopefully keep me honest about them, however, I’ll take it one step further and lay out my current plan of attack for each of them.

Reading

This should be easier than it ends up being.  In 2016 I read a total of 5 books.  My favorite was Elon Musk’s biography by Ashlee Vance which I read on the beach in Mexico while on vacation with my wife and parents.  I have a pretty broad range of interests from science and engineering to philosophy and even economics.  As long as it isn’t a romance novel, I’m probably OK but I’ll likely read books that will still benefit me in some way.  Feel free to comment below on recommendations.  My first book will be: Our Revolution by Bernie Sanders

Coding

I’ve enrolled in an Introduction to Computer Science course through EDX which is presented by MIT as well as picked up the Udemy class for Automate the Boring stuff.  I begin the EDX course today and will follow it for the next 12 weeks.  Shortly following and depending on where my next goal is, I’ll start the Udemy course.

AWS (Amazon Web Services)

The first time I learned about “cloud”, I think I was hooked.  Not having to worry about specific underlying hardware and other resources and just focusing on the “thing” that you want to do was really intriguing to me.  I’ve been a longtime fanboy of Google Apps (G Suite) as a cloud based email and document handling service as well as Microsoft Office 365 but the real 800 pound gorilla in the cloud computing space is Amazon.  Amazon Web Services has a true vision for how “cloud” should be accomplished and have laid out certification courses for various aspects of these services.  My end goal is AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional, I’ll be taking a few stepping stones along the way and using A Cloud Guru’s courses on the associate level certifications to get started.  This is actually a carry over from 2016 and am more than 75% through the initial learning process.

Facebook and other Distractions

Between Facebook and Reddit, my time in front of a screen was getting a little out of control.  I am reducing the time I’m on Reddit for “bathroom” breaks but Facebook is going away from my daily habit completely.  I figured I could use this time more wisely with the rest of my 2017 goals.  Over the past few years my mailing lists and email subscriptions got a little out of control as well.  As a result, I’ve unsubscribed from around 45 publications and will only seek out the information I desire on an adhoc basis.

Weight Loss

Keto is my plan and my plan tastes like bacon 🙂  Super low carb, high fat, adequate protein.  I’m going through some sweet tooth cravings right now but able to quince those with some sugar free options and lots of water (no room for other stuff).  In addition to diet, I’ll be breaking out the bikes this year and have a goal of 2000 total miles.  This will be tracked with Strava and my progress will be available on this site after a while.

Retirement

I read an article last month about retirement savings and how much I need to be putting away into investment accounts every month and determined that if I don’t do this now, I simply won’t be able to afford to retire when the time comes.  I’ve read enough personal finance books to have a fairly well rounded foundation but will be leaning towards simplifying rather than being overly aggressive which is loosely based off of I Will Teach You to be Rich by Ramit Sethi.

Patience

I have no idea what I’m doing here just that I  know I lose my patience too quickly.  My daughters both stubborn and I need to do better to remember this.  I’ll start off by counting to 5 instead of just 3.

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blog Linux Ubuntu

bitcoin CPU mining with Ubuntu 12.04

Please do not bother responding with how worthless this is.  This is purely academic.  A few of the guys at my office were curious and I was idle for a little while this weekend and got started with the basics of the basics in bitcon mining.

Prerequisites

Go setup yourself a bitcoin wallet here –> http://www.trybtc.com  There will be some tutorials, feel free to go through those.

You’ll end up here –> https://coinbase.com This is where you can keep track of your account.  First let’s pop in there and grab the bitcoin address that we will use in a bit.  You can find it under Account Settings –> Bitcoin Addresses.  This is how others can give you money.

Create an account here –> https://mining.bitcoin.cz/ This is the only way that CPU mining is even relevant….which it’s really not.  This is a pool of individuals that work on mining bitcoin blocks.

 

Ok, now that you have setup the accounts, here is the basic how-to for setting up CPUMINER on Ubuntu 12.04 Server.  I have this deployed on 16 VM’s running 1 processor and 512 Megs of RAM each for testing.

Install Ubuntu 12.04 Server and get root

wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/clamasters/linked/bcminingprep.sh
chmod o+x bcminingprep.sh

edit bcminingprep.sh for your worker user/pass found under “My Account” in the bitcoin.cz site.

./bcminingprep.sh
./mine.sh

Now you are mining.  Please feel free to comment how fast or slow your mining is going.  I have 16 VM’s on modern hardware under XenServer 6.2 running on AMD processors all getting 4.57 khash/s.  Please note…this is very slow and you will likely never make your money back once power is concerned.

If you want to learn more about bitcoin and bitcoin mining, here are 2 links that I found to be helpful.  http://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin and http://www.bitcoinmining.com.

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Added some things…

Added Cycling to my “Projects” dropdown and Pins for Pinterest (they are actually my wifes but I like most of them). Stay tuned…

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Google Chrome Pilot Program

A few days ago I received a pretty new Google Chrome Notebook model CR-48.  I was, completely caught off guard by a very nicely packaged device sitting the table when I got home.  I still had no idea what I was because I forgot that I signed up for this program.  Ecstatic doesn’t quite cut how happy I was when I discovered what it was.  I was actually selected as a Google Chrome Notebook pilot user.  I doubt this is a rare thing, however I almost never get selected to test stuff that I think is cool.

So far the experience has been pretty good.  When I first booted the system, I had a bit of a hard time connecting to my wireless.  I have a WRT-160N running DD-WRT with WPA2 AES/TKIP enabled.  I reconfigured it to just TKIP and it seemed to work after that and then I was able to login and get the notebook updated.  Pretty neat that EVERYTHING is handled under Chrome.

My wife said it’s the perfect computer for her.  It’s small and light enough to take around the house and we pretty much use Google Docs exclusively for document creation and sharing. We both use Hulu for video’s, Picasa for photos and I use WordPress for blogging.  I have not found a telnet/ssh client for the browser yet so I may take a stab at creating one or finding someone who can.  Since I’m a network engineer, this is an essential function for me.  I’m happy to see the Cisco ASA Clientless SSL VPN now supports Chrome as a browser since that will be my primary view into my work network.

I’ll put up some more posts as time goes on about the use of the Google Chrome Notebook CR-48.