• RHEL 8 CentOS 8, Alma Linux 8, Rocky Linux 8 System Not Booting with RAID or on other servers/computers Solution for dracut and initramfs missing kernel modules


    This seems to have changed for RHEL 8 where a normal dracut to update your initramfs creates a system that only boots for the running kernel. For example if you have Kernel 5 and then chroot into a RHEL 8 variant which uses kernel 4.18, and run dracut, it seems that by default the system will be unbootable. It is also the case that if you move your RAID array or drives to another server that it will be unbootable, because dracut seems to only include modules needed for the curre........
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    This happens to a lot of Nvidia users especially users of newer cards like the RTX series. If for example you are trying to boot and install Linux and you get a black and white grub2 screen instead of a nice graphical welcome installer, you probably suffer from this bug. It is normally followed by the user booting and finding they just have a blank/black screen. Here is the quick flow of steps to fix it: If you get a black grub scree........
  • Howto Set Static IP on boot in initramfs for dropbear or other purposes NFS, Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS


    This is only really necessary in the case you don't want DHCP. If you are dealing with an encrypted LUKS server on the internet, you will often want to have a static IP so you know which IP to connect to (or if you have a semi-static IP assigned by DHCP). SET IP Address by /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf IP Address=192.168.1.27 Gateway=192.168.1.1 Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0 Hostname=myhome.com IP=192.1........
  • ADATA USB Thumb Drive Issues


    This is the reason that I don't like the new ADATA USB drives such as the UV128/64GB or 128GB drives and other ones that look to be the same style (the green sliding USB connector). They just don't work well from new and never work properly at any point. [ 788.242463] usb 1-1.2: new high-speed USB device number 16 using ehci-pci [ 788.339816] usb 1-1.2: New USB device found, idVendor=125f, idProduct=db8a [ 7........
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    This would be crucial especially if the phone is hardened, not being able to reset or change settings could prevent a phone registering in a new environment or even when migrating from office to office. This applies even if you are trying to migrate the phone to another platform such as Asterisk/FreePBX etc... This guide applies to nearly all of the Cisco IP phones that you would use in CME or CUCM from several years ago including models: 9900, 9971, 8800, 8900, 8845, 8851, 8841........
  • /etc/iproute2/rt_tables default settings file in Linux Centos 6,7 and most other NIX's


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  • How to Update Linux /usr/share/misc/pci.ids


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  • How to verify SSL SHA-1 Certificate Fingerprnit Signature of your mail/web server to avoid hijacking/man-in-the-middle attacks


    This is especially helpful if you run your own servers. If you are presented with an error message or warning that the signature has changed or does not match the IP/domain you are connecting to you always want to verify manually. So your e-mail/web client will show you an SHA-1 fingerprint like this: "Could not verify this certificate because the issuer is unkown" or other reasons such as a mismatch in IP/domain. It will also show you........
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    This was a surprising bug but I unplugged all drives for an array md127. At first it was just 1 drive and mdadm seemed to notice this. I unplugged the second drive taking the array offline but mdadm did not realize it was offline and still showed a non-existent disk as being part of it. This created problems trying to unmount it or even to stop this array with mdadm freezing. As for how to fix it I can only think of making sure you are not in a mounted path of........
  • Linux CLI command to rip audio CD and encode convert to MP3s


    This command rips the audio tracks to .wav files *I recommend making a new directory with the name of the audio disc first and executing everything from within that directory below. cdparanoia -B Use the lame mp3 encoder to encode each one with this script: *Note that this will encode any other files ending in "cdda.wav" for track in `ls *cdda.wav`; do lame -b 192 $track; done........
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  • How to wipe/erase hard drives clean so data cannot be recovered for privacy reasons


    This is something many people and especially businesses worry about, or at least they should. Before throwing away a hard drive, returning a hard drive, or especially Warrantying/RMAing it, you should wipe the drive. Linux provides the "shred" and "dd" utlities which work quite well. It seems even a single pass is good enough but by default shred will do 3 passes. Here's an example of using shred in Linux (I use a custom made distribution from........
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    This is a handy link and list of all the relevant Directadmin log files and related servers. http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=11 DirectAdmin: /var/log/directadmin/error.log /var/log/directadmin/errortaskq.log /var/log/directadmin/system.log /var/log/directadmin/security.log Apache:........
  • How to recover from dead DRBD partition/hard drive in two simple commands


    This assumes that you've at least created the correct partition for your DRBD already. Notice that I am "diskless", that's because either your DRBD partition doesn't exist/has been renamed (eg. sdb becomes sda when sdb dies and you reboot) or because that drive is really actually dead/gone. *If you need to permanently change the partition/device for your resource be sure to edit /etc/drbd.conf on both hosts and reload the config. (replace r0 with........
  • exim high load and dozens of processes


    This server was experiencing loads of up to 80 and maxing out the RAM and kmemsize on a CPanel VPS. There were literally dozens if not hundreds of exim processes. I have no idea why exim has such a design that would allow it to consume this much CPU and RAM. Any normal MTA should not be spawning so many processes, it should be processing them in sequence and if it is going to spawn hundreds of processes in response to a large volume of mail, it's better to have a delayed del........
  • Canel Default VHOST DocumentRoot/Contents Directory is /usr/local/apache/htdocs


    This can be very annoying and CPanel doesn't seem to document it, or it's not found or made as obvious as it should be. It's always funny when I find it more difficult to work with a control panel than to do everytihng manually without CPanel or even Plesk. So once again, the default serve path for contents is: /usr/local/apache/htdocs and this is especially applicable when accessing Apache by just an IP which is unbound to any domain at this point.........
  • Upgrade Release Kernel Tips


    Upgrade Release Kernel TipsThis is for CentOS 3.1 to 3.8 but the methodology will apply everywhere. I ran into a problem first of all with a non-booting system after running #yum update centos-release It took me to 3.8 and upgraded all the other packages [b:7e931c835d]BUT[/b:7e931c835d] because of some stupid flags enabled in /etc/yum.conf the KERNEL WASN'T UPGRADED SO AFTER BOOTING, WELL IT DIDN'T BOOT OF COURSE :) H........
  • Adventures in pre-paid SIM Cards and data GPRS/Edge/3G in China with China Mobile in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing and other cities


    This really is a difficult and confusing process for non-Mandarin speakers, but here's what I've done and learned so far: You can purchase an "M-Zone" China Mobile pre-paid SIMCard from almost anywhere but I tried to purchase mine from Suning (a large electronics dealer) hoping they would be able to help me or answer my questions but my plan didn't work out at all. At Suning once I found someone who spoke some English they gave me the 55 RMB M-Zone China Mobile P........
  • RTL8111/8168B R8169 Gigabit Link slow speeds


    This is the Intel Atom 330 motherboard with integrated Realtek Gigabit NIC (Intel Desktop Board D945GCLF2 Motherboard W/ Atom 330 1.6 GHz Dual Core Processor - Mini-ITX) I cannot achieve more than 15 MB/s, even doing a local transfer through eth0 to it's own IP. 100% 95MB 15.9MB/s 00:06 So this is not a cabling, switch or hardware issue, it seems like a driver or chipset limitation problem. Here is my........
  • LAME MP3 Encoder Segmentation Faults


    This happened on one of my Ubuntu machines where Igot some kind of segfault on line 21 from LAME at random while encoding MP3s (a second try is fine usually). I've read that it's best to compile it from source and that has solved most issues for people. Here is my preferred configure line: ./configure --enable-mp3x --with-fileio=lame --enable-debug --with-vorbis Even with that I got a different error this tim........
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