A nice Windows Task Manager tip I stumbled across this weekend

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! 🙂

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.

So at long last I am finally getting around to (stop procrastinating) getting this site going again. It has taken a lot longer than I planned but between my work and my home life it seems like there is never enough time and/or energy to get things done. More to come as I get to it!

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! 😀

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.

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.