Shami's Blog

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

So I’ve been assisting a customer with their website and I was helping them with some data entry. Most of the content they sent me was in MS Word format. Copying the text directly to Drupal’s CKEditor had all formatting messed up so I was copying to notepad, copying from there to Drupal and then formatting manually. This turned out to be a nightmare when I had to copy 10 tables in a single page.

Read More - Copying Content From A Word Document To A CKEDitor