I stumbled across this interesting article this week from The Verge from my beloved NetNewsWire feeds. The article is titled Today I learned you can easily pause the Windows Task Manager to stop apps moving around. The gist of the article is the below quote for those in a hurry. 😝

I can’t believe I’ve been struggling with apps in the Task Manager randomly moving around without realizing there’s a simple keyboard shortcut to pause the Task Manager and stop its contents in their tracks. Yup, all you have to do is hold down the CTRL key and it will pause the Task Manager on both Windows 10 and Windows 11, and perhaps even older versions of Windows, too.

Tom Warren via The Verge

This tip only applies to Windows 10 and 11 and I wish I had known this years ago! At any rate as you can see in the original article at your leisure and I hope it helps out others out there in this wide world.

This is a really weird edge case that I came across at work. After an update to Windows subsystem for Linux (WSL) I was no longer able to use my Cisco AnyConnect VPN connection to connect to any of the infrastructure I manage.

WSL (112) ERROR: CreateProcessParseCommon:782: Failed to translate

Currently, the only method that I have to use a WSL Virtual Machine (VM) is to use this great third party script so that my VM knows how to actually use a network. I do with Microsoft had an easier way to do this, WSL has no network connectivity once connected to a VPN. 🤦🏻‍♂️

At any rate, all of these weird tech issues aside with how I choose to SSH into the systems I manage at work, this is how you correct the error WSL (112) ERROR: CreateProcessParseCommon:782: Failed to translate when attempting to use a WSL VM on a VPN Connection. You will need to edit the .profile folder in your home directory (/home/your_userneame_here) and add the following line to the end of the file.

wsl.exe -d wsl-vpnkit --cd /app service wsl-vpnkit start

To apply the fix, power cycle your WSL VM with your method of choice. I hope this helps and same you time having to search all over the Internet or watch a Youtube “tutorial” what wastes your time. If you have any questions, etc. hit me up via one of the methods on my contact page. Thanks for stopping by! 🙂

My family dines at this restaurant semi regularly and sometime during the COVID “end times” the chain discontinued two of our favorite breakfast items, the Uncle Herschel’s Favorite and the Sunrise Sampler. The staff of course does not know why menu items are changed as this is a decision made at the corporate level so there is no point in complaining to them about the missing items. I did find a thread on the Cracker Barrel Subreddit (yes that is a thing) where I was able to recreate my personal favorite, the Uncle Herschel’s Favorite and my Brother found a random review on Trip Advisor that provided his favorite, the Sunrise Sampler. In the off chance that someone else is wanting to dine on these two lost menu items I thought that providing the workaround we discovered might be helpful to others out there.

The Uncle Herschel’s Favorate (modified)

• Two Eggs (scrambled with cheese)
• Grits
• Farm-Raised Catfish
• Fried eggs
• Biscuits & Gravy

In order to recreate this item on today’s menu you will need to choose the Build Your Own Homestyle Breakfast option from the menu. Fortunately, this comes with Biscuits & Gravy and two eggs already! For myself I would ask to have them scrambled with cheese but you choose your eggs however you wish. Now we will need to make the following selections:

• Choose catfish as the meat (grilled).
• Choose fried apples as the side.
• Add gets as an additional side.

If you are not a catfish fan you can choose whatever other meat option that you wish.

The Sunrise Sampler

• Two eggs (scrambled with cheese)
• Grits
• Fried Apples
• Hashbrown Casserole
• Meat sampler (Bacon, Sausage, and Country Ham)
• Biscuits & Gravy

Much like the prior item you will need to choose the Build Your Own Homestyle Breakfast option from the menu. Fortunately, this will come with Biscuits & Gravy and two eggs already! My Brother would also ask to have them scrambled with cheese but you choose your eggs however you wish. Now we will need to make the following selections:

• Choose meat sampler as the meat.
• Choose fried apples as the side.
• Add hash brown casserole as an additional side.
• Add grits as an additional side.

This is as close to the original items as we have been able to determine. Unfortunately, these now cost more than the original items but it replicates everything else that you want from Breakfast! Feel free to contact me on Mastodon if you know of a cheaper way to do this or lament other list menu items from this Midwestern stable!

I just wanted to wish everyone out there in this increasing crazy world out there. I have not felt much like celebrating the holidays since I lost my Wife three years ago but this years has me feeling much more into the spirit of things. With that being said I hope that you and yours have the happiest of holidays! 😀

In my day job I recently came across a much easier was to deal with file and/or directory permissions on Linux based systems. Typically, to determine the permissions of a file or directory you would use the ls command with various potions appended to the end of the command and to change the same file or directory’s permissions you would use the chmod command. As I recently discovered the chmod is also able to clone or copy permissions as well as manually set them.

To lustrate what I ma talking about let’s create a hypothetically example where we have two files with the following permissions.

$ ls -l file*
-rwxr-xr--. 1 lrendek lrendek 0 Apr  7 14:39 file1
-rw-rw-r--. 1 lrendek lrendek 0 Apr  7 14:40 file2

If we wanted to copy the permissions from file 1 onto file2 we would run the following option appended to the chmod command.

$ chmod --reference=file1 file2

As we can see the permissions for file2 have been cloned from file1.

$ ls -l file*
-rwxr-xr--. 1 lrendek lrendek 0 Apr  7 14:39 file1
-rwxr-xr--. 1 lrendek lrendek 0 Apr  7 14:40 file2

If we extend this example further we can also clone the permissions of a directory as well!

$ ls -ld dir*
d--x--x--x. 2 lrendek lrendek 40 Apr  7 14:52 dir1
drwxrwxr-x. 2 lrendek lrendek 40 Apr  7 14:52 dir2
$ chmod --reference=dir1 dir2
$ ls -ld dir*
d--x--x--x. 2 lrendek lrendek 40 Apr  7 14:52 dir1
d--x--x--x. 2 lrendek lrendek 40 Apr  7 14:52 dir2

I had a little bit of an issue finding this but stubbled across this site that provided me with the syntax and examples. Although, I am making this entry mainly for myself but I also hoping that this post will make another Sys. Admin. Job easier. Uf you have any questions, comments, etc. please feel free to contact me on my Contact page or on Twitter.

Neofetch is really neat open source tool for displaying your system information on your command line oof choice. There are a lot of instructions on the Internet explaining how to do this on most Linux based system. There is a lot less information for Unix like systems such as macOS. Currently, I am running macOS Montery and as this version of the operating system now uses ZSH over the traditional Bash shell for the Terminal app . Eventually, I figured out that this difference in default shells is why I could not get this to work. If you want to do this for yourself you will need to first install the application.

Now, unlike installing most applications on macOS there is no graphical installer so instead we have to use the fantastic macOS package manager Homebrew. in order to do this open up Terminal and run this command:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Once this is complete and you run this command:

brew install neofetch

Once neoffetch has been installed running it is super easy, just do:

neofetch

Great, now that we have neofetch installed, if you want to run this. every time a Terminal window opens we need to create a .zshrc file in your home directory which will run the neofetch command every time you open a new Terminal window.

 sudo nano .zshrc

then you just add the command into this new blank file

Don’t forget to do ctrl+x to save the file. 🙂

If all went well you should see something similar to this once you quit and open Terminal.

If you have any issues or questions feel free to DM me on Twitter or use the contact form on this site.

Some of these are pretty basic and some are a bit more advanced and/or obscure in my opinion. I hope they are also useful to others out there. Please not that files names and file paths are just made up examples and might not fit what you are attempting to accomplish.

• cd – change directory
• Carl + c – cancels the currently running foreground operation
• pod – s/how your current fill file path
• cp /path/to/file.txt /path/to/your/new/file.txt – copy a file from one location to another location
• move (rename) a file from one location to another location – mv file1.txt file1.back.txt
• show the tail end of a file with any new additions that are written to the file – tail -f /var/log/messages.log
• determine if a node is online – ping duck.com
• determine the network route to a given node – trace route duck.com
• perform a DNS lookup on a given address – nslookup duck.com
•  show xx number of lines at the tail end of a file – Show the tail end of a file with any additions – tail -f /var/log/messages
• run a shell script – bash shellscript.sh OR sh shellscript.sh
• check drive mappings for the currently mounted file system – do -h
• change to another system user – su username
• easy way to change to the root user if you have sudo level access – sudo -i

---------- On Red Hat Linux ---------- 
$ cat /etc/redhat-release

---------- On CentOS Linux ---------- 
$ cat /etc/centos-release

---------- On Fedora Linux ---------- 
$ cat /etc/fedora-release

---------- On Debian Linux ---------- 
$ cat /etc/debian_version

---------- On Ubuntu and Linux Mint ---------- 
$ cat /etc/lsb-release

---------- On Gentoo Linux ---------- 
$ cat /etc/gentoo-release

---------- On SuSE Linux ---------- 
$ cat /etc/SuSE-release

AS you can see this various depending on on which form of the original Linux Operating System so I usually end up searching for this as it is not something that I use day to day in my professional or work life. I hope it makes somees’s day that much easier. 🙂

I keep having to look this up so I might as well save myself some time. 😉

• From the UNRAID Web UI stop the RAID array under Main > Array Options > Stop Array.
• When the UI reloaded go to Settings > Docker.
  • You should now be able to change the size of the array in GB.
• Click the Save button.
• Start the RAID array back up.

For awhile now I have been seeing a reoccurring charge for $5.99 listed as AMZN Digital*MI or something similar. I looked all over my account pages and could never find any subscriptions that were active. I was finally able to determine that the charge was for ComiXology which was squired by Amazon some time ago. I am assuming at some point the charge stopped being listed under ComiXology and was switched to Amazon Digital but I am not certain about this. There was no help for this online so I thought I would put a not here and hope that future searchers find this post.