Last year I mostly spent Hacktoberfest just learning about the open source development process and how to contribute to projects on GitHub. Things like forking projects and creating branches and pull requests were still fairly foreign concepts as I mostly spent my time making commits to master on my personal projects. I found some repositories of scripts and algorithms to contribute to, got my points and my t-shirt, and called it a day. It was a great learning experience at the time, but this year I wanted to do something different.

I have been wanting to work on developing a site from scratch with a JavaScript library as well as gain some more experience working with APIs. So after gathering some inspiration from some sources I’ll list below, I dove straight into building my first React website. I built a site around the Open Brewery DB that let’s a user enter the name of a city and returns a list of breweries there. My first iteration was very simple and I was excited just to get it to make a call out to the API and dump a bunch of data. I then started googling some CSS and quickly had my breweries and some relevant information such as their website laid out in little cards.

I decided it would also be interesting to see what it is like to manage an open source project and work together with other members of the community. So with a little magic from my friends over at Netlify, I had “Find Me Beer” up and hosted on the web in a few short minutes. I then went to my GitHub repository and started opening some simple issues for things like “Make the user input field look pretty”, “Automatically transform user input” (the API requires any whitespace to be replaced), and “Clear the input box when selected”. I marked my repository and issues with the “Hacktoberfest” topic, this is how maintainers can opt-in to Hacktoberfest now, and was blown away when I suddenly had people lining up to work on issues for my little learning project.

Nearly a week later, I have had the pleasure of working with a diverse group of developers, ranging from just starting out to the more seasoned, to improve Find Me Beer. It has been a great learning experience both from the aspect of managing all the questions and PRs, as well as all the knowledge I have been able to absorb from reviewing the code contributed by others. Netlify really helps to simplify the pull request review portion of this process as each time one is submitted it automatically builds a deploy preview separate from my production instance. This allows both myself and the contributor to easily see that the build is still succeeding and visually verify the changes that are being submitted before pushing them to prod.

As we continued to work on the site, I began to notice that some of the data for local breweries was out of date. This lead me to begin contributing back to the Open Brewery DB and the whole thing came full circle. I plan to continue to open more issues for the Find Me Beer project on GitHub so it will be interesting to see how it evolves from here. Hacktoberfest goes until the end of the month so you still have time to participate if you get started now. Check out the links below if you too are looking for some inspiration or want to contribute.

• Hacktoberfest - https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com
• Find Me Beer website - https://findmebeer.app/
• Find Me Beer repo - https://github.com/MStewGT/FindMeBeer
• NASA Photo of the Day API/React tutorial (by Kapehe) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1nENYv-r_w
• React Hooks Todo App tutorial (by Coding Garden) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eSwZ0z-50c
• GitHub repo of public APIs - https://github.com/public-apis/public-apis
• Open Brewery DB - https://www.openbrewerydb.org/

Luckily, this can easily be remediated by adding the following line to the global defaults area of your settings file.

"copyOnSelect": true,

Start by launching a command prompt or Powershell session, then run the command diskpart. This will open the Diskpart command line application in a new window.

From here, start by using list disk to show all of the disks connected to the PC. Now determine which of these is your Linux disk. You can usually identify it based on the sizes listed. You will want to be 100% sure of your selection here because the following commands will wipe ALL DATA from whichever disk you select.

Select the disk by using the command select disk X where X is the number of your disk from the previous command.

Once you have selected your disk, use clean to remove all existing partitions. Create a new partition with create partition primary and then mark it as active.

Finally, we can format the disk with format fs=Fat32 quick. Now your USB drive or SD card is ready to be used again.

For quick reference, here are all of the commands in order:

diskpart
list disk
select disk X
clean
create partition primary
active
format fs=Fat32 quick

Note: If your disk is larger than 32gb you can format it using fs=exFat instead of Fat32 to support larger capacities.

wmic bios get serialnumber

While we are on the topic, you should also be able to snag the computer model using this command:

wmic csproduct get name

Note: These commands should be fairly widely supported but may not be compatible with all models if the information has not been coded in the BIOS.

Connect to your Ubuntu host and run the following cli commands:

1. sudo apt update
2. sudo apt upgrade
3. Restart your host machine sudo reboot.
4. Make sure Update Manager is installed sudo apt install update-manager-core
5. Begin the upgrade with sudo do-release-upgrade, you will need to accept several prompts.
6. Verify upgrade lsb_release -a

First of all, we will need to snag an API key from our Pi-hole instance. To generate an API key you will need to have a password set up on your Pi-hole instance. If you have not done this yet, or you forgot your password, you can reset it with the following console command: pihole -a -p. To generate the API key, log in to the admin page http://pi.hole/admin and navigate to the Settings menu on the left-hand side. Here, go to the API/Web interface tab and then click on the Show API token button in the bottom-left of the pane. Confirm a security prompt and then you will be shown your API token. Save this off somewhere or keep it open as you will need to input this on your phone shortly.

Next, let’s switch over to our iPhone and open up the Shortcuts app. Tap the blue + icon in the top right-hand corner. This will bring you to the New Shortcut screen, here, tap on the Add Action button.

In the search bar at the top of the screen type ‘url’ and then select the URL action from the list below.

Tap on the blue + icon just below the URL action to add another action.

Type ‘Get contents’ in the search bar at the top and then select the Get Contents of URL action to add it to your shortcut.

Use the + icon to add one more action. This time type ‘Notification’ in the search bar at the top and then select the Show Notification action to add it to your shortcut.

Tap on the URL action and enter the following: http://PIHOLE_URL_HERE/admin/api.php?disable=300&auth=API_KEY_HERE. You will need to adjust this to match the URL for your Pi-hole instance and then add your API key at the end. The number following the disable= key is the number of seconds that your Pi-hole will be turned off for. For example: http://192.168.1.42:80/admin/api.php?disable=300&auth=3A43A66AF8685D3B155886994875C.

Next, tap the Notifications action and replace the default “Hello World” text with the Contents of URL variable.

Tap on the Contents of URL variable you just added and tap where it says as File >. Scroll down and choose Text as the type instead and then verify there is a checkmark next to the default of Text as the return.

Once you have finished the above steps, your shortcut should look similar to the screen shot below.

At this point feel free to tap on the … button in the top right-hand corner to enter the Details screen. Here you can rename your shortcut and change the icon that will be displayed for it.

Now that our shortcut is complete, let’s test it out! You can use your shortcut from the Shortcuts app or the widget on your home screen if you have enabled it.

If it was successful, you should see {"status":"disabled"} returned in a notification.

If you wanted to play around with the shortcut further, you could add options for different lengths of time to disable your Pi-hole.

To get started launch Windows Terminal, click on the drop-down menu, and select Settings (or use the shortcut Ctrl+,). This should open the profiles.json file in whatever your default editor for JSON files is, in my case VSCode.

In the profiles section add a comma after the last profile in the list followed by a new curly-bracketed section. Copy the below template and paste it after the last profile in the list as shown in the screenshot above.

}, //Make sure to add a comma here after the previous profile in the list.
{
    "guid":  "{5064e844-37f9-4c7c-aba5-51fa0795ee1a}", //Random GUID
    "hidden":  false,
    "name":  "DockerHost",
    "commandline":  "ssh user@localhost" //username@hostIP
}

You will need to provide a random GUID for each profile, you can either make changes to an existing one or use a generator online just as long as they are all unique. Choose a name for your profile, this is what will show up in the Windows Terminal drop-down menu. Finally, edit the commandline to something appropriate for your local or remote host, ex. ssh docker@192.168.0.42. Save the file then return to Windows Terminal. You should see your new entry similar to the screenshot below.

You can, of course, continue adding profiles in this manner to handle other connections you may require. I am currently unsure if there is a limit to the number of profiles you can have; if you find out let me know in the comments below.

First, open the Microsoft Store app and search for terminal. You should find the Windows Terminal (Preview) app at the top of the results; click on it to be taken to the appropriate store page.

Click the blue Get button followed by the Install button. You should now be able to click the Launch button to take Windows Terminal for its first test run. By default, Windows Terminal currently has built in support for Windows PowerShell, cmd, and Azure CloudShell. If you have also setup Windows Subsystem for Linux (see this post to learn how), then there will be an option in the drop down menu to launch a shell into your chosen Linux distro.

You can also learn how to add custom SSH session options to the drop-down menu by following the instructions in this post.

Enable Windows Feature

To get started, open Control Panel, navigate to Programs and Features, and select Turn Windows features on or off on the left-hand side. In the Windows Features pop-up, scroll down and check the box next to Windows Subsystem for Linux and click the OK button.

Once the addition of the feature is complete, you will be prompted to restart your computer. We’ll wait and do this later by clicking the Don’t restart yet button. You can exit out of Control Panel at this time.

Choose a Linux Distro

Launch the Microsoft Store application and type Linux in the search box. You should see “Run Linux on Windows” at the top of the suggestions, click on it to proceed to the list of available distro options.

On this screen, select your desired distribution to continue to its store page; for my purposes I chose Ubuntu.

Click the Get button followed by the Install button and wait for the installation to complete. At this time go ahead and restart your PC.

Completing Setup

After your computer has restarted, go to the start menu and search for the Linux distro that you chose earlier. Launch the application and you should get a Bash shell window with a message stating that it is completing the installation process. Once the install is finished, you will need to choose a user name and password, these do not need to match the account you use for Windows.

Testing

To test out our WSL setup, we will go ahead and install neofetch which is a small application that will return some system information in the terminal window. Let’s start by updating our package listing using the command sudo apt update. Once that is complete, we can install neofetch using sudo apt install neofetch. Finally, run neofetch by simply typing neofetch at the shell prompt and hitting the return key.

From here, you can install any number of Linux command-line utilities you may desire to use. Not everything will be fully supported at this time so there may be some trial and error involved. You can refer to this list to see what other users have discovered so far.

This script will allow you to quickly determine which VMs need be addressed in a large environment and help you triage them accordingly.

# Import PowerCLI module and connect to VSphere servers
Import-Module VMware.PowerCLI
Connect-VIServer YOUR_VSPHERE_FQDN -User YOUR_USERNAME -Password YOUR_PASSWORD

# Get VMs and initialize counter
$vms = Get-Datacenter | Get-VM
$i=0

# Create table and add columns
$table = New-Object System.Data.DataTable "NeedsUpdated"
$col1 = New-Object System.Data.DataColumn "Name"
$col2 = New-Object System.Data.DataColumn "HardwareVersion"
$col3 = New-Object System.Data.DataColumn "ToolsVersion"
$col4 = New-Object System.Data.DataColumn "ToolsStatus"
$table.Columns.Add($col1)
$table.Columns.Add($col2)
$table.Columns.Add($col3)
$table.Columns.Add($col4)

# Check hardware and tools versions
foreach($vm in $vms){
    $vmview = $vm | Get-View
    if(($vmview.Guest.ToolsVersionStatus -notlike "*Current") -OR ($vm.HardwareVersion -notlike "*13*")){
    $row = $table.NewRow()
    $row.Name = $vm.Name
    $row.HardwareVersion = $vm.HardwareVersion
    $row.ToolsVersion = $vmview.Guest.ToolsVersion
    $row.ToolsStatus = $vmview.Guest.ToolsVersionStatus
    $table.Rows.Add($row)
    }
    $i++
}

# Format table and export to csv
$table | Format-Table -AutoSize
$csv = $table | Export-Csv C:\temp\NeedsUpdates.csv -noType

Note: Change the HardwareVersion number above to whatever version you consider acceptable in your environment. The statement could also be modified to report anything lower than a specific version if you have a minimum that is acceptable outside the current version.