In 2021, an AT&T landline price increase finally gave my grandma the push she needed to get rid of her landline phone service. I have been encouraging my family to use their Google Voice lines for many years, but some of them have still held on to their expensive landline service. A hangup for my grandma was not wanting to lose her primary phone number, so I set off to see about porting it to Google Voice.

Google Voice, for some reason, will not port a landline number directly. I came across some other articles online, like this one from The Cord Cutting Report, which I found helpful throughout my process. So, I thought I’d document my experience for the future reference of myself and anyone else who may find it useful.

TracFone as a number porting intermediary.

Numerous guides I’d read online suggested using a prepaid cell phone carrier, such as Ting, to port the number away from the landline service. This process would transition the phone number into a mobile number, which Google Voice is willing and able to port over to their service.

I decided to use TracFone, since I have used them personally for many years, as has most of my family. As a result of my long time as a customer, I had an old Android phone laying around from a previous TracFone service term, and was able to get it activated on the network again – so I did not even have to buy a burner phone, I already had it!

I’ve read that others have experienced problems with their number porting due to information not matching up on the two accounts. It seems that things like the billing zip code on the credit card used to order the service, and other factors can impact the process. So, to attempt to minimize any such issues, I added my old phone to my grandma’s TracFone account, and we ordered the service using her credit card. This way, all of the billing and account information will match her AT&T landline service.

I began the process on a Thursday night, knowing it may take 1-2 business days, not knowing whether it would be done before the weekend or not. But, there was no rush here. I’d been informed through my research that it was a good idea to wait at least 1 full week between porting the number to TracFone and trying to port it again, so with this intention in mind, nobody was in any hurry.

The Porting Process – Initial Issues

Having personally never ported a number before, I wasn’t totally familiar with the process and what it would entail. I began the process on TracFone’s website, which asked me for the AT&T account number and password\PIN for the account I wanted to port the number from.

The account number could be found on the top right corner of the AT&T landline bill.

It seemed completely clear, although there was some awkward spacing in the information. For the sake of this example so I can provide a workable example with a non-real account number, let’s say her phone number was (111) 222-3456. And let’s say the account PIN was 7654.

The information appearing as “Account Number” on the AT&T bill was formatted like this: 111 222-3456 765 4

I tried all possible combinations of these numbers on TracFone’s website, but it said everything I entered was an invalid account number. I came across this Reddit thread from someone else who had the same issue. The thread seemed to conclude that the account number would be 13 digits, so from our example, I assumed the correct account number would be 1112223456765. The thread noted it was necessary to select “Other” as the carrier, not “AT&T” because the account number was still not a “valid” AT&T account number, according to the form.

I figured I could call TracFone support, but I also figured there was no harm in trying this, and if it didn’t work I could fall back to calling support. So, I went ahead and did as suggested, entering the account number as 1112223456765 and the PIN as 7654.

The Wait Begins

After entering the information, TracFone appeared to accept the order and begin the porting process. They provided the following guidance:

For kicks, I tried to activate the phone several hours later, and unsurprisingly, the activation was not successful. The wait was now on to see how many days \ business days the transfer would take, and if it would even be successful at all.

Unexpected Issues

Unfortunately, there was a hangup in my plan. Tracfone called us the next day to notify us that the phone we were trying to activate was too old, and no longer supported by the network. I was somewhat surprised, considering I still know at least one person actively using the same model phone on Tracfone’s network, but since the temporary phone I had was a 3G phone, they probably are no longer activating 3G phones since that network is in the process of being decommissioned by major carriers, like AT&T.

I really didn’t want to buy a phone for the sole purpose of using for a week, so I started asking around, and was fortunate to find a friend with an old 4G unlocked phone they were no longer using. I was able to borrow their phone and use a very cheap TracFone BYOD SIM card to attempt to activate it on TracFone’s network.

The process of activating the second phone was difficult the first time, the first agent I called was unable to find the service card we had paid for on the previous phone, and told me that the account number I had from AT&T was invalid for the number port. (This turned out to not be true – the information outlined above IS correct.)

I called back a second time the next day, after calling AT&T to verify the account number, and got a different TracFone rep who was able to overcome all of the problems the first rep couldn’t. Finally, the transfer process was underway! I was told it would take 2 days to complete the porting process, since it was a landline. It sounded like they would have to actually communicate with AT&T via email and send over documentation, it would not be a quick automated process (maybe this is why Google refuses to do it!).

Successful TracFone Port!

After two days, as promised, the number was ported and I was able to activate the phone on TracFone’s network. I made a test call to myself and confirmed it came from the old landline number.

Various articles and forum threads I’d read online suggested that I should wait 1 week before trying to port the number again. So, I decided to wait a little extra. The port completed on a Wednesday, and I decided to do the second port the following Sunday, when I could go over to Grandma’s house and finish setting up her Obi200 box.

Porting to Google

The port to Google was a fairly straightforward process overall, but a lot of the information I’d found online concerning how to port out of TracFone had been incorrect.

I began here, on this Google KB post which provides the link to the page to start the number porting process.

The first step was to enter the phone number and check portability, this was where we failed before, since Google did not support porting the AT&T landline. This time, success! Google said the number was eligible for porting. Once on the next screen, they provide the following terms and details:

The next step was to fill out contact information for the phone number being ported (the billing address and details on the TracFone account). Note that the carrier shows up as Verizon, I was expecting this, since I used the Verizon compatible BYOD SIM.

This was where the slight issues began. Every piece of information I found online, including this article from Best Cellular, stated that the “Account Number” for a TracFone BYOD device was the last 15 digits of the SIM card. As far as the 4 digit PIN, information I found online varied from “TracFone doesn’t use PINs, so you should enter 0000” to “TracFone doesn’t use PINs, so you should enter any 4 digit number”. I decided to enter a 4 digit security PIN I knew existed on the account.

Unfortunately, the port request was immediately rejected due to a bad account number. I was provided the option to correct the account number, but didn’t know what the right information was. I really was not looking forward to calling TracFone and asking them how to port away the number they’d just ported in a week earlier, but I decided to give it a shot.

Fortunately, the agent I got at the TracFone number porting department was very helpful, and didn’t seem to care at all about what I was doing. They initially thought I was right to be using the last 15 digits of the SIM card too, but then found another account number in the system that I didn’t have. They provided it to me, and I entered it in the Google form, along with the 4 digit account security PIN. This time, the port was accepted!

I was disappointed that it was going to take another 24 hours, I thought the port would be fairly immediate now that it was a mobile number. I’m not sure if the delay was normal, because it was a landline, or because I made a mistake on the form the first time. Either way, Google was very timely and completed the port request exactly when they said they would. The next day, we received an email notifying us it was complete!

Closing Thoughts

This was my first time ever porting a phone number in any capacity, and I was trying to do something somewhat unsupported… All in all, this process was as easy as I could have asked for. There were certainly some snags along the way, which were learning experiences for me, but I would definitely do this again in the future if someone else in my family asks for assistance getting rid of their landline. Hopefully someone else out there will also find this information useful if you are trying to do the same process, or wondering what will be involved and how hard it will be. Happy porting!

CKEditor 5 is a WYSIWYG text editor that can be used for a variety of purposes, from creating your own Google Docs type of site to creating your own WordPress knock-off platform.

I recently wanted to use this editor, but was disappointed with the lack of features in the default builds. It doesn’t even have underlining. Evidently the official stance of the developers is that you should build your own and they won’t provide a full build anymore like they did for CKEditor 4.

CKEditor provides some detailed build instructions on their documentation, but as someone who is not a Javascript developer and has never used Node before, I found the process a bit intimidating at first. So I am writing this guide up for my own future reference when I need to update my build, and also to hopefully help someone else who is in the same situation by explaining what I feel isn’t well explained to someone who’s completely new to NPM.

The Basics – Starting Your Build

First you will need NPM installed as well as Yarn. For me on Debian 10 the package name for Yarn was not immediately intuitive and the command was different than just “yarn”.

On Debian 10 my dependencies were:
# apt-get install npm yarnpkg git

Once these are installed you can simply clone the Git repository. I didn’t plan on keeping this server long term so I’m just doing it the lazy way on to a temporary VM I am going to delete when I have my final build. This isn’t the best way if you are developing your own stuff, but if you are like me and you just want a build that CKEditor won’t provide, you can just use a temp environment on a throwaway VM like I did. I had no desire to junk up my live server or even my desktop with all this NPM stuff I will not likely use again anytime soon.

For the purposes of this project I am starting with a “Classic” editor as that’s closest to what I want.

# git clone -b stable https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor5-build-classic.git
# cd ckeditor5-build-classic
# git remote add upstream https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor5-build-classic.git

Finding The Plugins You Want

The plugins you want can all be located on this page of the official documentation. I simply went through each option on the sidebar to see which plugins I might want.

Some of these are already included in the build, which you can discern by reading the build file located in src/ckeditor.js on your VM.

For the purposes of my build, I am adding Alignment, Strikethrough, Underline, Subscript, Superscript, Code, Highlight, HorizontalLine, RemoveFormat, Base64UploadAdapter, and ImageResize.

Installing Plugins

To install your desired plugin, there are 3 steps.

1. Install the NPM package. The directions for this are provided on the plugin page on the documentation. Here are the NPM installs I ran to install the plugins I wanted:

# npm install --save @ckeditor/ckeditor5-alignment
# npm install --save @ckeditor/ckeditor5-highlight
# npm install --save @ckeditor/ckeditor5-horizontal-line
# npm install --save @ckeditor/ckeditor5-remove-format
# npm install --save @ckeditor/ckeditor5-upload

At a glance, you might notice these plugins do not match what I stated I wanted to add above. This is because you may see that some plugins contain several features, not all of which must be imported. For example, Base64UploadAdapter is one feature of ckeditor5-upload, there are other features which I haven’t imported such as SimpleUploadAdapter.

You can discern which features are part of which plugin from the plugin’s documentation page. Each one has a link to a page containing more information about the feature.

2. Edit src/ckeditor.js to contain an import line for each plugin feature that you wish to import. For the purposes of my build, I added these import lines below the default ones.

import Alignment from '@ckeditor/ckeditor5-alignment/src/alignment'
import Strikethrough from '@ckeditor/ckeditor5-basic-styles/src/strikethrough';
import Underline from '@ckeditor/ckeditor5-basic-styles/src/underline';
import Subscript from '@ckeditor/ckeditor5-basic-styles/src/subscript';
import Superscript from '@ckeditor/ckeditor5-basic-styles/src/superscript';
import Code from '@ckeditor/ckeditor5-basic-styles/src/code';
import Highlight from '@ckeditor/ckeditor5-highlight/src/highlight';
import HorizontalLine from '@ckeditor/ckeditor5-horizontal-line/src/horizontalline';
import RemoveFormat from '@ckeditor/ckeditor5-remove-format/src/removeformat';
import Base64UploadAdapter from '@ckeditor/ckeditor5-upload/src/adapters/base64uploadadapter';
import ImageResize from '@ckeditor/ckeditor5-image/src/imageresize';

As a newbie to NPM, I wasn’t 100% sure how to determine exactly what should go here at first. Since I for example ran “npm install –save @ckeditor/ckeditor5-upload” how do I determine the remainder of the string to import the feature?

The best way I found is to click through to the GitHub page for the plugin, and navigate into the “src” folder. There, you will see .js files, and you simply need to put the path to the .js file, minus the extension.

3. Add a line for each plugin in the ClassicEditor.builtinPlugins section of src/ckeditor.js. Unless you do this the plugin won’t actually be built into your build, which afterall is the goal.

Once again, I came across some ambiguity here. Where do the names of the plugins come from and how can I make sure I have the capitazliation correct and everything?

I copied the exact name as displayed on the documentation page for the plugin, it seemed to work correctly 100% of the time.

Some caution is needed here as some plugins contain dashes in the NPM package but the plugin itself doesn’t contain a dash. For example “@ckeditor/ckeditor5-horizontal-line” the plugin name is “HorizontalLine”.

On the Horizontal Line page of documentation, it says “See the Horizontal line feature guide and the HorizontalLine plugin documentation.” This is where I was sourcing my exact spellings and it was working reliably.

Here’s what my additional lines looked like:

        Alignment,
        Strikethrough,
        Underline,
        Subscript,
        Superscript,
        Code,
        Highlight,
        HorizontalLine,
        RemoveFormat,
        Base64UploadAdapter,
        ImageResize,

4. Add your desired plugin to the “toolbar:” section of the ClassicEditor.defaultConfig in src/ckeditor.js.

Once again some ambiguity here. I used the lowercase version of the plugin name from the section above in step 3. This seemed to work 100% of the time.

By the way, you can use the pipe ‘|’, in the toolbar section to add spacers to the toolbar.

I moved some stuff around so here is what my whole toolbar section ended up looking like:

        toolbar: {
                items: [
                        'heading',
                        'removeformat',
                        'horizontalline',
                        '|',
                        'alignment',
                        'bold',
                        'italic',
                        'underline',
                        '|',
                        'strikethrough',
                        'subscript',
                        'superscript',
                        '|',
                        'link',
                        'bulletedList',
                        'numberedList',
                        '|',
                        'highlight',
                        'indent',
                        'outdent',
                        '|',
                        'imageUpload',
                        'mediaEmbed',
                        '|',
                        'code',
                        'blockQuote',
                        'insertTable',
                        '|',
                        'undo',
                        'redo'
                ]
        },

A Note About Some Dumb (In My Opinion) Defaults

CKEditor comes bundled with a few things which I removed for the purposes of my build.

Firstly it comes bundled with CKFinder and its associated UploadAdapter. Are far as I can tell, this does not function without a server side script I don’t care to invest time investigating, so I’m removing these from my build.

Additionally I am removing EasyImage because I have no plans to use cloud services.

To remove these items, I’m simply commenting the imports out and the plugin declarations in builtinPlugins in my src/ckeditor.js before finishing my build.

Out of the box, the image upload features of the editor do not work unless you put in some elbow grease. For now I am implementing Base64 image uploading so I don’t have to mess with a server side handler and filesystem permissions issues that can come along with uploading files. We’ll see how this works for me in my use case long term, I may switch to the Simple Upload Adapter and write a server side handler in the future.

I personally think CK Editor should just include the Base64 uploader by default so that the features work out of the box instead of this CKFinder plugin that doesn’t work without additional dependencies.

Finishing Your Build

Once you have added all of the customizations to your build, you can compile it with the Yarn tool you installed.

Although the official documentation suggests the command is “yarn”, on my Debian 10 system, it was “yarnpkg”.

So to finish my build I ran:

# yarnpkg build

Once it’s finished, the completed file is located in build/ckeditor.js. This file can be used as a drop-in replacement for any other downloadable build direct from CKEditor, and it should contain your new features.

I found I could run this build over and over as I refined my source file and I didn’t have any problems, it just overwrote my build file with a new one.

There ya go! I hope this guide simplifies someone’s project. 🙂

I recently started building out my third file server, and picked up some Adaptec 6805T RAID cards on eBay to interface with my multiple drive trays. Having built similar servers and also working with numerous Adaptec product lines in my day to day datacenter work, I consider myself to be a subject matter expert, but this experience seemed interesting enough to write a post about since the issue had me scratching my head for a bit, hopefully this will help someone who is in my shoes in the future.

An Unusual Error

One of the cards out of the batch was producing an unusual error.

One or more drives are either missing or not responding.
Please check if the drives are connected and powered on.
<<<< FATAL CONFIGURATION ERROR DETECTED >>>>
<<<< CANNOT CONTINUE BOOT PROCESS >>>>
<< Correct the problem and Reboot the system >>

On the surface, this error makes a lot of sense, it’s simply warning that the hard drives from the previous configuration are gone. Since I bought this card on eBay, and there’s no telling what the previous owner’s configuration was, this makes perfect sense.

What doesn’t make sense is this error message halting the boot process, and the lack of ability to accept this new configuration state. Normally, you would be prompted to accept or reject the new configuration when drives are removed.

What makes even LESS sense is the complete absence of any documentation or other posts online containing the text of this error. My Google searches returned nothing of use. No mention of this on any Adaptec resources I could find. No one on /r/homelab able to provide a helpful response to my post.

Troubleshooting Efforts

Troubleshooting this problem was difficult, because my computer would not boot with the PCIe card installed. This error message completely halted the boot process. Since PCIe isn’t hot plug, it’s not as if I could turn the computer on and then slide the card in.

I remembered that I have a few server boards which allow me the capability of disabling the PCIe option ROMs on a per-port basis, so my hope was that I could disable the oprom on the card and boot into Linux, then do further troubleshooting with arcconf.

So, I popped the card in and went to go into the BIOS, but of course, thanks to this error, I couldn’t even open the BIOS. The ROM initialization happened before the BIOS opened and thus locked up my system and I wasn’t able to proceed further.

I decided to put a working 6805T card in, disable the option ROM, then swap the card for the non-working one and hope that the ROM would stay disabled in the BIOS.

This worked, and I was able to get booted into Linux!

Trial & Error

Poking around arcconf I had a few ideas.

I tried resetting the controller to factory defaults:
arcconf setconfig 1 default

Curiously, this alone did NOT fix the problem.

Reading the docs, I came across this command, and I was VERY hopeful:
arcconf setbiosparams 1 BIOSHALTONMISSINGDRIVECOUNT <count>

But unfortunately, apparently my controller doesn’t “support” changing this setting?
Setting the BIOS parameters in not supported on this controller.
This was definitely a letdown, as this seemed like the setting I wanted to change.

What Ended Up Working

I decided, since the firmware on the controller was outdated, I would update the firmware, try to reset as much as possible, and then test it.

So I downloaded the latest BIOS ROM image from Adaptec and proceeded:

arcconf romupdate 1 as680T01.ufi
arcconf setconfig 1 default
arcconf resetstatisticscounters 1

This worked! I was now able to boot into the Adaptec BIOS with the CTRL+A prompt, after moving the card to a PCIe slot where the option ROM was enabled.

Curiously, even after resetting everything, I STILL had to “accept” the new configuration the first time. But, after this, everything was working normally! 🙂

Introduction
LibreNMS is a fantastic open source NMS which I have been using for some time to monitor statistics on my network devices and servers.  The SNMP-based monitoring it offers is very simple to set up and provides fantastic insights into a variety of devices.

I recently spun up some Halo Online \ Eldewrito servers and wanted to keep track of the performance of the servers, so I could know the capacity of my VM hypervisor which I dedicated to the project.  My first step was configuring LibreNMS and monitoring the basic server statistics, but I really wanted to take this a step further, and correlate that data to the player count on the server.  Since Eldewrito is a community based game, a lot of tools are very limited, so tools such as GameTracker aren’t supportive of the game.

Fortunately, Eldewrito has a very simple query port usage and returns simple JSON data, so I was off to figuring out how to get this done.

The Approach
After consulting with some LibreNMS community members on their Discord, it was pointed out to me that LibreNMS supports Nagios plugins, so I got to work writing my own.

My Nagios Plugin
I have published the code for my Nagios plugin on Github.  The repository can be found here, and a direct link to the plugin file here.

If you are setting this up, download the plugin file, and proceed with this article.

LibreNMS Nagios Plugin Setup
LibreNMS provides excellent documentation on how to set up Nagios plugin support, you can find it here.  I am not going to cover this entire setup here, only the parts necessary to get this plugin working.  If you aren’t going to use other Nagios plugins, you don’t need to follow the rest of their guide’s steps either, but it’s there for your reference if the configuration steps change down the road.

The only steps which were required for the setup I wanted were:

• Update the LibreNMS config.php, add the following lines:

$config['show_services']           = 1;
$config['nagios_plugins']   = "/usr/lib/nagios/plugins";

• Create the Nagios plugins directory:

mkdir -p /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/

• Place my plugin file (found in the above section) in this directory.
• Make the plugin file executable:

chmod +x /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_eldewrito

• Your LibreNMS cron in /etc/cron.d/librenms needs a line which is checking the services.  Mine had this line already, so I didn’t need to change anything.  If yours doesn’t, you could try adding mine or consult the LibreNMS documentation above.

*/5  *    * * *   librenms    /opt/librenms/check-services.php >> /dev/null 2>&1

Set Up Your Monitor!
Now that you’ve done the above, LibreNMS should display a Services tab at the top.  Navigate there to add a new service monitor.

On this tab, your next step is filling in the details for the plugin to work.

You will need to know the IP address of your Eldewrito server, as well as the query port.  The default query port is 11775.

Enter the following options:

• Device – Choose the server which you are hosting the Eldewrito server on.
• Type  – Select check_eldewrito to use our script.  This should be the filename of the file you put in your plugins folder, if you changed it.
• Description – Enter whatever you please here, I don’t care. 🙂
• IP Address – Can be left blank and LibreNMS will autofill the device’s IP, or you can type the device’s IP if you enjoy verbosity like I do.
• Parameters – Just enter the query port of the Eldewrito server here, default is 11775.

Locating The Graph & Data
Once you’ve set up your first service monitor, go grab a cup of coffee or some dinner.  Allow at least 5-10 minutes for the graphing to start.

The graph is located under the Services tab, you can either click on the device and go to its services tab, or you can go to the services tab on the top and click “All Services”.  You’ll need to toggle the tab from Basic to Detailed as well to see the graph.

Unfortunately on my version of LibreNMS there are some styling issues, the last check time overlaps the plugin check name a bit.  Maybe they will correct this in a future update, it is mostly a cosmetic issue anyway.

There you have it!  You can add this plugin on multiple server devices in LibreNMS, or use it on the same server several times across multiple ports.  The possibilities are quite endless!  It’s possible to extend the plugin to gather other statistics from the server as well, but for the moment, player count was of the most interest to me.

Please feel free to leave a comment here or open an issue on the Github if you run into any questions or problems with the plugin, and I’ll be happy to take a look.