Maintenance

To get Thunderbird working with UVic's Exchange calendar you need to have a version of Thunderbird that incorporates the fix for sending passwords in the clear - this means at least v43. There is a version 44 beta out right now that works quite well, so I went through the process of documenting how I got things going. This also works with v45, which was just made available on the PPA.

Install

1. Add the PPA and install/upgrade in the usual apt-get way.
2. download Lightning plugin - note Thunderbird version requirements for each version
3. download the Ericsson exchangecalendar plugin - currently v3.6-beta1

Email account settings
Account settings->Server settings
Server name: mail.uvic.ca, port 993
Connection security: SSL/TLS
Authentication method: Normal password
Outgoing server (smtp): mail.uvic.ca, port 465
Outgoing server connection security: SSL/TLS
Outgoing server authentication method: Normal password

Configure calendar

1. Click the 'Switch to the calendar tab' button (top-right) to view your local calendar (called 'Home').
2. Add new calendar by right-clicking below your 'Home' calendar, and choose 'New Calendar'. Select 'On the network' for location.
3. Select 'Microsoft Exchange 2007/2010/2013' for format, then name the calendar.
4. Check the 'Hosted Exchange' option, not the 'Office 365' option.
5. Check 'Use Exchange's autodiscovery function. Fill in Username (Netlink ID) and Domain (UVIC). Click 'Perform autodiscovery'. You should be challenged for a password.
6. If you got this far you'll be asked to choose an EWS server. I only got one to choose from: https://mail.uvic.ca/ews/exchange.asmx

We have a shared calendar for vacations and so forth. To share a calendar, log in to the account that owns the calendar (through OWS) and right-click the calendar you want to share, and choose 'Share calendar'. In the dialogue that appears, add the email address of the person you want to share with (note that this can only be a UVic email address). It will send an email to this person that has an XML attachment. They can create a new calendar based on the information included in this attachment.

Add shared calendar

1. The email that the share recipient gets has an XML file attached (called 'shared_metadata.xml'). It contains two things we need: SmtpAddress, which is the email address of the person that shared the calendar; and FolderId, which is a very long string (hex?). These are XML elements, and we only need the text values, nothing else.
2. Add a new calendar as above, but in the 'Primary email address' field, use the email address of the person that shared the calendar - not yours.
3. Use your Netlink ID in the 'Username' field.
4. In the 'Share folder Id' field, add the hex value of the FolderId element (from the shared_metadata.xml file).

That should be it. I've had no trouble with this setup, other than being unable to see nested folders - but this problem has been there for ages. For example, I have a folder for the Humanist list that I've placed inside a 'Lists' parent folder. Thunderbird shows me the Lists folder, but not the Humanist folder. This is true for all folders more than one layer deep.

I've been working on this for a while with SB to figure out the best way to do it; using a regular headset makes the voice too quiet compared with the keyboard noise. Tonight I tried using the condenser mic and preamp, which is a nice enough setup and gets the volumes a little better, but it results in a mono mic channel which appears as the left side of the stereo; the output from the preamp is unfortunately mono, so I'm not sure what we could do to handle that. If we had a USB audio capture device, we could chain the two using a balanced out from the preamp (which is a tube with a nice compressor in it). I'll talk to PS tomorrow.

I wanted to create a new 'sub-repo' in the main hcmc repo for the SVG graphics I've been re-producing ('brand' grpahics and so forth), but I forgot how to add a sub-dir to an existing repo without checking out the parent - and I definitely didn't want to do that.
So here's how:
mkdir graphics
svn import graphics https://revision.hcmc.uvic.ca/svn/hcmc/graphics
Now I can populate the graphics dir and svn commit.

This new change to Jenkins came as a complete surprise, and stopped virtually all JavaScript and some inline CSS from working. I've worked around it for the moment; I need to learn the full details and put a more refined policy in place when I understand it better.

Managed to get one VM working and updated (XP, the most important). Now trimming and cleaning up backup data from Rutabaga prior to launching an enormous rsync/delete over the weekend.

New machine arrived; set it up on purpose with encryption, selecting to encrypt the system when initially installing, then also electing to encrypt my home directory; finally, setting up LUKS encryption on the big HDD following some online instructions (using defaults, basically, and then configuring in /etc/crypttab and /etc/fstab), before doing software installs and then beginning the overnight pull of all my data from Rutabaga. So far so good; we haven't yet tested ssh and other users to see who can access what when it's running.

If you create a UEFI guest OS (Linux, at least) in VirtualBox, you will find that every cold boot ends up at a UEFI shell prompt. In order to boot the guest OS you need to type this at the UEFI prompt:
fs0:\EFI\ubuntu\grubx64.efi
The fs0 points to the first 'drive'. If you have a thumb drive or multiple virtual HDD setup you'll need to adjust this (to, say, fs1 or fs2 etc.)

A permanent workaround is to create a nsh script that does this for you at boot. In the running guest, do the following:

$ sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
$ cd /mnt
$ sudo sh -c "echo '\EFI\ubuntu\grubx64.efi' > startup.nsh"

** got the answer from here

Lost a lot of time this morning when the HDD in my desktop died. Replaced it with an old one which is only half the size, and now I'm reconstructing as much of my data as will fit for the moment, pending arrival of a new machine.

SET up MT as a user on Jenkins, and then configured matrix project-level security (I haven't done that before), allowing a specific user to have permission on a specific job and no others. MT will now configure a pilot Jenkins job doing some diagnostics on part of the ISE repo.

Not a casual job...
Install notes

rvm install jruby-1.7.16 --2.0 doesn't work. RVM looks in a config file to see about 'know-strings', and jruby-1.7.16 isn't one of them. It apears that jruby-1.7.22 is the only one it finds. So, change that.
Also, the $JAVA_HOME it sets isn't right. Set it in .bashrc, like this:
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64
PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64
then, do 'source ~/.bashrc' to let your tty know about the change

Also, javac is not installed when RVM does the java install. I installed java-default to compensate, but it adds ~200MB to your install base - there's probably a more economical method of installing javac.

Setting up postgresql: instructions say 'psql -d template1 -U postgres'. But that won't work. Do this instead: 'sudo -u postgres psql -d template1'

Configuring Panoptes: seems to have changed slightly, or docs are bad. Filenames now use a .hudson extension and include test and development settings.
The db:migrate command I change from rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=development to rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=test because the .hudson config files ref'd development and test - with test having the localhost ref from docs
Running the db migrate command fails like this: no such file to load -- bundler/setup
It's because bundler isn't installed, so: gem install bundler
Run rake again: git://github.com/edpaget/cequel.git (at update-cql-version) is not yet checked out. Run `bundle install` first.
Ran bundle install
Then got this:
======================
Errno::ENOENT: No such file or directory - /home/hcmc/.rvm/gems/jruby-1.7.22/gems/jruby-kafka-1.0.0.beta-java/deps.lst
An error occurred while installing jruby-kafka (1.0.0.beta), and Bundler cannot
continue. Make sure that `gem install jruby-kafka -v '1.0.0.beta'` succeeds before bundling.
======================
So, did this:

then ran rake db:migrate... again. Kept getting same error. Online suggestion=move on and see if the problem matters. I did that and MAYBE it worked.
Got further errors suggesting that I needed more gems, so I did what it said.
Stuck here