Its_All.Lost

Because hope just breeds everlasting misery…

AKAI MPK Mini on a Mac Pro with Logic Pro

Little tid-bit of information I found out today, I’ll share with the class. I have a “late 2013” Mac Pro, aka the trash can. I dabble a little bit with Logic X Pro, sometimes I just fool around. But I do like to use it for recording my guitars and shit. Works great. I thought lol, well it didn’t today. I got bit by the music bug early this morning wanted to get something done. Was feeling in a dirty dubstep mood and wanted to play. Plugged in the AKAI and nothing. It lit up and all the pads worked but no sound. It wasn’t auto mapping to instruments and dials were not moving. Took me about 30 minutes before I switched USB ports and wha-la! Apparently it only plays nice as the main USB port. I was programming an ESP8266 yesterday on the Mac and left the FTDI plugged in on the main port, I just plugged the AKAI into the other one figuring it should work. Never gave it a second thought. The trash cans USB plugs are on the back, a rather inconvenient place for them says I. So I use some USB extension cables to get them to a more reasonable spot on the desk. They look the same so they get mixed up sometimes, which usually doesn’t matter. Did this time I guess.

ESP8266 and MQTT

ESP8266 and MQTT, Google that and see what happens (you most likely already did and that is how you got here). Shit is everywhere. It’s gobbin up the bandwidth of the intarwebs. And you know what? I couldn’t get any of that shit to work on my standard ESP8266-01. I have a few of them, I tried them all with all kinds of shit. I would get close but never a damn cigar (I can’t smoke it anyways). Until today for months I have been stuck on this. So if you are like me and have not been able to get the damn thing to work, for whatever reason, try this. Hope it helps.

This is the page that saved it all for me, thank these guys (I did not read or follow any guidelines on this page, I merely snagged their code):
https://developer.ibm.com/recipes/tutorials/connect-espressif-esp8266-to-ibm-iot-foundation/

I copied “mainIoTF.lua” and made some minor tweaks to get it working. I removed the orgID and changed the broker to my raspi IP address. Don’t forget to change the topic. I made those tweaks and uploaded it. BAM!! I was getting data send via MQTT to the Pi every 10 seconds.

This is what I was getting on Node-Reds debug window every 10 seconds (the number will change):  {"d": {"data":69}}

This is where it comes from, should be easy enough to modify:
m:publish(topic ,'{"d": {"data":'..t1..'}}', 0, 0,

I came back and edited this post because I hate it when I find a site that says they found the fix, but never posts it.. so heres the code. Like I said, its 99% the same code from the other site I linked/mentioned. But here it is for you anyways.

/boot I hate you (fixed it, but I still hate you) [updated]

So thanks to ClearOS and their installer (in my defense I should not have used the autoinstaller but I had also tried a custom install a few times with no success so auto it was) I have a /boot partition with a fucking size of 30mb. Yeah thanks for that shit. So now I can’t seem to update cause I need at least 60mb more to do so. I have to resize it. Which the server has to be down for – no internet for the house – no Plex for the house. It’s 2016…Do you realize what this is asking of me? So I did it, brought it all down.

Fucking Optiplex refuses to boot from CDROM/DVDROM. I tried SATA4, and SATA3/ I tried ATA0 and ATA1. I tried removing a hard drive (SATA3). Refuses to see it. See its once booted, sees it in BIOS, won’t see it at boot. Fucker wont boot from USB even though BIOS says it should. Boot priority is good. Hard drive priority is good. What the fuck man?! I remember booting issue with this box before (which is why I didn’t originally use it).

Good news: ClearOS has been rebooted 3x so far and each time it has come back up with full internet support – no bullshit required to get it working as usual. Dunno wtf happened there, but I ‘ll take it! Yet the battle rages on…

UPDATE: I was able to get the 840 to boot off the USB stick. Apparently auto doesn’t do anything.You have to set the USB emulation to hard drive, not auto, then select the proper hard drive boot sequence. Pushing the new USB drive which you should now see to the top. You will NOT see the USB drive under boot priorities in the BIOS. You WILL see it under the hard drive boot priorities after setting the emulation to hard drive. Hopefully that is clear as mud and helps you out.

So I was able to boot but I was not able to resize the partition. The /boot drive that was generated by ClearOS installer was 95mb, whoo! And the scheme it used is all fucked up. Time to rethink ClearOS, like with Zentyal? All these little things are becoming an irritation. Part of me wants to scrap it all and go straight Debian. But then again since the family is involved I need to be able to make changes quickly, or someone else has to if I am away.

2mb….. unknown partition
95mb…. /boot
200gb… xfs partition
700gb… extended partition
… swap
… linux… ext4
… home…. ext4
… bullshit…

It wouldn’t let me resize anything other than the extended partition at the bottom (which is what I though I needed to do. I could shrink it and add unallocated space at the end of it but then it would not let me move any others “to the right”. Back to the drawing board.

UPDATE 2: I removed (after backing up) the vmlinuz-0-rescue-* and initramfs-0-rescue-* files. See this http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/238081/removing-the-rescue-image-from-boot-on-fedora

UPDATE 3: I removed the files from /boot and I was able to update all but Samba – ain’t that a bitch. The one program that wont update is Samba. One… I use it…two..Samba doesn’t play well with others. I had to restart the Samba service to get it all working again. Now I am stuck because Samba won’t update along with some other lib module I can’t remember right now. Fubar. Then I noticed Transmission is down. For fucks sake man.

UPDATE 4: A simple uninstall and reinstall from the Marketplace solved the problem. But for some reason I am now expecting to have permission problems…

ClearOS 7 Multilib problems, thanks for that guys

So I tried to update my ClearOS 7 box the other day and ran into a shit ton of issues. Apparently the system had not been updating itself for quit a while and I hadn’t noticed. Skipping the GUI I went strait to my OSX terminal to use SSH. yum update got me the original multilib problem to display itself:

libldb-1.1.25-1.el7_2.i686 != libldb-1.1.25-1.el7_2.x86_64

After a bit of Googling the horrible ClearOS forums I found enough info to get going. I did not have the same problems that the OP had but I found the info on this page to be of great help, it is what enabled me to finally get to the state to update my system (or at least uncovered other issues I needed to fix):
https://www.clearos.com/clearfoundation/social/community/repositories-404-error/latest

From what I gathered there are so many things that need to be updated there is a dependency snafu. So we have to ignore all the updates to those apps until the dependencies can be met then we can go back and update those other guys, no man left behind.

yum --exclude samba*,libldb*,libsmbclient,libwbclient,pyldb*,app-samba-* update

Thats the command that led me to discover my other issues, probably why the system wasn’t self updating. My /boot partition doesn’t have enough space. Well WTF ClearOS I used your fucking installer. Douche cannons. On to that later. At first yum --exclude samba*,libldb*,libsmbclient,libwbclient,pyldb* update is what they had to get going and it worked a bit but samba still was throwing errors for app-samba-blah-blah the ClearOS samba module I assume. So we had to ignore that bitch too. Samba is always a bitch no matter what system I have worked on samba always rears its head somewhere.

I COULD update, if I didn’t have the partition issue. Great no I have to expand /boot. Fuck me.

Fuck ClearOS, I think I’m done

I am starting to get really tired of this distro. Their “support” forums are about the worst on the web. The forum software fucking sucks too, I have never seen a support forum that arranges posts the way they do. The shit is far from in order, the posts feel like Facebook – you know how they constantly rearrange shit for no good fucking reason. yeah like that so fuck that place. Not to mention there is no help there, all the posts that show up in searches are YEARS old and/or only apply to a version a few years old.

Besides the extreme lack of any public community support the shit isn’t stable’ish. Every the system reboots (usually due to a power failure or Comcast sucking ass) I have to spend hours trying to get my internet connection back. Clear does NOT play well with any fucking cable modem or NIC I have yet to come upon. That’s a serious fucking problem. Now lets get to why I am typing this post. I’m fucking irritated. My UPS battery decided to take a shit, so I lost power to the server. Upon reboot I actually happened to have an internect connection, which is really fucking odd – cause that has never ever ever ever ever happened before… But nooo, can’t just leave it at that nope. After the server came back up something happened to Transmission and its permissions. I’m not sure what, but it’s fucking bullshit. Transmission, a module available via the marketplace but it doesn’t configure itself properly. Permissions are a fucking nightmare trying to get it all to work, which I had until Clear rebooted. It won’t let me add the transmission user to the group, the group doesn’t show up everywhere, the users are where they are suppose to be. Fucking ridiculous.

Any other options instead of ClearOS? I was using Zentyal which was great until they removed every module I actually found useful, now Clear is giving me more headaches than I care for. A GUI is required, I am not messing with CLI shit all day long for a home box.