Category: sysadmin
-
Recent Battle to Use Thunderbird
I am a daily Ubuntu user, and I’ve been been one since 10.04. The use of Snaps in 22.04 took me for a very unhappy drive down frustration lane recently. Around February 2023, both Firefox and Thunderbird appeared with display rendering problems, like the were using bad video driver code. But also, Thunderbird became unkillable.…
-
Programming and Escape Characters (PowerShell)
Having started using Perl back in 1996 and learning conventions for character escaping in like eight to twelve other languages since, I’m continually impressed by how escape characters vary by language. And in the case of PowerShell, the (`) character really pulls the majority of the weight in the language. PowerShell, coming from the Microsoft…
-
Text Editor Debate
There was a listener question posed on Coder Radio 477 that asked: dafuq with the vim an shit, bruh? Having edited code since about 1988 (DOS 3.5 Bible era) and actually having taken classes programming in OG Unix (SunOS 4.1, 1993) before the time of vim, there was Bill Joy’s vi. But around that time,…
-
ZFS: third time through
Fascinating–I had just finished a scrub on June 6. Then a drive started dying. Now I’ve attempted to replace it, but an adjacent drive also had errors. I feel like I’m in a bit of a pickle. This snapshot had the error, so I deleted the snapshot and did a zfs clear tank, and the…
-
Adding Lots of Storage Pools to Libvirt
I do not enjoy having subdirectories involved for storing files in libvert. The virt-manager interface is just way too brutal about how you manually add storage pools. After much ranting, I wrote a bash script to add these directories for my VM disk images. 1 #!/bin/bash 2 3 set -e 4 #set -x 5 existing_pools=()…
-
VirtualBox: boot from USB image
Projects like OPNsense.org provide you with an .img file that you would dd to a USB device to boot from. This is not obvious how to use from VirtualBox. You need to convert that into a VMDK file. Basically, the command I used was: vboxmanage convertfromraw OPNsense-19.7-OpenSSL-serial-amd64.img /tank/VMs/4544-opnsense-19-freebsd/opensense-19.7-usb.vmdk –format vmdk Then attach that VMDK file…
-
Ubuntu 18.04 Terminal Boot
Here are a series of commands to get Ubuntu 18.04 to boot into terminal mode, with various extras on how to get an automatic menu on boot up. Skipping Graphical Boot If you want to skip the graphical login screen, hit [Shift] or [Esc] before you see the grub menu to get to the grub…
-
ZFS Snapshot alias
Add this to your .bash_aliases for fun and profit: function Snapshot () { local dst=”” local atnam=”” if [ -z “$1″ ]; then dst=`df -l . | tail -1 |awk ‘{print $1}’` else if [[ $1 = *@* ]]; then atnam=”${1##*@}” dst=”${1%%@*}” fi dst=`df -l “$dst” | tail -1 |awk ‘{print $1}’` fi [ -z…
-
Apply ZFS driver settings without reboot
Apply your modprobe.d values without rebooting: egrep -v ‘^#|^\s*$’ zfs.conf \ | while read L; do M=($L) N=${M[2]} P=(${N/=/ }) echo “${P[1]}” > /sys/module/zfs/parameters/${P[0]} done #zfs #linux #bash
Bitratchet 