the möbius trip

Windows – Path changes not updating

April 26, 2023 / abhijit

Multiple times when I change the path on Windows, via the ‘Environment Settings’ dialog, those changes don’t apply.

Even when I reopen the command prompt, the settings don’t seem to be there.

So, either I would log out of Windows completely and log back in or do a system restart. This was a big pain and God knows how much time I’ve wasted with this!

Recently, I got tired of this and decided to dig in a bit deeper and finally found the answer!

Share current directory using Ruby, Node, PHP, Python

March 3, 2023 / abhijit

Sometimes, we need to share some files quickly on the network for our colleagues or family.

Of course, we can set up Nginx, or something else. But to this quickly and easily, and mostly, only temporarily, we can do this using many different languages quite easily.

Art is not what I think when I’m painting. It’s what you feel when you’re looking.
Prof. Fabian Hemmert

upgrading bitwarden / vaultwarden

January 20, 2023 / abhijit

I had posted earlier about running Vaultwarden (a Bitwarden server in Rust). This has been running amazingly all this time.

But today, when I tried to log in from the browser extension, I kept getting an error.

Searching in the forum, I found the issue – I had to update the Vaultwarden server.

Since I was running Vaultwarden as a Docker container, and I had run the docker command directly, so I decided to create a docker-compose.yml file instead this time.

Nginx – folders as subdomains

December 31, 2022 / abhijit

I have a projects folder in which I put multiple folders, each having an html page.

So, the folder hierarchy looks something like this –

projects
|-sampleproject1
  |-index.html
  |-style.css
|-sampleproject2
  |-index.html
  |-style.css

I want to have each of these folders as subdomains to my domain, so I had to create an nginx conf file for each one with a different root path.

Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.
George Addair

error – sudo without being in the sudo group?

August 30, 2022 / abhijit

This was quite a head-scratcher. I wanted to remove a user sammy from the sudo group and did that by running this as root

root> deluser sammy sudo

However, when I logged in as sammy I was still able to run –

sammy> sudo su

Checking which groups the user belonged to was of no help either.

sammy> groups
sammy

When in doubt, choose the adventure.
Friedrich Nietzche

Postgres pg_dump without password

August 26, 2022 / abhijit

I have to do a dump of a Postgres database on a regular basis.

So pg_dump is the obvious choice to do this as is cron to do this periodically.

But the main problem with this is – pg_dump expects a password to be entered at the prompt. There’s no way to pass the password in the prompt to be able to do this.

Stackoverflow to the rescue.

What is required is a .pgpass file in the home directory.

‘asdf’ not finding program

August 26, 2022 / abhijit

I discovered asdf quite late! I was relying on a bunch of different programs to manage Ruby (rvm), Node (nvm).

asdf was an amazing headache saver. It already has core plugins for Elixir, Erlang, Node and Ruby. Plus, it has community plugins for what seems like practically anything under the sun.

I had installed asdf on a new system. And as usual, there were some crons to run on it. I kept getting a /bin/bash/ruby not found error.

After some time I realized I had faced this problem before as well!