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Author: David Westerfield Page 4 of 118


Chrome Remote Desktop Running on Ubuntu 18.04

These are the settings I had to change in the config file to get Chrome Remote Desktop working on my Ubuntu 18.04 server. Thanks to this site: https://superuser.com/questions/778028/configuring-chrome-remote-desktop-with-ubuntu-gnome-14-04

  1. Make a backup and then edit /opt/google/chrome-remote-desktop/chrome-remote-desktop
  2. Add screen size(s if multiples) to DEFAULT_SIZES to look like this:
    DEFAULT_SIZES = “1920×1080,3840×2160”
  3. Changed display number to 0:
    FIRST_X_DISPLAY_NUMBER = 0
  4. Comment out this section:
    #while os.path.exists(X_LOCK_FILE_TEMPLATE % display):
    #display += 1

  5. In this section, comment out self._launch_x_server(x_args) and self._launch_x_session() (shown below) and then add this:

    display = self.get_unused_display_number()
    self.child_env[“DISPLAY”] = “:%d” % display

    so that it looks like this:

    def launch_session(self, x_args):
    self._init_child_env()
    self._setup_pulseaudio()
    self._setup_gnubby()
    #self._launch_x_server(x_args)
    #self._launch_x_session()
    display = self.get_unused_display_number()
    self.child_env[“DISPLAY”] = “:%d” % display

  6. Save and exit, then stop and start the Chrome Remote Desktop service from the command line:
    sudo service chrome-remote-desktop stop
    sudo service chrome-remote-desktop start

I Cried To You and You Rescued Me – A Prayer

“O LORD my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me.” | Psalm 30:2

Father we are those whom You have drawn up from the grave, whom you’ve healed, restored, forgiven, made Your very children. You have achieved the absolute impossible task of actually regenerating our hearts, softening them by Your Spirit, making them aware of the indwelling sin that keeps us from You and turning them from that sin to the greatness and glory and power and majesty of who You are, melting them by the very sight of You. Would we not become indifferent and complacent to the wonder and miracle it is that we have been made your own, adopted into Your family, transferred from the domain of darkness and brought into the kingdom of your marvelous light. Our identity lies in You, not in our possessions, not in our status, not in our comfort or where we live or what we do or who our friends are. We are yours and You are ours through faith Lord. Would you help us together as a church to believe what is already true about us: justified by faith, counted with the same righteousness that You posses, as a gift. Would you help us Lord in our temptation to despair during this strange time that You are sovereignly over, that we would press into this time with You while at home alone, with our kids, with our spouses to dig up the treasure of Scripture, to meditate upon Your presence with us and let Your grace soak into us like a dry sponge in water. Though Lord in many ways we do mourn the things we’ve lost and it is right to do so in so many aspects, Lord I ask that we wouldn’t stay there but that we would continue to use this time as an opportunity to seek the joy that surpasses understanding and comprehension to the world around us. Would we be a people marked by joy, by thanksgiving as we’ll hear about today from Psalm 30. Father, work in us a gratitude for all that we’ve been given by You both now and for all eternity and would we not wrongly crave the things we don’t have. We ask for contentment, a contentment that can only come from You. May we rest in you like a resting infant in her mother’s arms. Would You grant that to us as a gift to lighten the burdens we carry day in and day out, knowing that You love to give good gifts to Your children?

And now Lord we pray this prayer from the Book of Common Prayer for this Fourth Sunday of Pentecost:

Almighty God, you have built your Church upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone: Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their teaching, that we may be made a holy temple acceptable to you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

OpenVPN IPv6 Setup on Ubuntu

Documenting settings to get IPv6 setup within the configuration for OpenVPN, plus forwarding all IPv6 traffic through the VPN. This has no explanation of how you obtain IPv6 address prefixes frrom your ISP or how it works differently from IPv4, just simply how to get it working within OpenVPN. Will update if needed.

Ubiquiti EdgeRouter 4 IPv6 Setup

Update: for a newer version of this information set within the Config Tree portion of the web interface of the EdgeRouter 4, read this post, with pictures and all! 🙂 https://davidwesterfield.net/2021/03/enabling-ipv6-prefix-delegation-on-att-internet-for-a-second-firewall/


I’m archiving this information for future reference because I (or others) may need it. This was extremely helpful in getting AT&T’s allotted IPv6 subnet(?) (properly called: delegated prefix) setup in my EdgeRouter 4, although I wound up having to use the web interface and configuring the same settings within the Config section. Without further ado (or a whole lot of ado below) here is Bradley Heilbrun’s explanation.


A Prayer For a Time of Uncertainty

We give thanks to you, O God; we give thanks, for your name is near. (Psalm 75:1) 

Father as one of your churches that makes up the larger body of Your people, we come and simply lay at Your feet in thankfulness, for how You have given us life, support us in times of trial, provide for us in times of turbulence like we find ourselves in now, and how you’ve provided an incomparable salvation that we never could have sought after or achieved on our apart from the work of Your Spirit by Grace Alone. We thank You that Your name is near, that You have been made known to us through Jesus and all he’s accomplished to make us Your children. We thank You that You, the great I AM of the universe, would condescend to our level in order to be near us.

This Monitor Was Everything I Hoped it Would Be

Fear is the Enemy of Faith, Faith is the Enemy of Fear

“I do know that waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one’s thoughts.” | Elisabeth Elliot

“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” | Matthew 6:25-34 (ESV)

These are unexpected, historic, trying times to say the least. And it is during these times I believe the Lord gives us a great opportunity for personal, communal and societal reflection. But then there’s fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of loss (whatever form that takes), anxiety that we have no control over this situation, how long it will last, what shape it will take in the future, on and on. A person (points at self) can easily get wrapped around the axle at 3am in the middle of the night on all of this (or 2pm for that matter when dealing with even more struggles with the kids as cabin fever sets in). Fear is the enemy of faith in general, but at these times it gets ratcheted up exponentially. It’s no wonder this was the most repeated command in the Bible: “Fear not…” 

Yet the reverse is also true: faith is the enemy of fear. I believe the Lord has handed us a great opportunity filled with hope. This is a time for us, His people, to slow down, to take a step back and press into our life with Jesus individually and with our families or roommates, to recapture and develop routines and habits that move and press us into the resurrection life and activity of the Spirit. 

This is where for me the Daily Office patterns of prayer and Scripture readings throughout the day have been life giving. http://www.gnpcb.org/esv/mobile/devotions/bcp/

Generally, what this looks like is simply having a morning, afternoon and evening time of prayer, Scripture reading and meditation. And it doesn’t have to be some long, drawn out time. Make it your own. Just wake up, get coffee and pray through a Psalm or two. Let it penetrate your own heart as you dwell on it. Then at lunch, stop what you’re doing, step away (as the setting allows) and repeat by reading more Psalms, an Old Testament reading or a New Testament reading. Then in the evening, either alone or with your family or roommates, read the gospel reading and pray, resting and rejoicing in Your Father’s rejoicing in and over You. Just make it consistent. This is a great pattern to start and get in the habit of, a time to take a step back from the chaos and uncertainty and be in the word and in prayer, really as a means to simply be with Jesus, either alone or with others. Let Him work His healing salve and the means of grace into Your heart. Allow Him to dine with You and fill Your soul with what is the banquet Your soul and my soul so desperately needs: Jesus Himself.

Here is a lecture series Pastor Brian (at Trinity Pres Fort Worth) did at the very beginning of Trinity I have posted before that explains this in greater detail. Such good, rich material I commend to you to sit with and take in during this time. https://trinitypresfw.org/media/lectures/formation/

None of this chaos catches our Father by surprise. The past, present and future is ever-present before Him and is all worked out for His glory and our good. He is sovereign, He is kind and loving. He is our great Physician with a surgeon’s scalpel and healing hand who knows exactly what we need to shape us and form us into the image of His Son, the very One who went through the worst form of suffering, to the cross, bearing our wrath, and rose again, victorious over sin, death and hell, so that we could live with Him forever in the City of the New Jerusalem. Let’s together as His people put on the armor of God (Ephesians 6) and stand firm in the faith, resisting the work of the devil to discourage us, fighting the temptation to fear and press toward our great King who has already won the victory, with the hope and resiliency of the saints in the past who have endured similar trials.

“On Christ the solid Rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand…”

May it be so. Amen.

“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” | Romans 5:1–6 (ESV)

“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.” | James 1:2–5 (ESV)

Coronavirus expert: ‘War is an appropriate analogy’

A Prayer in Memory of D. Kent Pingel

Father we praise You for Your work in creation, in bringing about all that exists from nothing. We praise You for creating men and women in Your image, to reflect Your glory in the world. And yet, though we fell into sin and that image has been distorted within us, You brought about salvation and pointed the way to our only source of salvation all throughout the Old Testament through prophets, priests and kings that You appointed to proclaim Your good news. And in time you brought into the world the greatest prophet, priest and king, Your Son Jesus, who lived a perfectly righteous life we could never live, died a sacrificial death in our place to remove the poison and consequence of our sin, and rose again conquering sin, death and hell once and for all. In doing so You have restored and are restoring Your image in Your church, in those who trust in Christ alone for salvation. We praise You for Your wonderful works of mercy to save us from our sin and to have the image of Christ restored in us and brought back to our original purpose for existing: to bring You glory.

Father we thank You today for Kent and the way You created Him in Your image and revealed Your Son to Him. We thank You for the life of Kent as a father, brother, uncle, son and friend to so many here.

We pray for the family and friends here who are mourning his loss and ask for Your comfort today and in the coming days of grief, that You would be near by Your Spirit, that You would fill that hole, that gap they are experiencing with the presence of Your Son and His grace. Lord You are our only hope of life in the midst of suffering.

But Father, we don’t pray now or mourn as those without hope: because You rose again You are bringing with Yourself and raising to life all those who rest in You to live with You forever in Your kingdom. Lord would You comfort us all with the truth and joy of Your resurrection, that death doesn’t have the final word. You are our hope now and for all eternity. Would You grant us rest and joy that surpasses understanding even in the midst of loss.

The Fulfillment Realized – A Prayer

Father, after many years of waiting for Your promises to be fulfilled, You brought Christ into the world and made His coming known to the Gentiles, and specifically during this time of Epiphany, you revealed Him to the Magi who had come to see this King who had been born. In fulfillment of so many Old Testament passages such as Moses who says, “Rejoice O Gentiles with His people,” and Isaiah who says, “The Gentiles will hope in Him,” You brought about a great fulfillment to bring salvation not just to ethnic Israel but to include the Gentiles around the world with Your chosen people Israel and so all Israel will be saved together. We rejoice together that we are seeing the promise spoken to Abraham that he would be the father of many nations fulfilled in our very midst. Father in Your great kindness, across history and even to this very day, you are continuing this fulfillment in effecting your work of the covenant of grace in Christ our Lord and bringing in Your called people from every tribe, tongue, language and nation. You are building Your church and the gates of hell cannot prevail against it. Though we see so much persecution around the world against believers and even in our midst feel it with our family and friends at times who don’t know You, You are working a glorious end in which You will be lifted up and highly exalted and we will be caught up together and share in Your glory. Lord fill us with the hope and wonder and mystery of these truths that we would seek and find our treasure first and foremost in Christ, seeking the things that are above where He is instead of fleeting things here on Earth, and find rest for our weary souls.

Father in heaven, who at the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan didst proclaim him thy beloved Son and anoint him with the Holy Spirit: Grant that all who are baptized into his Name may keep the covenant they have made, and boldly confess him as Lord and Savior; who with thee and the same Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen. (BCP)

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