Shami's Blog

I’ve been wanting to get shami.blog ever since the generic TLDs have been introduced.

Now I finally have it, welcome to the new domain :).

A couple of months ago I switched from running OpenWRT on a TL-WDR4300 to running pfSense on a Netgate RCC-VE 2440 . Not that OpenWRT is bad, it’s only because I’m a big fan of FreeBSD and I’ve been wanting to run a similar setup ever since I discovered custom firmware like DD-WRT and afterwards m0n0wall and Soekris . When I finally decided to get the hardware I thought Netgate had a better offering and I went for it.

Read More - XBOX LIVE With pfSense

So while I was migrating my data over from wordpress there were a few posts with photo galleries. The options I had were to write each photo gallery by hand or use the photos array in the front matter. What I did was change the photos array a bit and added the following code as a module

Read More - Hexo Photo Gallery

Update: I have since moved to Hugo with Tailwind CSS and not sure if this code is still valid.

So now that I have finally finished fixing my content migration issues I can get back to writing.

While checking my old posts I noticed embedded using the {% youtube %} tag looked like this:

Read More - Responsive Youtube Videos With Hexo

Since PHP 5.5 reached it’s end of life a while back I started upgrading my servers to PHP 5.6. This has caused some issues but the worst was:

error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed

Read More - Fixing Certificate Verification Error After Upgrading to PHP 5.6

I have recently acquired a Netgate RCC-VE 2440 which I intend to use as a router/firewall for my house. But I thought I might as well play with it a little before I do so. One of the things I wanted to test was the BSD Router Project to have in place of one of the routers we have here at work but I couldn’t get it to boot, it would always free with just a “\”.

Read More - Booting BSD Router Project On The Netgate RCC-VE 2440

Quick one here, if you want to create an SCP only user on FreeBSD just do the following

Read More - FreeBSD SCP Chroot

Update: I have since migrated to Hugo which seems to be better maintained and generally easier for me to update. I have also started using Texts more for editing Markdown

I haven’t been very active on this blog over the years, one of the reasons was Wordpress itself; As nice as it is, I grew sick of updates always breaking something. Another thing that always made me feel uneasy was the email I got every once and a while from my blog telling me it updated itself. True, this is good when people ignore their blogs but I didn’t feel in control of my own blog any more and sometimes I wouldn’t have enough time to debug any plugins that broke when the blog decided it was time for me to upgrade.

Read More - Welcome To My New Blog

I have recently faced an issue while migrating MySQL to a new server where non-English characters show up as gibberish. This was because UTF-8 text was saved in columns encoded as latin1. The solution is simple, convert the field into a BLOB and then back to text with the required type and encoding.

Read More - Fixing Incorrect Encoding In MySQL Databases

Quick one here, to get real-time traffic stats on FreeBSD just run the following command

systat -ifstat