Category: Technology

Did you know … Teams meetings now include closed captioning?

When you record a Teams meeting, Stream can generate a transcript of the meeting. Great for making meeting minutes or creating searchable content from meetings. But it doesn’t help someone who doesn’t here so well *participate* in the call. And the attendee at a noisy aeroport? They’re stuck waiting for the transcript to be generated. Microsoft had demonstrated a few new meeting features earlier in the year — background replacement and live captioning. While I still cannot drop the company logo behind me … live captioning has started to show up in tenants. This is currently in preview — which means you may encounter glitches. Instead of waiting for a transcript to be generated for a recorded meeting, live captions provide real-time on-screen transcription.

To turn on live captioning, click the ellipsis in the call control bar and select “Turn on live captions”.

A real-time transcript will appear in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. The text is large and easily read — at least on my desktop.

Their transcription engine picks up random background noise as interjections — the “oh” in my test, of instance, wasn’t actually uttered. Participating in a discussion with esoteric terms might yield a lot of mis-transcriptions. But it did a decent job with Z-Wave, DSLAM, and antidisestablishmentarianism.

Samba and SELinux

I had a horrendous time trying to get the Samba share on our new server working. It worked insomuchas I could map a drive to the share … but I couldn’t actually see any files. Increasing the log level (smb.conf)

log level = 10 passdb:5 auth:5

showed that, yeah, I was getting a lot of access denied errors.

[2019/12/14 23:04:53.249959, 10, pid=17854, effective(0, 0), real(0, 0)] ../../source3/smbd/open.c:5438(create_file_unixpath)
create_file_unixpath: NT_STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED
[2019/12/14 23:04:53.249982, 10, pid=17854, effective(0, 0), real(0, 0)] ../../source3/smbd/open.c:5716(create_file_default)
create_file: NT_STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED
[2019/12/14 23:04:53.250012, 3, pid=17854, effective(0, 0), real(0, 0), class=smb2] ../../source3/smbd/smb2_server.c:3254(smbd_smb2_request_error_ex)
smbd_smb2_request_error_ex: smbd_smb2_request_error_ex: idx[1] status[NT_STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED] || at ../../source3/smbd/smb2_create.c:296
[2019/12/14 23:04:53.250038, 10, pid=17854, effective(0, 0), real(0, 0), class=smb2] ../../source3/smbd/smb2_server.c:3142(smbd_smb2_request_done_ex)
smbd_smb2_request_done_ex: idx[1] status[NT_STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED] body[8] dyn[yes:1] at ../../source3/smbd/smb2_server.c:3304

Many, many iterations of samba configs later, I wondered if SELinux was causing a problem. Temporarily disabling SELinux allowed files to be seen in the mapped drive … so that was the problem. I needed to tweak the SELinux settings to allow Samba to actually share files.

semanage fcontext -a -t samba_share_t "/data(/.*)?"

And

setsebool -P samba_export_all_rw=1

I2C 1602 LCD Display Formatting

We’re setting up an Arduino Uno as a humidity/temperature/lux sensor. A little LCD display came with the kit, so we are playing around with writing to the display. Building out the 2×16 display in Excel was an easy way to organize the information … and I didn’t have to keep re-counting out to find that the humidity output starts at column 11:

Adding CSS To Header

I am currently working on a website that sources in a header and footer — not an uncommon thing to do as this ensures a consistent look across the site. The lead-in code starts head, closes head, starts body, and defines the common page elements (nav bar, etc). The footer then defines some more common page elements and closes body. This approach creates a problem when you want to add CSS. Now you could use style tags within the HTML, but I would rather not have the same style definition twenty times. Yeah, I’d make a single variable out of it and print the style-definition-variable twenty times … but I’d rather have my CSS sourced in from a style-sheet file.

Since I’m already using jQuery to dynamically append elements — add table rows as data is pulled back from the server — I wondered if you could append something to the header. Yes, you can!

/**
* This function appends a CSS file to the document head
*
* @param {string} strFileName Path to CSS file
* @return n/a
*
* @example
*
* loadCSSStylesheetToHead('/path/to/file.css')
*/
function loadCSSStylesheetToHead(strFileName){
var file = document.createElement("link");
file.setAttribute("rel", "stylesheet");
file.setAttribute("type", "text/css");
file.setAttribute("href", strFileName);
document.head.appendChild(file);
}

This allows me to after-the-fact add css from a style-sheet file into the document head.

Apache — Switching to PHP-FPM

A few system updates ago, PHP fell over completely because of some multi-processing module. The quick fix was to change the multi-processing module and avoid having to figure out what changed and how to use php-fpm. Part of moving my VM’s to the new server, though, is cleaning up anything I’ve patched together as a quick fix. And, supposedly, php-fpm is a lot faster than the old-school Apache handler. Switching was a lot less involved than I had expected.

Install php-fpm:

dnf install php-fpm

Edit 00-mpm.conf

My quick fix was to switch to a non-default multi-processing module. That change is reverted to re-enable the ‘event’ module

vim /etc/httpd/conf.modules.d/00-mpm.conf

Configure Apache PHP Module

Verify the socket name used in /etc/php-fpm.d/ — Fedora is configured from /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf with a socket at /var/run/php-fpm/www.sock

cp /etc/httpd/conf.modules.d/15-php.conf /etc/httpd/conf.modules.d/15-php.conf.orig
vi /etc/httpd/conf.modules.d/15-php.conf

# Handle files with .php extension using PHP interpreter

# Proxy declaration
<Proxy "unix:/var/run/php-fpm/www.sock|fcgi://php-fpm">
    	ProxySet disablereuse=off
</Proxy>

# Redirect to the proxy
<FilesMatch \.php$>
	SetHandler proxy:fcgi://php-fpm
</FilesMatch>

#
# Allow php to handle Multiviews
#
AddType text/html .php

#
# Add index.php to the list of files that will be served as directory
# indexes.
#
DirectoryIndex index.php

Enable php-fpm to auto-start, start php-fpm, and restart Apache

systemctl enable php-fpm
systemctl start php-fpm
systemctl restart httpd

Voila — phpinfo() confirms that I am using FPM/FastCGI

We’ll see if this actually does anything to improve performance!

External Access to libvirt VMs

Instead of trying to map individual ports over to guest OS’s, I am just routing traffic to the VM bridge from the host.

Testing to ensure it works:

systemctl start firewalld
firewall-cmd –direct –passthrough ipv4 -I FORWARD -i br5 -j ACCEPT
firewall-cmd –direct –passthrough ipv4 -I FORWARD -o br5 -j ACCEPT
firewall-cmd –reload

Permanent setup:

systemctl enable firewalld
firewall-cmd –permanent –direct –passthrough ipv4 -I FORWARD -i br5 -j ACCEPT
firewall-cmd –permanent –direct –passthrough ipv4 -I FORWARD -o br5 -j ACCEPT
firewall-cmd –reload

Then I just added a static route for the network defined on br5 to the VM host.

Migrating from Hyper-V to libvirt

We finally got a new server, and I’m starting to migrate our servers to the new box. We currently have a Windows virtualization platform (Hyper-V) — Windows Data Center edition was supposed to provide unlimited licenses for standard servers running on the host, so it seemed like a great deal. Except “all of the Windows servers” turned out to be, well, one. So we decided to use Fedora on the host. Worst case, that would mean re-installing a few servers. But I wanted to try converting the existing Hyper-V VMs.

Install libvirt and associated packages:

dnf -y install bridge-utils libvirt virt-install qemu-kvm virt-top libguestfs-tools qemu-img virt-manager

Start libvirtd and set it to auto-start on boot:

systemctl start libvirtd
systemctl enable libvirtd

Create an XML file with the definition for a new bridge:

[root@localhost ~]# cat br5.xml

<network>
<name>br5</name>
<forward mode=’nat’>
<nat>
<port start=’1024′ end=’65535’/>
</nat>
</forward>
<bridge name=’br5′ stp=’on’ delay=’0’/>
<ip address=’10.1.2.1′ netmask=’255.255.255.0′>
<dhcp>
<range start=’10.1.2.200′ end=’10.1.2.250’/>
</dhcp>
</ip>
</network>

Build a new bridge from this definition and set it to auto-start on boot:

[root@localhost ~]# virsh net-define br5.xml
Network br10 defined from br5.xml

[root@localhost ~]# virsh net-autostart br5
Network br5 marked as autostarted

Verify the network is running and set to auto-start

[root@localhost ~]# virsh net-list –all
Name State Autostart Persistent
———————————————-
br5 active yes yes

View the IP address associated with the bridge:

[root@localhost ~]# ip addr show dev br5
5: br5: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state DOWN group default qlen 1000
link/ether 52:54:00:33:3f:0c brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
inet 10.1.2.1/24 brd 10.1.2.255 scope global br10
valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

Copy the VHDX from Hyper-V to the Linux host and convert it to a qcow2 image:

qemu-img convert -O qcow2 fedora02.vhdx fedora02.qcow2

If needed, sysprep to clean up system SSH host keys, persistent network MAC configuration, and removing user accounts.
virt-sysprep -a fedora02.qcow2

When finished, use virt-manager to create a host by importing an existing HDD. Provided the drive type remains the same (SATA, in my case), the server boots right up.

Strange Windows 10 / MS Paint Bug

My arrow keys were moving my mouse pointer. And, unlike all of the search results which said I had turned on some ease-of-use feature …

It seems like there is an odd bug between Windows 10 build 1903 and MS Paint. I had a pbrush window open and had selected some of the image (something I was pasting into a usage document). Somehow the “arrow keys move this selection around in pbrush” translated into the arrow keys moving my mouse pointer around everywhere else. Simply closing pbrush sorted the problem.

It’s not something I can reproduce at will — opening pbrush, pasting in whatever screen shot I’ve got in my clipboard, selecting and grabbing a section of it … and the arrow keys are not moving the mouse pointer. But some combination of this process has, twice today, caused the arrow keys to move the mouse pointer. At least it’s an easy fix 🙂