Linux

I’ve Upgraded my Ubuntu box to Ubuntu 17.04 to fix one issue and created another issue. This after my USB WiFi card would not connect to the network. I could see the network and it would try to connect but timed out after a minute or so. lsb_release -a No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 17.04 Release: 17.04 Codename: zesty lsusb Bus 002 Device 003: ID 148f:5370 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT5370 Wireless Adapter ...

Operating Systems are tools in a toolbox in my view and over the years I have been reaching for Debian because it is a quick way to get things done. I especially love the Network Installation, mostly because I hate burning CDs :-). Net install ISO are under 300 Megs and coupled with PXE boot, this is a quick way to get a desktop up and running. Download your netinstall image Boot-Up and Install the base system Select Additional packages Configure system as required Once the base system has been installed, all additional packages are download from the repositories and install. If you have a slower connection NetInstall would be very painful (slow). ...

VirtualBox is a viable LAB option for Certification study. Personally I would prefer to run Hyper-V or XENServer but those solutions are a bit resources heavy for a home LAB. VirtualBox is prefect for older aging hardware. ========= Install VirtualBox ============ On Debian Wheezy I learnt the hard way that the packages in the distro repo are dinosaurs, which I could not get to work with PHPVirtualBox. I installed VirtualBox from the Oracle repo. ...

I can’t keep up with all the passwords! There are too many passwords for me to manage, I used to find myself unable to access systems. Passwords are especially annoying on mobile devices with the tiny keyboard. I wanted a solution that works on both the Desktop and Mobile devices. Lastpass is a password management option that I have used in the past. They have a free service but you have to pay to use there mobile apps which is not bad however I never liked the user interface on their Android App. ...

My iPXE setup is coming along just lovely, and it is working out just fine. My goal is to avoid scurrying around like a headless chicken looking for USB flash drives and optical media whenever I have to work on someone’s system. This part usually takes the most out of me when I am fixing a system as I can never seem to find install media, usb drives and my tools. I sure wish I could network boot my tools! I’m trying to become more organized in that regard :-). ...

Network Booting my WinPe image with pxelinux has been an illusive goal of mine. I got it working :-). Get iPXE I downloaded iPXE into my home folder: git clone git://git.ipxe.org/ipxe.git cd ipxe/src make cp bin/undionly.kpxe /tftproot/ PXE Chainloading I have configured my network to chainload iPXE using the “undionly.kpxe” image. I configured my dhcp server (dd-wrt) to point to my tftp server which runs on my NAS. I placed “undionly.kpxe” in the tftp root folder. ...

I have been using Growl for Windows for a few months and I think it is a very cool application. I use it mostly at home with Sickbeard and Couchpotato. In Sickbeard, when a show is snatched, that is the show has been submitted to your download manager (Transmission in my case) a notification will be sent to growl. When the the download has been completed, a notification will be sent to growl. This is especially useful when I am waiting a particular show to finish downloading. ...

I’d given up on getting DD-WRT flashed on this router. With the help of one of my colleagues at work we were able to get DD-WRT flashed! Omar Davis you rock! What got it to Flash Success came with these work arounds: 1. Disable Windows firewall on the command line: netsh firewall set opmode disable 2. Using the ASUS firmware update tool you’ll have to place the .trx file on the root of the C: drive. ...

I grabbed this card from my local computer shop without doing any research. I was very excited and eager to get my home NAS up and running. I was soon disappointed after installing and configuring one hard drive. I was using freeNas then and the write speeds where terribly slow. This was one of the main reasons why I started looking for another NAS solution other than freeNAS. When I migrated to OpenMediaVault this card seemed to have much better Linux support. The I/O speeds were very decent and in spite of this this card always seemed unstable and even though I kept having unstable behavior with hard drives I never made the connection that this card was the root cause. If I had any clue that this was the case I perhaps would not have been so eager with my move to RAID and would have delayed my migration until after I had found a reliable replacement. Alas, you lose data to learn and I lost over 500GB worth of movies and tv shows. ...

Check raid status cat /proc/mdstat or watch cat /proc/mdstat Scan configuration mdadm --detail --scan To Remove a disk from the Array, you’ll have to fail then remove the drive. mdadm --fail /dev/mdX /dev/sdX mdadm --remove /dev/mdX /dev/sdX To add a disk to the array: mdadm --add /dev/mdX /dev/sdX Turn bitmap on mdadm --grow --bitmap=internal /dev/mdX Turn off bitmap mdadm --grow --bitmap=none /dev/mdX Speed up recovery echo 50000 > /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min Resources ...