Blog Page 1 :: Alasdair Keyes :: www.akeyes.co.uk

Best Albums of 2024

Posted: 2025-01-03 10:00:35 by Alasdair Keyes

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My most enjoyed albums of 2024...

Smashing Pumpkins - Aghori Mhori Mei
Sheryl Crow - Evolution
KMFDM - Let Go
Static X - Project Regeneration Vol. II
The Cure - Songs of a Lost World

Special mention to Squarepusher - Dostrotime.

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Cloudee LTD now provides LineageOS installation

Posted: 2024-11-20 15:13:09 by Alasdair Keyes

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After my blog post earlier this year about installing LineageOS onto an old OnePlus2 phone (https://www.akeyes.co.uk/blog/installing_lineageos_on_ancient_device); I've had some interest from people asking me to install LineageOS onto their older phones.

Installation of LineageOS is quite a technical endeavour and can be quite difficult for some devices. It seems that regular phone stores on the high street may offer hardware repairs but not Operating System installs.

As such I have expanded some of the services that I offer through my company Cloudee LTD (https://www.cloudee.co.uk/), to include installation of LineageOS onto old mobile devices.

So if you do not feel comfortable doing it yourself or have perhaps already tried and been unsuccessful, feel free to contact Cloudee and we'll see if we can help.

If you found this useful, please feel free to donate via bitcoin to 1NT2ErDzLDBPB8CDLk6j1qUdT6FmxkMmNz

Sysadmin Appreciation Day 2024

Posted: 2024-07-26 10:50:42 by Alasdair Keyes

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Once again, it's Sysadmin day.

Give thanks to your sysadmin. If you are a sysadmin, have a beer.

https://sysadminday.com/

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Installing LineageOS on ancient device

Posted: 2024-06-18 16:56:26 by Alasdair Keyes

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This week I finally upgraded my phone from my ancient OnePlus 2 I bought in 2015 to a more modern Samsung.

For years, I've wanted to install LineageOS, an open Android variant. I always held off from installing it on my only phone in case I bricked it and was left up the creek without a paddle.

Now that I have the OnePlus 2 spare, I decided to finally go for it. Unfortunately, the device is now so old that LineageOS no longer hosts the installation images for it.

Thankfully, with https://archive.org/ I was able to gather all this data and thought it might be useful for others in the same situation. I will use my OnePlus 2 as an example, but obviously substitute this for your device.

Visit https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/ - Using the Filter Options unselect the Hide discontinued devices check box then find your device. If it does not appear LineageOS never supported your device.
Navigate to the page for your device (For me https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/oneplus2/). From here it's worth noting the latest LineageOS version that was available for your phone under Previously supported versions (17.1) and you will have access to the installation instructions via the Installation link. (The installation instructions will tell you to build the image from source, but ignore that, we will get the pre-built image).
As the build images are no longer kept we will have to go to https://archive.org/ to hunt for it. When at archive.org enter the URL https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/oneplus2/ into the Wayback machine search box. You will need to browse around all the snapshots to find the last snapshot that has the heading Get LineageOS for the OnePlus 2 and a Get the builds here link.

(Using a manual binary search on the snapshots is probably the quickest way to find this).

For my device, this URL was https://web.archive.org/web/20210518101444/https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/oneplus2/

From this archived page click on the Get the builds here link. This page doesn't link to the image files any more, but it does show the image names, which we can use.
Go back to https://archive.org/ and in the search make sure Search Metadata is selected and enter the image name lineage-17.1-20210605-nightly-oneplus2-signed

If archived, it will show the files available. If it doesn't you're probably out of luck. There are other sites that provide builds, but I would only trust archive.org to not have tampered with the images.

You may wish to play around with the search function and enter just nightly-oneplus2-signed and scan the results for an even later version that may have been archived. The numbers in the filename 20210605 are the concatenated year/month/day that the image was generated.

For the Last LineageOS 17.1 build on the OnePlus 2 this page is https://archive.org/details/lineage-17.1-20210605-nightly-oneplus2-signed_202108 - You can download the image via HTTPS but be a friend to archive.org and use the Torrent instead to help save them data costs.

Follow the installation instructions we found in Step 2.

The TWRP recovery image and Google Apps image are still available at LineageOS through the links provided in the installation instructions. From here you should have everything you need to install LineageOS on your ancient device.

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HMRC Basic PAYE Tools P60 generation error on Linux

Posted: 2024-04-12 09:52:59 by Alasdair Keyes

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TL;DR if you are just looking for the fix scroll down to see the The Fix section.

As I run a UK company, I have to supply various bits of information to HMRC (the UK tax office) for payroll.

HMRC offer a free tool called Basic PAYE Tools for small businesses to make this possible (https://www.gov.uk/basic-paye-tools). It's a great tool, without it small companies would have to shell out money for proprietary solutions just to fulfil basic payroll/tax obligations. The tool is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. This is specifically for the Linux version, but a similar bug/fix may work for Mac.

The tool is a binary rti.linux that starts a web-server which listens on a http://127.0.0.1:46729/. A browser is then opened to automatically connect to that URL to provide the user with a GUI. The server stores data in a local sqlite database. When any actions are performed that require HMRC to be notified (such as paying employees), these transactions are stored locally and then sent via a batch process to HMRC.

As we have just passed into the 24-25 tax year, I have to 'close' the old year so that I can start the new one. Part of this process is to generate a P60 form for all employees. However, when doing this, the page just appeared to refresh and no form was displayed. This action is not one that requires any transfer of information to HMRC as the P60 is just a summary of an employees payments and tax contributions for that tax year.

A Google didn't show any similar issues and there was no easy 'File bug report' option. The only reporting is to call up HMRC on the phone. I didn't really want to try explaining the issue over the phone so I thought I'd investigate myself.

I could find no information about log files for the tool so I found the process of the rti.linux and looks in /proc/ for any possible logs.

$ ls -al /proc/24876/fd/
total 0
dr-x------ 2 user user  0 Apr 12 09:56 . 
dr-xr-xr-x 9 user user  0 Apr 12 09:52 ..
lr-x------ 1 user user 64 Apr 12 09:56 0 -> /dev/null
l-wx------ 1 user user 64 Apr 12 09:56 1 -> /home/user/.xsession-errors
lrwx------ 1 user user 64 Apr 12 09:56 10 -> 'socket:[147745]'
lrwx------ 1 user user 64 Apr 12 09:56 11 -> 'socket:[148555]'
lrwx------ 1 user user 64 Apr 12 09:56 12 -> 'anon_inode:[eventfd]'
lrwx------ 1 user user 64 Apr 12 09:56 13 -> 'socket:[148556]'
lrwx------ 1 user user 64 Apr 12 09:56 14 -> 'socket:[147746]'
lrwx------ 1 user user 64 Apr 12 09:56 15 -> 'socket:[147747]'
lrwx------ 1 user user 64 Apr 12 09:56 18 -> 'socket:[147819]'
l-wx------ 1 user user 64 Apr 12 09:56 2 -> /home/user/.xsession-errors
lrwx------ 1 user user 64 Apr 12 09:56 21 -> 'anon_inode:[eventfd]'
lr-x------ 1 user user 64 Apr 12 09:56 3 -> /dev/urandom
l-wx------ 1 user user 64 Apr 12 09:56 4 -> /tmp/rti.log
lrwx------ 1 user user 64 Apr 12 09:56 5 -> 'anon_inode:[eventfd]'
lr-x------ 1 user user 64 Apr 12 09:56 6 -> 'pipe:[144859]'
l-wx------ 1 user user 64 Apr 12 09:56 7 -> 'pipe:[144859]'
lrwx------ 1 user user 64 Apr 12 09:56 8 -> 'socket:[144860]'
lrwx------ 1 user user 64 Apr 12 09:56 9 -> 'socket:[144024]'

The /tmp/rti.log shows one entry.

24876 Server has asked us to open_file

And /home/user/.xsession-errors shows something a little more helpful.

evince: error while loading shared libraries: libjpeg.so.62: failed to map segment from shared object

So it looks like an error in libjpeg.so.62, but nothing specific.

To get more information, I ran strace to find more about what was being called. (The read() call data is truncated to save space).

$ strace -Ff -v -s 1000 -p 24876
[pid 25497] openat(AT_FDCWD, "/home/user/HMRC/payetools-rti/libjpeg.so.62", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3
[pid 25497] read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\----TRUNCATED----\0)\0\0\0", 832) = 832
[pid 25497] newfstatat(3, "", {st_dev=makedev(0xfd, 0x1), st_ino=23609456, st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_nlink=1, st_uid=1000, st_gid=1000, st_blksize=4096, st_blocks=848, st_size=432128, st_atime=1712911963 /* 2024-04-12T09:52:43.275396143+0100 */, st_atime_nsec=275396143, st_mtime=1602102343 /* 2020-10-07T21:25:43+0100 */, st_mtime_nsec=0, st_ctime=1712611938 /* 2024-04-08T22:32:18.204486045+0100 */, st_ctime_nsec=204486045}, AT_EMPTY_PATH) = 0
[pid 25497] mmap(NULL, 434200, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x7f318954d000
[pid 25497] mprotect(0x7f3189551000, 413696, PROT_NONE) = 0
[pid 25497] mmap(0x7f3189551000, 241664, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x4000) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
[pid 25497] close(3)                    = 0
[pid 25497] writev(2, [{iov_base="evince", iov_len=6}, {iov_base=": ", iov_len=2}, {iov_base="error while loading shared libraries", iov_len=36}, {iov_base=": ", iov_len=2}, {iov_base="libjpeg.so.62", iov_len=13}, {iov_base=": ", iov_len=2}, {iov_base="failed to map segment from shared object", iov_len=40}, {iov_base="", iov_len=0}, {iov_base="", iov_len=0}, {iov_base="\n", iov_len=1}], 10) = 102
[pid 25497] exit_group(127)             = ?
[pid 25497] +++ exited with 127 +++

Here we see /home/user/HMRC/payetools-rti/libjpeg.so.62 is opened for reading, the data is read and then mmap() and mprotect() are run, the file is closed and then we see the log error above is written to file handle #2 (/home/user/.xsession-errors) before the process exits with a non-zero code.

This indeed looks to be the issue, I don't know enough about the codebase to determine if it is corrupt or perhaps it wasn't updated when the rest of the code? It's very likely a FOSS library. So I checked if Debian supplied a version.

$ apt-file search libjpeg.so.62
libjpeg62-turbo: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libjpeg.so.62
libjpeg62-turbo: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libjpeg.so.62.3.0

Great, maybe I can use that?

The Fix

Make sure paye-tools is closed.
Install the libjpeg62-turbo package

It turns out I already had the libjpeg62-turbo package installed, but if you don't you can use.

apt install libjpeg62-turbo

I checked if the files were the same.... it turns out they're different versions.

$ sha256sum /home/user/HMRC/payetools-rti/libjpeg.so.62.paye-tools-version /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libjpeg.so.62
4f3446bc4c2a2d3c75b7c62062305ff8c5fcdaa447d5a2461d5995d40f728d00  /home/user/HMRC/payetools-rti/libjpeg.so.62
dad87949ccad2be7e40a02986306087fdcfb35ccaadd59aea923a3f96d290eec  /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libjpeg.so.62

Back-up and link to the system version

$ cd /home/user/HMRC/payetools-rti
$ mv libjpeg.so.62 libjpeg.so.62.orig
$ ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libjpeg.so.62 libjpeg.so.62

I started the tool back up and I was able to get the P60.

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Simple Local LLM AI via docker-compose

Posted: 2024-03-13 16:21:36 by Alasdair Keyes

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I've been playing about with local LLM (Large Language Model) AIs.

I knocked together this docker-compose.yml file to help people get started with Ollama with a nice Open-WebUI front-end to have the "joy" of AI, but locally.

It's available through a Gitlab snippet, or you can copy and paste from below. https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/3687211

---
# Created by Alasdair Keyes (https://www.akeyes.co.uk)
# * `docker-compose up`
# * Visit http://127.0.0.1:3000 to create account and login
# * Click 'Select a model'
# * Enter the model name to use. Click the link on the page to see all. `llama2` or `llama2-uncensored` are suitable first options.
# * Chat
version: '3'
services:

  ollama:
    image: "ollama/ollama"
    volumes:
      - ollama-data:/root/.ollama
# Uncomment ports to allow access to ollama API from the host
#    ports:
#      - "127.0.0.1:11434:11434"

  open-webui:
    image: "ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:main"
    depends_on:
      - ollama
    ports:
      - "127.0.0.1:3000:8080"
    environment:
      - "OLLAMA_BASE_URL=http://ollama:11434"
    volumes:
      - open-webui-data:/app/backend/data

volumes:
  ollama-data:
  open-webui-data:

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Best Albums of 2023

Posted: 2024-01-01 11:17:12 by Alasdair Keyes

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My most enjoyed albums of 2023...

Godsmack - Lighting Up The Sky
Health - Rat Wars
Neil Young and Crazy Horse - All Roads Lead Home
Extreme - Six
Filter - The Algorithm

Special mentions Jungle - Volcano, which just missed out a place in the top five. Additional mentions to Metallica - 72 Seasons, Aphex Twin - Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / In a Room7 F760 as it's been a while since each had a release but neither quite had the spark I was hoping for.

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Updating Dell BIOS on a machine without Windows Installed

Posted: 2023-12-23 14:53:03 by Alasdair Keyes

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I recently had a Dell laptop that required a BIOS update, but the BIOS installers were only for Windows and my machine was running Debian.

This posed a problem as to how to apply the update. I didn't want to go swapping out hard-drives to install Windows, or even wipe the Linux installation to install Windows and then re-install Linux after.

In the end I found that I could start a Windows 10 installation process, drop to a shell and run the BIOS update.

The steps are as follows...

Download a Windows 10 ISO image from Microsoft. Write it to a DVD or use software such as Rufus (https://rufus.ie/) to create a Windows 10 Bootable USB drive.
Download the BIOS update .exe files and put them onto a second USB stick.
Boot into the Windows 10 installer.
At the first screen that asks you for languages, press SHIFT+F10, a Windows Command prompt appears.
Insert the second USB stick with the update into a second USB port. Wait 5 seconds for the drive to be auto-mounted, Windows will assign it drive letter E:.
In the command prompt type e: <ENTER>.
Run the executable file that you downloaded. The update will run and then reboot into the BIOS update process as normal.

After the update, you can remove the USB sticks and reboot back into Linux.

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Sysadmin Appreciation Day 2023

Posted: 2023-07-28 07:59:10 by Alasdair Keyes

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It's that time of year again - Give thanks to your sysadmin.

https://sysadminday.com/

If you found this useful, please feel free to donate via bitcoin to 1NT2ErDzLDBPB8CDLk6j1qUdT6FmxkMmNz

Ansible/Jinja2 array concatenation changes in Debian Bookworm

Posted: 2023-07-24 21:50:19 by Alasdair Keyes

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When I was first getting into Ansible, I read this article https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2017/adding-strings-array-ansible by Jeff Geerling on how to add items to arrays a playbook using Jinja2 and I ended up incorporating it into my playbooks.

It's worth reading the article but essentially the code is...

hosts: localhost
connection: local
gather_facts: false

vars:
  my_messages: []

tasks:
  - name: Add to array
    ansible.builtin.set_fact:
      my_messages: "{{ my_messages }} + ['Message added to array: {{ item }}']"
    loop:
      - element one
      - something else
      - 3
      - false

  - name: Display messages
    ansible.builtin.debug:
      var: my_messages

This produced the following debug output

ok: [127.0.0.1] => {
    "my_messages": [
        "Message added to array: element one",
        "Message added to array: something else",
        "Message added to array: 3",
        "Message added to array: False"
    ]
}

I found this useful for any post-run reminders. The debug block was added at the end of the playbook and could prompt me to perform any other tasks that might be required.

After I upgraded from Debian Bullseye (11) to Bookworm (12) this feature was now no-longer working correctly. The code wouldn't error but the output would be one continuous string including the [] characters.

ok: [127.0.0.1] => {
    "my_messages": "[] + [ 'Message added to array: element one' ] + [ 'Message added to array: something else' ] + [ 'Message added to array: 3' ] + [ 'Message added to array: False' ]"
}

The change has occurred somewhere between Ansible 2.10.7 (with Jinja 2.11.3) and Ansible 2.14.3 (with Jinja 3.1.2).

To resolve this, the correct code is now...

hosts: localhost
connection: local
gather_facts: false

vars:
  my_messages: []

tasks:
  - name: Add to array
    ansible.builtin.set_fact:
      my_messages: "{{ my_messages + ['Message added to array: ' + item | string] }}"
    loop:
      - element one
      - something else
      - 3
      - false

  - name: Display messages
    ansible.builtin.debug:
      var: my_messages

The only line that has changed is the my_messages: fact setting. The array manipulation is now performed entirely within the {{ }} Jinja2 tags. This has a couple of knock-on effects that you will need to be aware of...

You cannot use a loop variable with {{ item }} method as you will be using tags within tags and Ansible will throw an undefined variable error. You will have to concatenate your string/variables using the + operator.
Because you are not using the {{ }} tags (because of point 1) but instead the concatenation operator +. It expects that you are only concatenating strings. As such you will need to ensure that any variables being joined are strings. If they are not, convert them with the | string modifier.

The second example shows both these methods being used to work correctly with later versions of Ansible/Jinja2

Depending on your use-case it's a little more messy, but won't take too much effort to convert.

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IT Consultancy Services

I'm now available for IT consultancy and software development services - Cloudee LTD.

Happy user of Digital Ocean (Affiliate link)

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