Technology – bish.co.uk

Lost Jenkins admin password !!! – work around / fix

Yesterday I created an instance of Jenkins on Docker so that I could package up all the pre-requisites for the HPE Automation Tools plugin. I need to do this periodically due to the fact that my Jenkins instance at work isn’t connected to the internet and I occasionally need to download new and updated plugins.

I built Jenkins yesterday and presumably used one of my “disposable” passwords for the admin account in this Jenkins instance. I tried “password”, “admin”, “password1” and a few others but I couldn’t remember the password that I set only yesterday !

I decided that I needed to “hack” Jenkins. This was easier said than done because although I found the location for the password in the config files, the password is hashed out (unsurprisingly).

\jenkins\var\jenkins_home\users\admin\config.xml

Rather than remove the password entirely and risk breaking Jenkins, I had a mooch about in some other config files.

\jenkins\var\jenkins_home\config.xml

By changing the <useSecurity> flag to false and restarting Jenkins,I can avoid the password prompt altogether.

Another Trump-related website failure

My son came home from school today to show me a funny Trump-related website. Apparently it’s all the rage at school. The website lets you blow a Trumpet in Donald Trump’s face. There’s a trumpet noise and a funny animation of the President-elect’s hair blowing. I can see why this is popular in schools and (probably) workplaces…. it’s disrespectful and childishly funny.

The site (trumpdonald.org) has been developed by a Swedish Ad Agency called Animal and it’s obviously captured the world’s imagination in the last day or so. Their website hit counter is at over 100 million hits and I just had a look at the site, only to see a HTTP 503 (Service Unavailable) error.

These (earlier) images are from the Daily Telegraph. In their article which was published on 7th November the site had 9 million “Trumps” (hits)

The site has more than 100 million hits now (10th November) and the counter is still rocketing upwards, have a look if the site’s not melted yet under load…..

Website videos black / dark for first few seconds – FIXED

This has been annoying me for ages… When I say ages, I mean 6 months or more. When I start to watch a video in Chrome on a website like YouTube or BBC News, the first few seconds of the video are dark and pixellated. I’ve tried new video drivers and other setting changes but none have worked until now.

This first image shows what a video looks like when it starts to run in Chrome.

When I realised that the same videos played well in Internet Explorer, Edge and Firefox, I decided that it had to be one of the Chrome settings. After some trial and error, I discovered this flag:
chrome://flags/#disable-accelerated-video-decode .

I disabled this which means that Chrome wasn’t trying to use hardware acceleration on my graphics card. This fixed my problem.

After disabling hardware acceleration, my videos are clear, right from the first second of replay – a great improvement.