Welcome to your site! This is your homepage, which is what most visitors will see when they come to your site for the first time.

I use Wordfence as a Wordpress security solution. Even the free version has a comprehensive set of features, and the premium version is even better. It’s very easy to install and configure Wordfence as a regular plugin. However, the step to “Optimize the Wordfence firewall” fails for many people. This is not the fault of Wordfence, since different steps may be required depending on how your web server is configured. My solution is for those who are hosting their own Wordpress, but may be helpful to other situations. Please note that these instructions affect the security of your system, and are aimed at users with intermediate to advanced Linux knowledge.

I’m very happy that Harebrained Schemes chose to release its Shadowrun game series (Shadowrun Returns, Shadowrun: Dragonfall, and Shadowrun: Hong Kong) for Linux. It can be a little difficult to get this stuff running on Linux. In this post, I will explain the errors you may see when trying to run Shadowrun on Linux.

Installation Procedure

I purchased and downloaded Shadowrun:Dragonfall on sale from Humble Bundle. 1. Verify file integrity. The md5 checksum is provided on Humble’s download page-check the output from this command against what Humble provides. This is how you make sure that you aren’t installing a corrupted or infected application on your system: [code language=“bash”] md5sum shadowrun-dragonfall-linux.tar.gz_2.0.9.zip [/code] 2. Unzip the downloaded file: [code language=“bash”] unzip shadowrun-dragonfall-linux.tar.gz_2.0.9.zip [/code] 3. Move the unzipped file (shadowrun-dragonfall-linux.tar.gz) to wherever you want to install it. I put it in a subdirectory called “Games” in my home directory: [code language=“bash”] mv ~/Downloads/shadowrun-dragonfall-linux.tar.gz ~/Games/ [/code] 4. Unpack the TAR archive. Note that there is a minor error on the part of the developers or Humble; the file you get after unzipping has the wrong file extension, so you have to use a different command than you normally would. The file should be called “shadowrun-dragonfall-linux.tar” because it’s not compressed with gzip. [code language=“bash”] tar xf shadowrun-dragonfall-linux.tar.gz [/code] 5. Run the game. This probably won’t work the first time; see the appropriate section below to install required packages on your system. [code language=“bash”] ~/Games/Shadowrun\ Dragonfall/Dragonfall Dragonfall: error while loading shared libraries: libGLU.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory It seems Shadowrun Dragonfall has exited unsuccessfully (error = 127). Please verify that you have the latest drivers installed before filing a bug report here: http://harebrained-schemes.com/shadowrun/bug-reports [/code] 6. Install required packages on Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) 64-bit (x86_64). Shadowrun is a 32-bit game, but it runs on 64-bit Ubuntu because of Ubuntu/Debian’s multilib feature. You just need to install two specific 32-bit libraries that probably aren’t on your system by default: [code language=“bash”] sudo apt-get install libxcursor1:i386 libglu1-mesa:i386 [/code] You also need the appropriate graphics card drivers for your hardware. I have an Nvidia card and I use the proprietary drivers available directly from Nvidia (not the open-source version, which has caused problems for me with other games). If you had to do something differently on another version of Ubuntu, please leave a comment below.

I found the solution for getting the New Relic APM Agent to run on a CentOS 7 system with SELinux Enforcing. The only SELinux modification you have to make is to change the context of the log file directory /var/log/newrelic. You can temporarily make these changes with the chcon command: [code lang=“bash”] chcon -R -t httpd_log_t /var/log/newrelic/ [/code] Kill any running instances of newrelic-daemon. If you’re using New Relic’s recommended default setup, make sure that the file /etc/newrelic/newrelic.cfg does not exist. Verify that all required values in /etc/php.d/newrelic.ini are correct (especially the license key and the application name). Finally, restart httpd: [code lang=“bash”] systemctl restart httpd [/code] If that works, you should see output in both /var/log/newrelic/newrelic-daemon.log and /var/log/newrelic/php_agent.log. Now, make this file context change persistent, and verify the result: [code lang=“bash”] semanage fcontext –add –type httpd_log_t “/var/log/newrelic(/.*)?” restorecon -RF /var/log/newrelic/ ls -laZ /var/log/newrelic/ [/code] When you restart Apache, it spawns the newrelic-daemon processes, which communicate with APM via the socket file /tmp/.newrelic.sock. You really don’t want to run the newrelic-daemon processes via systemd if you can avoid it. The resulting process tree should look like this:

I’m moving to a new address in Central Florida which has multiple Internet Service Providers (ISPs) available. Spectrum (formerly BrightHouse) provides speeds up to 100Mbps via cable modem. AT&T just installed fiber in the neighborhood, so I was excited to find out what they would offer.

Spectrum Cable Internet

Here’s a cost breakdown by service:

Lightning Internet (200Mbps download data rate, 30Mbps upload): $90/month Static IP address: $10/month Modem rental: $4/month  (you must rent a modem to get a static IP) Taxes: $0.26

There seems to be a lot of confusion about how to run games built on the Unity engine distributed by Steam on a Linux system. I recently solved this problem after backing the promising survival sandbox game Planet Nomads on Kickstarter. Here is how to configure an Ubuntu Linux system and launch Planet Nomads successfully.

Prerequisites

If you have an Nvidia card, you must download and install the official proprietary drivers provided by Nvidia. I could not get Unity to launch with the open-source drivers. Once I installed the proprietary (closed source) drivers, I was able to launch Planet Nomads from the Steam application.

If you are involved in information technology and compliance in a heavily regulated industry,  or work with larger organizations, you have probably run across the terms SAS 70, SSAE 16, SSAE 18, SOC 1 report, SOC 2 report, Type 1 Report, and Type 2 Report. These terms are frequently abused and misunderstood, even by compliance “experts,” so I’ve written this brief one-page summary. Everything I state below has a direct reference on the AICPA site; I have learned not to trust third-party sources in regards to compliance.

The Laravel/Lumen framework documentation does not explain how to connect an application to a database using UNIX sockets instead of a TCP-based network connection. I recently had to configure the Polr URL shortener (built on the Lumen microframework by Laravel) to connect to Google Cloud SQL with a UNIX socket. Since all of Polr’s configuration takes place in the .env file, and there is no environment variable that’s specific to database sockets, this took some research. I finally found the answer in an obscure StackOverflow response. Previous TCP connection: [code] DB_HOST=some-server-name DB_PORT=3306 [/code] Socket-based SQL connection: [code] DB_HOST=localhost;unix_socket=/cloudsql/cloud-project-name:us-east1:sql-instance-name [/code] This approach will work with any UNIX socket; you just need to give it the absolute path to the socket.