Whoops! WordPress Stuck in Maintenance Mode

It’s good to keep your WordPress instance up-to-date. But sometimes it doesn’t go to plan. Recently, this very instance got stuck in maintenance mode after an update.

It’s an easy fix! Logging into my cPanel, I found a .maintenance file in the root of my public_html folder where my WordPress instance is located. I deleted the file and voila, functioning, updated WordPress!

Locate Owner of Google Drive File

I ran into a fun problem today that let me put on my detective hat.

The hat I wear when problem-solving

It began like any other request – straightforward and seemingly innocuous. “I can’t access this person’s file, can you help?”

Unfortunately it turned out that the supposed owner DIDN’T own the Google Drive file – a spreadsheet. Google has a few tips for locating the owner of a document – requesting ownership and then checking email logs and checking Google Drive logs. Unfortunately, neither worked! Drive logs require that the file be accessed or viewed within the last 180 days and the email log check did not work. Most likely because the owner no longer had a Mail license.

Without the owner information I fired up GAM and was hitting a wall until I thought of something. I asked and poked around and found the name of someone with access to the file. Using their name as the basis to check ownership / permissions, I got a full list! From there, I located the owner’s name.

Basically, I was unable to find the owner, but with the knowledge of at least one person with access, I was able to locate the owner that way using a GAM command along the lines of gam user X show drivefileacl Y – that did it!

Invalid Login Attempt Accessing Netsuite using REST API

I banged my head against the desk for way too long trying to figure out this issue. While trying to authenticate with Netsuite’s REST API instead of SOAP, I got the same INVALID_LOGIN_ATTEMPT error.

The fix? My account ID, which was a sandbox and included the letters S and B, had to be capitalized. I was using lowercase letters. Changing them to uppercase letters did the job!

Why, Netsuite, Why?

Expand Ubuntu Disk / Partition after Hyper-V Disk Expansion

I have an Ubuntu VM running in Hyper-V (or HyperV if you’re lazy) that I had to expand. I used the GUI in Hyper-V Manager to add some space first and rebooted my VM. After that I was able to utilize the new space by following these steps:

First, open Up Disks app and make sure your “VM” is seeing the free space

Look at the beautiful free space

After that, open up terminal and install some cloud tools that’ll help us out.

sudo apt-get install cloud-guest-utils

After that, run this command to use all that sweet new space.

sudo growpart /dev/sda 1

That’s it! It grew to use all the free space and we were good to go.

Completely Remove Firefox Tab Bar

If you’re a user of Tree Style Tabs or enjoy vertical tabs, use this tweak to remove the tab bar at the top of your screen where tabs used to live.

You can edit the userchrome.css file by using the following steps:

  • Go to about:support in Firefox
  • Scroll to the Profile Folder line and click “Open Folder”
About:support
  • Make a new folder called “chrome”
  • Inside this new chrome folder, make a file called userchrome.css

Once in the file, add your tweaks! To remove the tab bar, use this snippet of code:

#TabsToolbar {
  visibility: collapse !important;
}

For other ideas and customizations with userchrome.css, take a look at the FirefoxCSS Subreddit

Ubuntu – Cannot Mount Share – Read-Only

I ran into this one today on a fresh Ubuntu install. I was attempting to mount my NAS and configured fstab. I went to mount the share and got this error:

mount: /media/Data: cannot mount //[SHARE]/Data read-only.

The fix was to install cifs-utils via apt-get install cifs-utils

Afterwards, I was able to mount the share successfully. Of course, there may be a few other causes for this error so be sure you fit this scenario.

SOLVED: Missing Office365 for Web App Tiles / Links

A real hand-banger of an issue thanks to Microsoft’s love for hiding settings behind classic admin centers. After enabling Office for Web and OneDrive (or Sharepoint) for several users, they were unable to edit Office documents in Office Online / Office Web Apps via www.office.com. They didn’t even show up!

What Was Being Seen:

Where the apps at?

What Should Be Seen:

Apps showing in better times

The resolution was classic Microsoft. After making sure that the users had the correct applications assigned, namely Office Apps for Web and either SharePoint or OneDrive, we had to navigate to the SharePoint Admin Center, click on Settings, and then classic settings.

Once there, the first option was the cause of our trouble. Make sure you don’t hide the icons!

Forwarding Ubiquiti Cameras Over WAN / Double-NAT

I’ve had to do this at a job recently that had to monitor access to sensitive offices and vaccines. This works internally (with a double-NAT) or over WAN with a change or two

Essentially, the steps are:

1) Setup camera with static, local IP

2) Login to camera and configure NVR IP as the WAN IP of the UDM Pro / NVR

3) Login to UDM Pro and configure WAN Local Firewall Rule to allow all traffic from static IP you set in Step 1 (if going over WAN, use WAN IP of location with Ubiquiti camera)

4) Login to Protect app in UDM Pro, add camera

Deleting Emails from Gmail or G Suite Mailboxes

Since being thrust into using GSuite / Google Workspace, I found the GAM tool on Github incredibly valuable.

We recently have a spear-phishing attack sent to a number of users in finance pretending to be the CFO. I was able to test and then remove all the emails from users mailboxes by using the following command:

gam all users delete threads query from:[xyz]@gmail.com doit

You can read more on the command here.