===== Technical Projects and Notes =====

====   20190416 ====

**bind mount** to get web server link to files outside //Documentroot// device

Wanting to give access at home to some files of use for
home activities, I set up a web server (I tried both nginx
and apache2). However, a symlink to the files of interest
pointed outside the current device. I was able to point to
files in my home directory from a symlink in /var/www/html
without difficulty. (/home is on same device as /var/www)

I tried a number of configuration settings in the .conf files,
including "alias" and various FollowSymLinks tries, without
success.

At the April 4 linux-ottawa meeting, Alex Pilon suggested a
bind mount, and this works.

My example: 

Directory /var/www/html/ contains files and symlinks
There is a directory tto18 with 755 permissions and root ownership.

The command 

sudo mount -o bind /media/john/Rebecca /var/www/html/tto18

allows local users (on local router, and therefore hopefully 
inside the firewall) to access my machine as "john-j6-18.local"
and see this directory, which points to a disk that is attached.

To get this set up when my machine boots, I tried adding 
the command "/home/john/bin/bmreb" to the Startup Items in the Linux Mint
Control Centre. "bmreb" is a file with contents

	#!/bin/bash
	# bmreb -- bind mount rebecca
	mount -o bind /media/john/Rebecca /var/www/html/tto18
 
It is owned by root and has 755 permissions. Rebooting, I found
that the bind mount was not active. In Linux Mint 19.1, it is now
necessary to use systemd to start such items as indicated in 
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=275464
which gives a tutorial. I followed this and have a working 
startup. 

====   * OCLUG live distro ====

      * [[livedistro:plan2017|Planning outline for OCLUG live USB distro]]
      * [[livedistro:scottmurphy20170321|Investigation of EFI boot (S Murphy) 2017]]
      * [[livedistro:jn170424|Attempts to configure graphical interface (J Nash) 2017]]
      * [[livedistro:jn190307|New tries to prepare custom iso - March 2019]]

====  * viewing Comment information in a JPG file browser ====

      * This investigation was prompted by a need to quickly check the captions saved in JPG files. After some exchange on the linux _at_ oclug.on.ca list, I recorded what I found, including a nice simple tool built on the **feh** package. See {{ :wiki:scanjpgwoes.pdf |}}. Because the Irfanview program for Windows (32 bit particularly) is useful for both Linux and Windows, documentation of how to use it to view JPG Comments in full-screen mode is presented separately as {{ :wiki:viewjpgcmt.pdf |}}.

====  * removing restrictions on pdf files ====

      * TD Canada Trust seems in 2017 to have started to put restrictions on pdf statement files. It is useful to be able to delete boilerplate and add in payment records using **pdfshuffler**. Here is a recipe. {{ :wiki:fixpdfrestrictions.pdf |}}