Categories
Hardware Software

Updating a Legacy MacBook Air to Manjaro Linux

I’ve got a 2015 MacBook Air version 7,2 which had been sitting on the counter for a few months untouched. My daughter was the last one to use this laptop and that was primarily for YouTube videos. Since she got her iPad for her birthday there hasn’t been much of a need of the MacBook. Never to let a perfectly good laptop go to waste. I had one the latest MacOS’s on it, but it wasn’t the latest. It was also a bit slow if you ask me. It’s a Core i5 2.5 Ghz with 8 GB of mem and a 128 GB SSD. So not a powerhouse, but a nice little laptop.

I run Manjaro Linux on my desktop PC so I am familiar with Arch and I had an installer USB ready. First thing I did was boot from the USB (you need to hold down the alt key while booting) to see if Manjaro would run. The “Live CD” version on the installer seemed to work great but no Wifi or networking. Of course, the installer needs wifi to update. I figured out that I could plugin my mobile phone via USB and it would provide networking support via the tether. I installed Manjaro and updated with all basic setting. Full wipe and install. I rebooted and happily it started without issue.

After a big smile an relief, I went about checking all the hardware to make sure everything was working. Arch Linux has a great webpage on installing and configuring Arch on MacBooks. The only bit of hardware that didn’t work was the web-camera. I followed this article to download, compile and install the required kernel module to use the web-cam. Remember that you must have kernel headers for your kernel loaded for the compilation to work! The first few times I’ve installed kernel modules in Manjaro/Arch, I’ve forgotten to install the proper kernel headers so it didn’t work properly. Anyways, I tested with the Cheese app after a quick reboot to ensure that everything was working fine.

Next, came the keyboard. I chose typical default US keyboard layout. Most of the function keys worked fine, volume, start/stop, mute, screen brightness and keyboard backlight brightness. Two function keys didn’t work out of the box. Those were for Expose and Mac Applications list. I went into Keyboard shortcuts and remapped the Expose key to Screenshot capture interactive since I don’t have a print key on this keyboard. I remapped the Applications function key to show all desktops in Gnome. Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention that I’m running Gnome 42 on Manjaro. You can choose different window managers/desktop environments for Manjaro and I’m most comfortable in Gnome from my days in Pop _OS and before.

Lastly, the trackpad, oh the trackpad. It was just frustrating to me that I was randomly doing right mouse clicks based on the location I clicked on the trackpad. My work laptop does this as well and it really bothers me. I like to click with my thumb on my right hand and it’s not always comfortable to go on the left side of the trackpad. I found the following Gnome setting that you must run in the terminal to change from “areas” clicking to “fingers”. Fingers means two fingers on the trackpad to right click which is way more natural for me. 

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad click-method 'fingers'

Update 21-Aug-22: I’ve also added the mbpfan service to autostart on my MacBook Air running Manjaro Linux. More details on mbpfan here. This service uses the coretemp and applesmc kernel modules to read the system temp and ramp up the internal (puny) fan. I have also installed a few of Luke Smith’s voidrice utility scripts to monitor the weather forecast and system temperature from the menu bar. More details at https://lukesmith.xyz

Categories
Software

Building Asterisk from source + Cisco SoftKeys

Asterisk Logo

I’ve had a collection of Cisco IP telephones setup in my home for a few years now. It was a covid-lockdown hobby project of mine to figure out how they work and get them setup. Literally 10’s of hours of being stumped trying to get a dial-tone out of them. I started with Cisco 7940 telephones (I have about a dozen of them), then I moved onto 9971 and 9951’s (I have 4 of them) and lastly I’ve moved to Cisco 8831’s (I have 3 of them). All phones I purchased used from Goodwill and the last set of phones seemed to come from a Mortgage broker (or something, I didn’t do too much research). Anyways, I wiped and cleaned the phones and created fresh SEP.cnf.xml files. For those that don’t know, Cisco Call Manager is the default PBX application that powers these phones in industry and it’s obviously propriety and heavy (aka bloat). In Cisco Call Manager, there are GUI’s for everything, so it would be relatively easy (I guess) to use but I never wanted to use it. I built my own PBX directly from Asterisk which is free (as in freedom). I originally used Ubuntu packages for Asterisk and then I switch to running it on a FreeBSD jail using the awesome FreeBSD package repositories and finally I switched to running it in an LXC container inside Proxmox running base Arch Linux. I used the equally awesome AUR (Arch User Repository) to install the Asterisk-cisco package (requires enabling AUR and in my case installing yay and all dependencies).

AUR asterisk-cisco
AUR package I compiled and installed

After I installed the package, I enabled the asterisk service in systemd — systemctl enable asterisk. I copied my sip.conf and extensions.conf configuration files from my previous Asterisk installation and restarted the LXC container to ensure it started up correctly. I connected my Cisco 8831 phone and did a quick call to test while I was watching the Asterisk console and voila it worked! Test call successful *BUT* the softkeys for Messages for instance still didn’t work ;-( These SoftKeys are the exact reason why I wanted to compile Asterisk from source with the brilliant usecallmanager.nz Asterisk source code patch. When I dug a bit further in the AUR package notes I saw the example configuration files that need to be copied to the TFTP server for the phones to consume and configure themselves at boot time. I copied the example files to my TFTProot filesystem on my ASUS wifi router. I then edited my SEP.cnf.xml configuration file and added the following section:

  <phoneServices useHTTPS="false">
    <provisioning>2</provisioning>
    <phoneService type="1" category="0">
      <name>Missed Calls</name>
      <url>Application:Cisco/MissedCalls</url>
      <vendor></vendor>
      <version></version>
    </phoneService>
    <phoneService type="1" category="0">
      <name>Received Calls</name>
      <url>Application:Cisco/ReceivedCalls</url>
      <vendor></vendor>
      <version></version>
    </phoneService>
    <phoneService type="1" category="0">
      <name>Placed Calls</name>
      <url>Application:Cisco/PlacedCalls</url>
      <vendor></vendor>
      <version></version>
    </phoneService>
    <phoneService type="2" category="0">
      <name>Voicemail</name>
      <url>Application:Cisco/Voicemail</url>
      <vendor></vendor>
      <version></version>
    </phoneService>
  </phoneServices>

When I added this PhoneService stanza to my config xml file and then restarted the phone then everything worked! I’m sure a bunch more tweaking needed to “dial in” or “rice” my phone configuration. But, initial success for a Saturday with this project. I now have a working Asterisk IP telephone configuration with freshly firmware updated Cisco IP Telephone 8831 (black and white screen sadly) where the SoftKeys for Messages and Recent Calls work when using Asterisk as a PBX software!

Next steps will be to continue to rice my config and look for Cisco IP Telephone 8861’s which are a color screen and a bit newer. I’ve used 8861’s at work before and I like that phone, a very sharp and colorful display and they have a feature I think that you can do a redirection to mobile phone when away from the desk. Maybe I can get something similar working in my home.

Categories
Software

Landchad (new VPS server)

I’ve moved this site from self-hosted to my new landchad VPS server. Performance seems really good and it was really easy to backup and move (I’ll need to write up my steps so I don’t forget).

Categories
Life in lockdown Science

Building Asterisk from Source

Asterisk Logo

Today is Sunday. I am building Asterisk 18.9 from source patched with cisco call manager features. See this website for more details: https://usecallmanager.nz/patching-asterisk.html

I’m doing this on a proxmox Linux ubuntu container. This is so I can get my Cisco 9971 phones to work with Cisco call manager features like voicemail button support and BLF (busy lamp field). Why am I doing this? Well, my Cisco phones have been laying dormant for many months while my gaze has been elsewhere. On a lark I plugged them back in and low-and-behold I had 5 voicemail messages. All were from my healthcare service provider trying to sell me stuff. I deleted all the voicemails but it got me thinking that the voicemail button doesn’t work and that’s a shame — I can fix that. Anyways, this is my attempt to fix by building Asterisk from source in a Linux container that has been patched from usecallmanager.

Categories
Software

Can I Send Graylog Alerts to Discord?

I’m using Discord to keep up with some technical discussion groups (e.g. TrueNAS and OBS) and I’ve even created a personal Discord server for my family. I’m also running Graylog for log aggregation of my home technology stack (switches, IP phones, Asterisk, Plex, Pihole, Router) and I was wondering if I could create automated alerts from Graylog to my Discord server? It is very timely as Graylog posted a blog entry just this past Friday on how to do this very thing. Now, before we go any further we need to be clear on what is required from a software perspective. You will need a working Graylog server version 4.0 or greater (I’m running version 4.0.5 on FreeBSD) and you will need to install and license the enterprise plug-in so that you can use the correlation engine. Don’t worry, the enterprise Graylog plugin is free for personal use under 5 GB of logs a day (I’m at like 400 Mb’s a day). You will also need a Discord server which are free to setup for personal use. Instructions for setting up Graylog can be found here and here.

Make sure you let your children know what you are up to.

Step 1: Inform Your Children

Children are super curious; they like to know when new network monitoring infrastructure is configured for your home network. I’ve found that a bit of subterfuge throws them off the scent.

Create a new #channel for your alerts

Step 2: In Discord, Setup a New Text Channel for Your Alerts (Optional)

This step is optional but useful if you want to separate alert content from your normal content in Discord. In your Text Channels menu for your Discord server (you must be the server owner or granted admin privs), you can click the plus icon to create a new text channel. I named mine graylog and defined a topic text. Click save. Please notice the Integrations menu item in the above graph. We will click on that next.

Add the Webhook which your Graylog server will call

Step 3: In Discord, Add a Webhook Integration

Within your text channel configuration you will see an Integrations menu item. Click Integrations and then click on Webhooks and New webhook.

You can add a unique icon to the automated messages

In the New Webhook dialog, you can name your webhook. I chose a descriptive name for this but yours can be more generic. Note the Channel the webhook will be in and you can copy the webhook URL (a url encoded string to your server). I got the Graylog icon from their Twitter feed @graylog2 account.

Graylog Event Definitions

Step 4: In Graylog, Add an Event Definition

In the Graylog Alerts menu, click Event Definitions and then the Create Event Definition button. I named my Event “SSHd Logon Open Too Long” to match to Graylog blog video which is linked at the start of this blog post. Click Next. I set the Condition Type to be “Event Correlation” and then set the Correlation rules to follow a sequence of events that are satisfied within 16 min. You can make it more or less but essentially I’m looking for SSH logins for more than 16 min.

The event rules you will correlate

I set Event #1 in the correlation to be the “SSHd Session Open” Event from my alerts. I added Event #2 and set it to “SSHd Session Closed” which SHOULD NOT OCCUR in the next 15 min. This means event #1 will fire and within 15 min a subsequent event #2 will not fire. The definition of those events will be covered later and is outside the scope of this article. click next.

Create a custom event field for the user_name

Step 5: Create Custom Event Field for User Name

Click Add Custom Field in the Fields item of the wizard. Set the name to user_name and click to make this a field key. Set the template to 

template: ${source_user_name}

And make sure you do not click the value is required. Click Next.

Setup the Slack Notification (works with Discord as well)

Step 6: Setup the Notification to Discord

In the Notifications wizard item, click on the Add Notification button.

Add Notification dialog

Within Add Notification, you will set a descriptive title and description (I’ve again used the example they discussed in the Graylog blog video). You MUST select Notification type of Slack and you can change the highlight color. In the webhook URL field you will paste the URL copied from Step 3 above. Please append to the end of the Webhook URL “/slack” which will tell Discord this message has been formated for Slack and to handle that format type. You can specify the channel again and the custom message template. You can use your custom user_name filed in the message template. Click on the Execute Test Notification button to verify your test message is logged to Discord. Click Save and wait for your event notifications!

Categories
Software

Upgraded to Graylog 4

FreeBSD package management recently updated their Graylog package from 3.3.0 to 4.0.5 with enterprise plugins! This article is as-of April 2021 and you should upgrade your FreeBSD os or Jail version to 12.2 and upgrade your packages (see below). 

[rich@graylog ~]$ uname -a
FreeBSD graylog 12.2-RELEASE-p6 FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE-p6 f2858df162b(HEAD) TRUENAS  amd64

[rich@graylog ~]$ sudo pkg update
Password:
Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue...
[graylog] Fetching packagesite.txz: 100%    6 MiB   3.3MB/s    00:02    
Processing entries: 100%
FreeBSD repository update completed. 30499 packages processed.
All repositories are up to date.

[rich@graylog ~]$ pkg search graylog
graylog-4.0.5_2         Tool for centralized log collection

[rich@graylog ~] sudo pkg install graylog

Now Graylog software is written in Java and distributed as JAR (Java ARchive) files so you really don’t need to wait for FreeBSD packaging to upgrade your server. In fact, just a few weeks before I wrote this I had upgraded the server manually by downloading the latest Graylog Jars from graylog.org website and putting them in the appropriate server directory. This works but was very manual and could be prone to error. The FreeBSD package automates everything and makes it simple I will not discuss my manual upgrade process and suggest to you to just use the official package noted above (v4.0.5). I even applied the FreeBSD package over my manual upgrade and it handled everything gracefully (by backing up the jars I placed as .prev versions).

There are numerous enhancements to Graylog and the software pkg upgrade process was relatively straight forward. PLEASE NOTE that I had to upgrade Elasticsearch to either version 6 or 7 (I was on version 5). This is noted in the FreeBSD graylog-4.0.5_2 pkg release notes that you must upgrade Elasticsearch (it doesn’t tell you how).

If you attempt to start the graylog service on your FreeBSD instance without first upgrading Elasticsearch and you are running version 5 or below then the web interface will fail to start and the graylog server will repeatedly log an error connecting to Elasticsearch.

If you have data in your Elasticsearch version 5 instance and you use FreeBSD package manager to install elasticsearch6 then it will upgrade the binaries and remove the elesticsearch5 package. It left the data intact in my experiance and I had to do a bit of editing of the elasticsearch config yaml file to start the new elasticsearch6 instance. The edits were very minor. I essentially had my old version 5 yaml config file up and diffed it against the new version 6 example and updated accordingly. I didn’t take notes of my edits but again they were version small.

You may also need to update your graylog config xml file although your mileage might vary. The connection details to elasticsearch changes slightly from my version 5 to version 6 so I had to edit in graylog config.

I restarted the graylog service again and tailed the /var/log/graylog/server.log to verify that it successfully restarted. I was able to login again to the web interface and verified none of my data was lost and that my graylog server was healthy. I took an immediate archive of the data to compressed gzip tar file just in case. The reader will note I took a backup after the upgrade not before… I should have taken a backup before if I was being truly risk averse as a rollback option. tsk, tsk on me…

New Graylog Features of Note

Dark Interface Mode

Slack & Discord Notification Support (I’ve discussed Discord Notifications in another post)

Categories
Life in lockdown Software

Linux Speedrun of Mega Man 2 streamed on Twitch

So I finally set myself up on Twitch tonight and streamed for an hour of Mega Man 2; I had zero viewers… Listen, I wasn’t expecting a following and primarily I did it to push myself. I’m using a 100% open-source platform for twitch streaming using OBS (open broadcast system studio) running on Pop OS Linux. I’m using an open source live split software called flitter. It’s within an xTerm (don’t use alpha channel enabled terms in OBS) and it uses a simple text file for configuration. I’m using Higan for my NES/Famicom emulator with a rom of Mega Man 2 that runs at 60 frames per second. And I have a camera on me while I’m playing to capture the reactions. All on one computer (not a particularly powerful one btw) running Linux and streaming the output to Twitch. I now have one follower, my son.

My son imparted some of his hard earned wisdom on Streaming to me. He said make sure your audio quality is good. Get a good mic, test the levels and make sure I’m speaking over the game (but you can still hear the game audio). He said this is really important. The video can be sorta crappy but the audio quality better be good. He recommended a few good quality mic’s and he uses an external audio mixer to set the mic levels. He also recommended I record, not stream for the first few sessions and then watch it back to make sure it sounds and looks good.

Why am I doing this? A few reasons. One, I like Mega Man 2 and the challenge of playing it well and getting a decent speedrun appeals to me. I’ve watched some of top speedruns and they so some crazy stuff. Two, I want to prove that you don’t need Windows 10 to do streaming/speedrunning — Linux and open source software is perfectly viable for Twitch streaming. Three, I wanted to prove to Cam that he can do all his creation/streaming/broadcasting if he switched to Linux. What do you think? Any games you’d like me to play? Leave a comment to let me know. My Twitch handle is rpavlovsky but I might change it, I don’t know…

Categories
Life in lockdown Weather

Houston Blizzard + Back Online

Snow shovels in Houston, TX

So much has happened in the last few weeks. Texas was hit with the worst snowstorm I think in recorded history. The snow in Houston didn’t look that bad via photographs but trust me. It was icy, heavy sleet and snow — not that fluffy stuff you ski on. Of course it cause havoc on our electrical grid and our water pipes. Thankfully all in my neighborhood are well and the weather is now in the 70’s! I’ll post a few more pictures when I have some time.

I lost power along with most Texans for large parts of early last week. Power has been stable since last Thursday. The last snow and ice melted last Saturday (so it was on the ground for a good 5 days). The worst days for me were Tuesday and Wednesday when we have the rolling power outages.

Ella enjoying a boogie board style toboggan at the nearby park.

Lastly, I needed to update my SSL cert for this website which I’ve now done. Silly me for taking so long to do that; I had a bit on my plate.

Categories
Animals Life in lockdown

Horse Riding Lessons

A new year of horse riding lessons for Ella. I decided to bring along the Canon DSLR’s with a standard lens and the telephoto and challenge myself to shoot in Manual (M) mode. The cameras were my EOD 50D and EOS 30D cameras that I purchased from Goodwill (secondhand). It was dark in the barn which is no problem for the human eye but quite a challenge for the budding photographer.

Canon EOD 30d, f/7.1, 1/100 shutter and 800 ISO, no flash.
Walking out to the parade grounds.
Ms. Amy on Joker; he wasn’t feeling very well.
Focused.
Waiting for her turn
Rode with bridle and a bit today
Trotting over some obstacles
Categories
Life in lockdown

The Last Day of 2020

As I type this, 2020 is approximately 11 hours from finishing (at least in my part of the world). My upstairs air conditioner decided to fail in the last few days of the year and guess what? It’s not under warranty. Effe you 2020! Ugh.

Here is hoping for a brighter 2021; I mean it’s always darkest before the dawn, right!?!