Enable dark mode for Chrome on desktop

Dark mode is great to protect your eyes, more so if you are a coder.

Here is how you can apply dark more on chrome on your desktop –

  • In the address bar paste this address : chrome://flags/#enable-force-dark
  • Change the setting “Force Dark Mode for Web Contents” from default to “enabled”

That’s it. Now you can have easy on eyes theme on Chrome, just like your IDE !

NPM install gives error : Cannot find module ‘semver’

Problem:
We get this error when we do npm install –

Error: Cannot find module ‘semver’
Require stack:

  • /usr/share/npm/lib/utils/unsupported.js
  • /usr/share/npm/bin/npm-cli.js
    at Function.Module._resolveFilename (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:924:15)
    at Function.Module._load (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:769:27)
    at Module.require (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:996:19)
    at require (node:internal/modules/cjs/helpers:92:18)
    at Object. (/usr/share/npm/lib/utils/unsupported.js:2:14)


Reason:
Version issues

Fix:
Run these commands

sudo rm -rf /usr/local/bin/npm /usr/local/share/man/man1/node* ~/.npm
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/lib/node*
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/bin/node*
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/include/node*

sudo apt-get purge nodejs npm
sudo apt autoremove
sudo apt-get install nodejs npm

Try now. Should be fixed !

Note: In case the version didn’t get updated even after following the above command use these set of commands:

sudo rm -rf /usr/local/bin/npm /usr/local/share/man/man1/node* ~/.npm
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/lib/node*
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/bin/node*
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/include/node*

sudo apt-get purge nodejs npm
sudo apt autoremove

Download the latest installable archive for your OS from https://nodejs.org/en/download/

tar -xf your-archiveFile
sudo mv extracted-archiveFolder-name/bin/* /usr/local/bin/
sudo mv extracted-archiveFolder-name/lib/node_modules/ /usr/local/lib/

Fix : The repository ‘http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu disco-backports Release’ no longer has a Release file.

Issue : When doing an apt update, we get the this error.
The repository ‘http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu disco-backports Release’ no longer has a Release file. N: Updating from such a repository can’t be done securely, and is therefore disabled by default.

fix :

[bash] vi /etc/apt/sources.list replace all occurrences of archive.ubuntu.com to old-releases.ubuntu.com [/bash]

Cannot connect to DB from a process inside Docker container ? This could fix it.

I had recently hit a blocker to production deployment, when my processes just won’t connect to my Cassandra DB from within their containers.

This is how I could fix it –

  • Start by checking if the target port is open. For eg, if it is the Cassandra DB that the processes cannot access, make sure that its host port 9042 is not blocked by any firewall rules (or security group settings in case of AWS)
  • From the host machine where your docker’ed process has a connectivity issue, use telnet or netcat to check if you can access the target machine and port.

  • Once you verify that you can access the port of the service you want to access, from the host machine where your docker process is failing, and still the problem persists, do these steps-
  • Verify the IP address of the problem container –
  • If the IP address so obtained is found to be conflicting with the IP addresses of your network, provide a new sub-net for the the docker containers within the host as below-
    • vim /etc/docker/daemon.js
    • Add the following lines with the subnet address of your preference
  • Restart docker service and start your containers.
  • Check your connectivity issue is solved.
  • If your application still cannot connect to your target service, lets reset docker by deleting the docker inventories and restarting it-
  • The above steps usually fixes the faulty bridge network created previously by deleting and recreating it.

Else, as it happens mosltly, you are on your own 🙂

Best of luck for your resolution, and please comment if you have have a different solution to the problem.

Open ports in Ubuntu’s firewall using IP Tables

On the terminal, do the following to open port 80

Persisting the rule changes across boot cycles –

iptables-persistent will look for the file “/etc/iptables/rules.v4” after boot up, to restore the rules for IPV4, thus automating the restore for each boot.

Make a new disk available in Ubuntu on AWS or Azure

To make a new disk you just added to the Ubuntu device, please go through the following steps –

Check whats the /dev path of the disk. On terminal, run-

lsblk

NAME        MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
loop0         7:0    0  97M  1 loop /snap/core/9289
loop1         7:1    0  18M  1 loop /snap/amazon-ssm-agent/1566
nvme0n1     259:0    0   1T  0 disk 
nvme1n1     259:1    0  10G  0 disk 

You would have got a result as above. ( In Azure the disk names are the usual sda, sdb etc, unlike the nvme* in AWS.)

In this case, the disk I wanted add is the 1 TB disk, which is /dev/nvme0n1

Format the disk with a new compatible filesystem (XFS).

sudo mkfs -t xfs /dev/nvme0n1

Wait for the file-system creation to finish.

sudo mkdir /data
sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1 /data
sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.orig
sudo blkid

From the output of the last command, find the UUID of your disk

sudo vim /etc/fstab

Append the line –

UUID=[your disk's UUID]  /data  xfs  defaults,nofail  0  2

Note that in the above replace your disk’s UUID without the square brackets, and save the file.

sudo umount /data
sudo mount -a
df -h

Verify that /data is listed as a disk in the last command. If not, please check the /etc/fstab file, apply correction of UUID, spaces etc, and repeat the above test block again.