I write this in the hope it may help someone else cos this one has been driving me crazy for days. I only decided to perform an analysis to find out what was going wrong today.

For the last 3-4 days I could not connect to my Synology DS414j NAS via shared drives, pinging or the web interface. I did a lot of research and after a few hours of testing and rebooting I found the issue.

Today I wanted to install the Fitbit desktop app. It is only available through the Windows Store. I loaded up the Store and searched for “Fitbit” then clicked on GET. Nothing happened. It just reloaded the same Store page.

To fix this issue, I went to Windows Update and updated to the new version. The Windows Update screen kept failing with errors 0x8000ffff and others. I Googled around and tried many fixes, but it seems all I needed to do was reboot the computer a few times. Then it updated Windows and rebooted itself a few times to apply the updates. I checked again and it said there were no more updates.

Next I started Services (click the Windows button in the task bar and type Services). I turned off the Windows Update service. Then I pressed the Windows button, typed ‘cmd’ and right-clicked the CMD app and selected Run As Administrator. Now I moved the old update out via:
move “c:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution” “c:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution.old”

Following that, I went back into the Windows Store and it had the same issues. I clicked on my account icon in the Store app and Logged Out. Then, logged back in again. Now I could install the Fitbit app from the Windows Store, finally. I hope this troubleshooter helps others with the same issue.

A friend of mine recently provided me with access to create some VPS machines, so I’ve set up:

• A Master Chef server
• A Database server
• A Webhosting server

Now I’m trying to learn how to set up Chef on them. I tried doing it as described on the Chef website. It describes installing Chef Server on all machines. I was having problems with this and, through a quick search, found another site which details installing Chef Server on the main server and the Client software on the others. Not sure if this is correct.  However, I tried both ways.

I had a problem with one of the VPS machines and found this solution: Please add a server section for to /etc/opscode/private-chef.rb! It turns out the VPS did not have the hostname set up as a FQDN name. Fixing this resolved that problem.

I’ve set up the server and have tried creating users, however I get an error that Chef cannot connect to the Nginx server on port 443 on 127.0.0.1  I’m trying to figure out why. I’ve disabled SELinux as recommended and even added in specific firewall rules through iptables to try and allow connections. I can’t connect to port 443 on the Master server from my desktop either. Not sure what’s going on there.  I guess I can create users on the Master server, but not Client servers. It just worked now with the Master server. There must be some way to connect the clients to the server for user creation… or perhaps only the Master server has users..?

At the moment, the Master server seems to be up and working but cannot be contacted outside the VPS network. Not sure if I have to install some Chef WebUI application..?  One VPS has the client software installed but I haven’t found how to configure that to connect to the Master server yet. We’ll see how it goes.