How to Install Any OS on a Physical Drive from Windows Using VMware Workstation (Linux, Windows, BSD)

Uses: Install OS on physical drive Linux installation VMware Install Windows on physical drive Boot OS from physical drive VMware Workstation tutorial Linux virtual machine to physical disk Windows to Linux migration Dual boot OS installation Boot from external SSD Linux, Windows, BSD installation guide Physical drive boot OS........

nvidia cannot resume from sleep Comm: nvidia-sleep.sh Tainted: Linux Ubuntu Mint Debian

This seems to happen in many different drivers but it happened more often in newer versions such as 530 vs 525. Then nvidia-modeset goes to 100% There are many reports of this appearing since driver 4.70 and I can confirm I've seen this in various machines. https://forums.de........

2024 Buyer's Guide: How to Choose and Buy the Best VPS/VDS for Your Needs - Tips and Strategies

In today’s digital landscape, finding a reliable and secure Virtual Private Server (VPS) or Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS) goes beyond just comparing specs and prices. With increasing concerns over data privacy, security breaches, and government surveillance, the wisdom of choosing your VPS/VDS provider based on juri........

How To Upgrade Debian 8,9,10 to Debian 12 Bookworm

Step 1.) Upgrade to Debian 11 first The process to go to Debian 12 is not as smooth as 11, when trying to upgrade from Debian 10. In fact, it doesn't work directly, so you'll first need to follow this guide to update to Debian 11, reboot and come back here if successful. Step 2.) Update sources.list Update your /etc/apt/sources.list like this: deb http://........

talib/_ta_lib.c:747:10: fatal error: ta-lib/ta_defs.h: No such file or directory

If you are installing ta-lib for Python and get this error then you can normally solve it by manually getting the ta-lib source files and compiling. tar -zxvf ta-lib-0.4.0-src.tar.gz cd ta-lib;./configure;make;make install Collecting ta-lib Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/39/6f/6acaee2eac6afb2cc6a2adcb294080577f9983fbd2726395b9047c4e13ec/TA-Lib-0.4.26.tar.gz (272kB) &nbs........

debootstrap how to install Ubuntu, Mint, Debian install

In this example we install debian 10 with --variant=minbase which gives us a minimal/tiny install. Don't use variant if you want the full size install. mkdir /tmp/deb10files debootstrap --variant=minbase buster /tmp/deb10files/ Did you get an error? debootstrap --variant=minbase buster /home/theuser/VMs/deb10files/ You'll get this error if you make a directory in your home........

Cisco 2900 3900 Router Password Reset How To Reset Enable Password

It is a bit different and annoying here for these types of routers/models as you need to physically remove the CF (Compact Flash) and only then, will it enter ROMMON mode (Ctrl + Pause remotely over the console will not do it for us). This means you cannot do this remotely, or at least not without the help of a remote/physical helper. Step 1.) Power off, router and remove CF Disk Slot#2 Go to the router and remove the slot#2 cover uses your hand or it may help to use a........

How To Tell Which Repository a Package Comes From Debian Mint Ubuntu

Just use apt-cache policy to find the repo of a package: apt-cache policy lxd lxd: Installed: 3.0.3-0ubuntu1~18.04.2 Candidate: 3.0.3-0ubuntu1~18.04.2 Version table: *** 3.0.3-0ubuntu1~18.04.2 500 500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates/main amd64 Packages &nb........

Docker Tutorial HowTo Install Docker, Use and Create Docker Container Images Clustering Swarm Mode Monitoring Service Hosting Provider

The Best Docker Tutorial for Beginners We quickly explain the basic Docker concepts and show you how to do the most common tasks from starting your first container, to making custom images, a Docker Swarm Cluster Tutorial, docker compose and Docker buildfiles.........

Zoom Password Error 'That passcode was incorrect' - Solution Wrong Passcode Wrong Meeting Name

Have you been given a Zoom password that the meeting owner says is correct but it doesn't work anymore or never works? If the meeting name says "Zoom Meeting" and it's not really named that (which most meetings are not), then the issue is usually that there is an initial password to be able to join, aside from the passcode. It basically means that Zoom has deauthenticated you randomly or maybe after X amount of uses, without clicking on the Join Meeting URL which contains a........

mpv / mplayer with Radeon / AMD GPU Video Card Driver enable VDPAU GPU Accelerated Video Decoding

The easiest way to know if your videos are playing with GPU acceleration are to watch the process of xplayer, mpv or whatever you are playing. The CPU usage should be no more than 10% for that process/program if it is using acceleration. Let's manually play with vdpau to make sure it works before we make it permanent: First make sure you have libvdpau installed: sudo apt install vdpau-driver-all If yo........

ls how to list ONLY directories

The key thing is the "-d" flag and the */ at the end of the path. Just do this: ls -d */ It would list all directories in the pwd If you want a path do this: ls -d /var/log/*/ /var/log/apt/ /var/log/hp/ /var/log/samba/ /var/log/ConsoleKit/ /var/log/installer/ /var/log/speech-dispatcher........

Cisco Unified Communications Manager / CUCM IP 8.6,10,12 Install Error Solution

Install Errors on Version 12: This error happened on QEMU emulator version 2.11.1 pve-qemu-kvm_2.11.1-5 on Proxmox/Debian but installing on QEMU.12 on Centos 6 did not produce the error. *Update it is not related to the OS or QEMU version. This happened in Centos 6 too after a second install. What really causes this even though you successfully install........

Cisco Unified Communications Manager 12 Install Errors on Proxmox/KVM

The strange thing is that usually the first install or two will work on any new machine but then it suddenly won't. I had this experience on QEMU 2.13 on a different machine. There is something finicky or buggy about the CUCM installer even when choosing the same virtual hardware specs. qemu-kvm command: /usr/libexec/qemu-kvm -version QEMU PC emulator version 0.12.1 (qemu-kvm-0.12.1.2-2.506.el6_10.1), Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Fabrice Bellard ........

sudoers file in /etc warning about comments/includes!

If you see this in /etc/sudoers it is NOT a comment but an include. #includedir /etc/sudoers.d For example in Linux mint sudoers.d contains the following files: casper mintupdate README casper for example contains the following sudoers line: mint ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL So if you are messing ar........

systemd management using systemctl and journalctl to check systemd logs

systemd is like the service manager for your Centos and other modern Linux distributions (including Debian/Mint/Ubuntu) allows you to enable services, stop them, restart them, check their status and even reboot your system. The key commands or arguments you will use with systemctl are the following: Unit Commands: list-units [PATTERN...] List loaded units &nbs........

VMWare ESXi 6.7 SSH/PowerShell CLI Commands

[root@localhost:~] BootModuleConfig.sh echo host-ind nfcd........

VMWare Vsphere VCSA Graphical Install Creates json

yes it does create its own json ============================================ cat /tmp/vcsaUiInstaller/ovftool-20180809-175238948-20180809-175603497.log |grep -i json 2018-08-09T17:56:04.238-07:00 verbose OVFTool[30966] [Originator@6876 sub=Default] Manifest file entry: SHA1(VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-6.7.0.12000-8832884_OVF10-file1.json) = 1deb658c724767697587d5909c4051c01813e6a1 --> ........

postfix errors fatal: no SASL authentication mechanisms /usr/libexec/postfix/smtpd: bad command startup -- throttling solution

Jul 3 22:12:17mailserver postfix/smtpd[6195]: fatal: no SASL authentication mechanisms Jul 3 22:12:18mailserver postfix/master[4881]: warning: process /usr/libexec/postfix/smtpd pid 6195 exit status 1 Jul 3 22:12:18mailserver postfix/master[4881]: warning: /usr/libexec/postfix/smtpd: bad command startup -- throttling This only ever happens in my experience when the authentication method is actually Dovecot. Usually the problem........

Linux Mint Black Screen after boot no graphics solution

This is not the normal "black screen"issue and I was shocked to eventually find out why. The normal advice of reconfiguring Xorg didn't work. Even booting into "Recovery Mode" did not help. Here is the short end of the stick that fixed it: sudo apt-get install mdm mate-desktop-environment Yes you got it right, mdm and the mate-desktop-environment / gnome were somehow uninstalled. This must be whe........

How To Create Apache htpasswd file

This just simply outputs what you need a username and password that can be used to authenticate from .htaccess htpasswd -nb user password user:Gnb6uE9Lp4gt2 If you want to write it straight to a file htpasswd -cb /tmp/somefile.pw user password How To Use This In .htaccess AuthUserFile /tmp/somefile.pw AuthName GetLost!! AuthType B........

Install Windows From a Linux TFTP Server instead of using WDS Solution

yum -y install samba vi /etc/samba/smb.conf https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/syslinux-6.03.zip mkdir syslinux;cd syslinux;unzip syslinux-6.03.zip mkdir -p /tftpboot/libs/ cp bios/com32/modules/linux.c32 /tftpboot/libs/ cp bios/com32/libutil/libutil.c32 /tftpboot/libs/ cp bios/com32/lib/libcom32.c32 /tftpboot/libs/ #add lib path echo "PATH libs" >> /tftpboot/pxeli........

userdel user userdel: cannot lock /etc/passwd; try again later.

I am not sure why this happened I think it's because the file was in use by another duplicate process or script. userdel user userdel: cannot lock /etc/passwd; try again later. ........

ffmpeg Unable to Use Hardware Encoding with Nvidia 3.40 Driver and GT210 card

I believe from what I've read that this card's driver doesn't support the features after trying all known troubleshooting methods. ffmpeg -i uservideoRendered.mp4 -filter:v hwupload_cuda,scale_npp=w=1920:h=1080:format=nv12:interp_algo=lanczos,hwdownload -c:v hevc_nvenc -profile main -preset slow -rc vbr_hq -c:a copy uservideoRendered.mp4-test ffmpeg -i uservideoRendered.mp4 -filter:v hwupload_cuda,scale_npp=w=1920:h=1080:format=nv12:interp_algo=lanczos,hwdownload........

ffmpeg Linux Mint download, compile and install howto

#if you have nvidia make sure you install the nvidia-cuda-toolkit so hardware acceleration can be used wget http://ffmpeg.org/releases/ffmpeg-3.3.2.tar.bz2 tar -jxvf ffmpeg-3.3.2.tar.bz2 cd ffmpeg-3.3.2/ ./configure --disable-yasm install prefix /usr/local source path ........

How to extract view contents of initramfs image gzip'd

Very simple browse to your /boot directory It does make more sense to extract the image in its own directory eg "initramfs-blabla-dir" as it will literally extract directly to the pwd. cp initramfs.img someotherdir cd someotherdir zcat initramfs-3.10.0-514.el7.x86_64.img | cpio -idmv........

rsync run as root sudo without password

This is a common issue, what if a issue shouldn't have root but you want to use that user to make a full backup of a system? They of course need root access. You can actually just give them passwordless sudo access to rsync in /etc/sudoers: sudo vi /etc/sudoers yourusername ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/rsync Here is how you would execute rsync: The key thing for the remote host is to........

cudaminer freezes Linux Mint taints kernel

When running cudaminer once it tries to initialize the card the entire screen freezes. The computer itself is still running but the Xorg is done for, you cannot even switch to another console window and must reboot (even an mdm or Xorg restart does not help). At first cudaminer will give you these errors: stratrum_recv_line failed ...retry after 15 seconds GPU #0: Geforce 210 with compute ca........

Nvidia Linux Mint/Ubuntu screentearing horizontal line solution

Finally after ages I found the solution which is on many pages on the net but not obvious and should have been standard or more common info! Instant Solution: Type this into the terminal (unfortunately the driver config menu doesn't have the option as itis hidden): nvidia-settings --assign CurrentMetaMode="nvidia-auto-select +0+0 { ForceCompositionPipeline = On }" Make permanent Cli........

Linux Mint/Ubuntu/Debian Nvidia driver becomes slow graphics performance issue

I've had this issue since Ubuntu 9 and now even on Linux Mint 17 no matter what latest version of the Nvidia proprietary driver that I use. It just becomes slower and slower and only gets better after rebooting or restarting Xorg. Someone here has it as well https://askubuntu.com/questions/822449/graphics-becomes-slow-after-a-while/917886 It's very fru........

How to create openssl md5 password hash to use in /etc/shadow using bash

Very useful in embedded and other non-standard deployments. The above makes a random salt of 14 random characters from /dev/urandom (you can change the -14 to whatever number of characters you want for your salt). openssl passwd -1 -salt `< /dev/urandom tr -dc _A-Z-a-z-0-9 | head -c${1:-14};echo;` YourPassword Output: $1$eW-ScuyL$f/iKMJ5mbJ..7bSzvX6EO0 How To Create Password Has........

What happens when you unplug 1 or more devices from an mdadm RAID array to simulate a failure in Linux Ubuntu/Centos/Debian?

In short the two drives in the array were /dev/sdd and /dev/sde. The kernel sees they were unplugged and have gone down as you can see below. mdadm caught the first one being unplugged /dev/sde and disabled the missing drive. However when the final drive that was part of the array is unplugged it didn't notice at all. Instead it complains about an IO error later for drives that the kernel knows do not exist anymore. [45817.162728] ata4: exception........

Linksys E2500 DD-WRT Upgrade Instructions and Enabling 5ghz with Tomato Firmware

1.) Flash directly to this file: http://tomato.groov.pl/download/K26RT-N/build5x-132-EN/Linksys%20E-series/tomato-E2500-NVRAM60K-1.28.RT-N5x-MIPSR2-132-Max.zip *I was never able to get the larger "Mega" file to work, at least not initially so I recommend the file above. To enable 5ghz I had to do the "Clear NVRAM" Option before it was shown. 2.) Or if you don't need 5ghz (most devices do not support it and cannot........

Avocent 8020 KVM Java Icedtea Viewer

This command in Debian/Ubuntu/Mint will get everything need installed for most Java based KVM viewers: sudo apt install icedtea-netx The following additional packages will be installed: ca-certificates-java icedtea-netx-common openjdk-8-jre openjdk-8-jre-headless It seems every other updated version of Java or Icedtea breaks things and I will save the frustration of Java for another post.........

Linux sudo config sudoers to run command without a password howto

Before reading on remember to put the line at the bottom of /etc/sudoers as from experience what happen is that other rules cancel out what you have added. If your sudoers setup is correct it will work immediately upon saving without requiring a reboot. Edit /etc/sudoers yourusername ALL = NOPASSWD: /path/to/command *Once again remember the above should be on the bottom of the sudoers file or........

bash script get directory location and path of script howto tutorial

So the situaton is this, you depend on things being relevant to where your bash script is and to be safe you want it to be dynamic (eg. do not hard code that we switch to /abc/dir but rather detect where script.sh is located). scriptlocation="$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" && pwd )" The path is then contained the the variable "scriptlocation" so you can cd to it in your script etc............

What a hdd hard drive and mdadm RAID array failure looks like in Linux

[3805108.257042] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 1953525168 512-byte hardware sectors: (1.00 TB/931 GiB) [3805108.257052] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off [3805108.257054] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 [3805108.257066] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA [3805108.257083] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 1953525168 512-byte hardware sectors: (1.00 TB/931 GiB) [3805108.257090] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off........

kvm centos cannot compile error

./configure ./configure: cannot locate gcc 3.x. please install it or specify with --qemu-cc yum -y install gcc make ./configure ./configure: cannot locate gcc 3.x. please install it or specify with --qemu-cc yum -y install compat-gcc-* ./configure Error: Could not find alsa Make sure to have the alsa libs and headers installed. yum -y install alsa-lib-devel ./configure........

Linux create htaccess file with username and password

htpasswd -b -c filename username "password" -b = take the password that we specify in the command (don't prompt for it) -c = create the filename username=username password=password (I use quotes because it breaks if you use special characters)........

LSI MegaRAID Adventures, Guide and HowTo

LSi Megaraid At first it was configured as a RAID 0, then I deleted the Virtual Disk Group. I thought both drives would be shown and detected in Linux as sda and sdb but it actually shows nothing. To make them work you have to hit Ctrl+R before the system boots (when prompted) and create a Virtual Disk Group. In my case I created each one as RAID 0 (with a single drive only) as I just wanted JBOD but there is no such option or default in these Dell Pe........

pxe-32 tftp open timeout

pxe-32 tftp open timeout The solution was to enable tftp in xinetd with "chkconfig tftp on". See the troubleshooting below: chkconfig --list NetworkManager 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:off 6:off acpid 0:off&n........

Brand new WDD 500GB Blue 3.5 SATA Drive Dead After Shipping

These drives seem to die very easily during shipping: sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Unhandled error code sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 18 8b 65 e0 00 00 08 00 end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 411788768 sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Unhandled error code sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 18 8b........

WD 20EARX Dead Again

Another new drive bad from the start: Jun 2 15:14:18 one-desktop kernel: [15895.386779] ata2.00: exception Emask 0x50 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x280900 action 0x6 frozen Jun 2 15:14:18 one-desktop kernel: [15895.386782] ata2.00: irq_stat 0x08000000, interface fatal error Jun 2 15:14:18 one-desktop kernel: [15895.386784] ata2: SError: { UnrecovData HostInt 10B8B BadCRC } Jun 2 15:14:18 one-desktop kernel: [15895.386788] ata2.00: cmd 60/0........

mdadm enable bitmap to speed up rebuilds

Have you ever unplugged the wrong drive and then had to rebuild the entire array? It may not be a big deal in some ways but it does make your system vulnerable until the rebuild is done. Many distros often enable the "bitmap" feature and this basically keeps track of what parts need to be resynced in the case of a temporary removal of a drive from the array, this way it only needs to sync what has changed. To enable bitmap to speed up rebuilds and sync........

WD 20EARX 2TB Bad within days

This is just trying to read 5GB off the drive with dd and the drive initially tested ok but shortly after I wondered why I was seeing 2MB/s read speeds. Notice the "current_pending_sector", anytime I've seen it at anything above 0 even with no other bad fields/attributes, it means the drive is bad. ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x3 SErr 0x0 action 0x0 ata1.00: irq_stat 0x40000008 ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED ata1.00: cmd 60/00:00:........

SMARTCTL Enable SMART on Device Solution for Error "Device does not support SMART Error Counter logging not supported"

smartctl -a /dev/sda smartctl version 5.36 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce Allen Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ Device: ATA WDC WD1600YS-01S Version: 20.0 Serial number: WD-WCAP03024940 Device type: disk Local Time is: Mon Apr 29 21:40:07 2013 PDT Device does not support SMART Error Counter logging not supported........

Bad Hard Drive Slows Down Computer

Here's a proven example of what a bad hard drive can do, it was technically functioning OKin a RAID array but the system became extremely low and the load become high and IOWAIT was even higher and I always thought it was a bad application. The truth is that this failing 1TBHitachi has slowly gotten worse and caused huge slowdowns, (eg. 100% load on Thunderbird waiting for e-mails to load etc..). After swapping it out, tabs change instantly, emails are not lagged, and........

How to log all PHP based E-mails for abuse

Step #1 - Create Wrapper Script vi /usr/local/bin/phpsendmail #!/usr/bin/php ........

mdadm how to add a device to an array after a failure

This array is a RAID 1 and in this case 1 of the 2 drives failed (a WD drive and I've found them to be the weakest and most unreliable of any brand and are easily damaged/DOA when shipping them). mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --add /dev/sdb1 The above assumes the array you want to add to is /dev/md0 and the device we are adding is /dev/sdb1 *One thing to remember is to make sure the partition you are adding is the correct size for the array. You can also g........

failed to IDENTIFY (INIT_DEV_PARAMS failed, err_mask=0x80)

[ 12.460014] ata1: SRST failed (errno=-16) [ 17.626677] ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0) [ 22.480011] ata1: SRST failed (errno=-16) [ 27.646681] ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0) [ 38.106817] ata1.01: failed to IDENTIFY (INIT_DEV_PARAMS failed, err_mask=0x80) [ 48.266676] ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)........

LOG: MAIN PANIC failed to expand condition "${if eq {$authenticated_id}{}{0}{${if eq {$sender_address}{$local_part@$domain}{0}{${if match{$received_protocol}{N^e?smtps?a$N}{${perl{checkbx_autowhitelist}{$authenticated_id}}}{${if eq{$received_prot

I experienced this with CPanel's Exim after an auto-update (a Google of this error produces lots of complaints with few clear solutions). In this case I'll put the solution at the top. Run /scripts/buildeximconf to rebuild the Exim config and it should be fine after that. mail -vs "from test" user@dest.com < .bash_history LOG: MAIN cwd=/root 4 args: send-mail -i -v user@dest.com LOG: MAIN &........

Linux Ubuntu Nvidia GT430 Lockups/Errors/Freezes NVRM: os_schedule: Attempted to yield the CPU while in atomic or interrupt context

I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 with Asus NVIDIA GT430 2.6.35-32-generic-pae #65-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jan 24 14:06:16 UTC 2012 i686 GNU/Linux Nvidia binary driver: 260.19.06 The screen sometimes completely freezes and locks up or everything starts going very slow: [1903398.100007] NVRM: os_schedule: Attempted to yield the CPU while in atomic or interrupt context [1903402.373210] NVRM: Xid (0001:00): 53, CMDre 00000000 00000080 00000000 00000005 00........

Hitachi HDD/Drive RMA Process Experience

The first Hitachi Deskstar 2TB 5K3000 drive I bought arrived DOA for whatever reason (not recognized by the BIOS or OS). Perhaps it was shipping since I bought only 1 hard drive. When I bought 4 through another Vendor, all 4 checked out fine. I was worried about the RMA process because a lot of people have complained about Hitachi taking weeks to send out their hard drive and almost implied the warranty is useless. I'm happy to report that my experience was great a........

How To Test If Your Hard Drive Is Good/Signs of dying hard drive

I like dd, although it only reads it, usually a read test of the entire disk will uncover if your hard drive is bad in some parts. This is a good thing to do at least once a month, a lot of times bizarre program behavior, laginess and crashing/unnmounting problems etc.. are due to a failing disc and SMART won't know it or indicate a problem: We must also remember there's never a guarantee, I've found that ever since we moved to larger and more platters per drive with 1TB drives........

smart is not smart, it thinks a dead drive is still good

I had a dying drive that smart thought until it totally disappeared was a good drive, and actually all parameters did look fine but this system was causing my system to lockup and other bad behavior: === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Device Model: WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0 Serial Number: WD-WMAZ20139 Firmware Version: 50.0AB50 User Capacity: 2,000,398,934,016 bytes Device........

Are my WDEARS20 Drives dying already?

This happened during a RAID array check: SMART says both drives pass the test, but I'm doing a long test on them and hopefully this is not a hardware error. Apr 3 04:22:01 remote kernel: md: syncing RAID array md2 Apr 3 04:22:01 remote kernel: md: minimum _guaranteed_ reconstruction speed: 1000 KB/sec/disc. Apr 3 04:22:01 remote kernel: md: using maximum available idle IO bandwidth (but not more than 200000 KB/sec) for reconstruction. Apr........

Yahoo Mail (email) DNS Server Out Of Date Problems

I don't expect this to be solved soon but some of Yahoo's DNS servers are out of whack. I changed the IPs of some nameservers of some domains and now most Yahoo users can't e-mail to those domains! As you can see below by the "No MX or A records for mychangedomain.com", now Yahoo's DNS/mailserver DNS cache is wrong. You would think they would at least have cached the old incorrect records, but instead for some reason their DNS cache has no entry and doesn't seem........

Enable SPAMASSASSIN on Postfix in 5 minutes

Centos 5 Postfix and SPAMASSASSIN Tutorial yum install spamassassin chkconfig spamassassin on vi /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf ############## #required_hits 5 #report_safe 0 #rewrite_header Subject [SPAM] #5 is the least restrictive (means only the most obvious SPAM is caught. 0 is obviously the most restrictive/sensitive and would have lots of false positives require........

Toms Hardware Hard Drive Comparison/Hitachi Deskstar 1TB

I bought the 1TB Deskstar C revision recently at just $49 each and put them in RAID 1for my Desktop. Look at how close the old Deskstar 1TB comes to matching the performance of the mor expensive Samsung and WD's? This is phenomal, I can't believe the performance I've gotten out of these cheap drives. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hitachi-western-digital-terabyte,2017-6.html........

CPU #1 not responding - cannot use it.

I think this will be useful to others because I have a server that kept crashing mysteriously during intense disk usage/RAID checks. It would only crash during the weekly RAID integrity check. ThenI noticed during a reboot that not all CPUs were being brought up, as a result this actually creates much higher temperatures with the output I got from sensors, just booting the system produced higher than normal temperatures. You can imagine that a full blown RAID check........

Understanding /etc/aliases from sendmail when using with postfix or other MTA's

understanding /etc/aliases *remember to apply changes you need to run "newaliases" after editing /etc/aliases one thing I don't get is that it doesn't allow you to specify the whole e-mail address on the left-hand side eg: yourfullemail@domain.com: someotheremail@domain.com postalias: warning: /etc/aliases, line 109: name must be local (if you try the above) It works more like this: your........

updatedb/mdadm caused a kernel panic?

Jan 16 04:02:03 centosbox syslogd 1.4.1: restart. Jan 16 04:07:34 centosbox kernel: INFO: task updatedb:20771 blocked for more than 300 seconds. Jan 16 04:07:34 centosbox kernel: "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message. Jan 16 04:07:34 centosbox kernel: updatedb D F78BE050 6476 20771 20766&n........

Installing Webmin & Enabling SSL

Webmin Setup Centos 5: wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/webadmin/webmin/1.530/webmin-1.530-1.noarch.rpm?r=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.webmin.com%2Fstandard.html&ts=1294339690&use_mirror=surfnet [1] 24229 [2] 24230 [root@host ~]# --2011-01-06 21:48:20-- http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/webadmin/webmin/1.530/webmin-1.530-1.noarch.rpm?r=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.webmin.com%2Fstandard.html Resolving downloads.sourceforge.net... 216.34.181.........

WD EARS Advanced Format Can't be fixed?

There's no partial WD EARS alignment fix: I had data on /dev/sda3 and /dev/sdb3 (RAID1) so I couldn't edit that one. I thought I'd be smart and try fixing the first two partitions so I set the first one starting at sector 2048 and then +8 for the second partition. This has really slowed the performance down worse than it ever was! Disk /dev/sda: 2000.4 GB, 2000398934016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243201 cylinders, tot........

rsync preserve attributes, permissions/ownership and times without being root non-root user

One of the purposes of rsync is to backup whole filesystems and archive them but how can you do that properly and restore things to normal if all permissions and ownerships are not preserved from your root filesystem? It's not desirable to have everything running as root, especially not just for an rsync. The Easy rsync preserve permission solution for non-root users sudo is the answer and all you have to do is edit /etc/sudoers At the end o........

WD EARS/Green 2TB Cannot Disable Power Saving/Head Parking with hdparm

hdparm -B 255 /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: setting Advanced Power Management level to disabled HDIO_DRIVE_CMD failed: Input/output error The one thing you can do though is to set hdparm spindown time lower (it doesn't seem to work that well). -S set standby (spindown) timeout hdparm -S 251 /dev/sda /dev/sda: setti........

mdadm RAID 1 adventures

I separated the 2 drives in the RAID 1 array. 1 is the old one /dev/sda and is out of date, while the separated other one /dev/sdc was in another drive and mounted and used with more data (updated). I wonder how mdadm will handle this: usb-storage: device scan complete md: md127 stopped. md: bind md: md127: raid array is not clean -- starting background reconstruction raid1: raid set md127 active with 1 out of 2 m........

WD (Western Digital) Advanced Format Drive Lagged/Slow Speed/Performance/Design Flaw EAD/EARS problem WDC WD20EARS-00S8B1

Let the numbers speak for themselves, from what I read the Load_Cycle_Count which is very high (more than 500,000/half a million times) is the number of head parks. What a stupid"Green" design and design flaw which will probably mean an early life for the drive. This is almost as silly as Seagate's new reputation for BSY/poor quality disks since the 7200.11 series. To make it worse this is also when Western Digital introduced "Advanced Format" o........

jailkit for chroot ssh account security tutorial and fix for error

This was done on Centos butI think it's easier on Debian machines, the paths that it is set to use are tailored towards Debian, so there is some fiddling that needs to be done on Centos. This is for chrooting ssh, but jailkit has other uses than just SSH jails but I won't cover them in this writeup. 1. Install jailkit yum install jailkit 2. Setup Jail Home mkdir /home/jail chown root:root /home/ja........

Realtek r8169 1gbit/1000mbit NIC/Ethernet Goes Down/Halts on Large File Transfer/Heavy Network Usage

This is obviously a bug in the r8169 kernel module and it seems to affect a lot of people. I upgraded to the latest kernel and hope this won't happen anymore, as it is a very serious error. This is especially serious for those who are running servers with this chipset, who can afford for the NIC to randomly go off-line for no apparent reason? [655548.189113] type=1505 audit(1277067560.902:5): operation="profile_load" name="/usr/bin/freshclam&q........

RAID 1 and Non-RAID Hard Drive Performance Comparison using tiobench

Here is a RAID 1 partition (500GB Seagate & 2TB WD): Sequential Reads File Blk Num Avg Maximum Lat%&nbs........

PHP cannot access /usr/bin/openssl

PHP cannot access /usr/bin/opensslI have verified the username that runs the process is able to access /usr/bin/openssl and it does exist but the PHP script is saying it doesn't exist: [code:1:1fd0f3abbe] if (!file_exists($OPENSSL)) { //echo "ERROR: OPENSSL $OPENSSL not foundn"; }[/code:1:1fd0f3abbe] I don't get itI can clearly see the contents of /usr/bin by using the PHP system fu........

How to compile in Windows/DOS

How to compile in Windows/DOSMingW is a free compiler project so start here: http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml#hdr2 I downloaded the core GCC compiler: http://prdownloads.sf.net/mingw/gcc-core-3.4.2-20040916-1.tar.gz?download But it's missing even the standard C runtime libraries like "stdio.h"! You may also need to add environment variables from the DOS command line. Here is a simpl........

DVD Burners and Media at an all time low

DVD Burners and Media at an all time lowThis is crazy you can buy a nice Pioneer DVD burner for like $64 CAD now and good media like 50PC Maxell is just $25.97 at Walmart. I'm liking this. Time to make double archives of important data :)........

The New Chips on the Block

The New Chips on the BlockThe New Chips on the Block By Bruce Gain Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,67795,00.html 02:00 AM Jun. 13, 2005 PT We have embarked upon a new era in x86 PC computing -- so say chip giants AMD and Intel following their launches of dual-core PC processors. So how will dual-core processing change your PC computing experience? Our FAQ should help you decide whether or when you sho........

auth/auth_util.c:make_server_info_sam(840) User nobody in passdb, but getpwnam() fails! - SAMBA/SMB Error How To Fix

auth/auth_util.c:make_server_info_sam(840) User nobody in passdb, but getpwnam() fails! I never found the solution to this in the web, as usual so Ithought I'd post the fix. In plain English smbd is telling us that the user "nobody" does not exist in /etc/passwd. You can simply add this to your /etc/passwd file like so: nobody:x:65534:65534:nobody:/nonexistent:/sbin/nologin Now SAMBA/smbd should........

Samba SMB Error - Server not using user level security and no password supplied. tree connect failed: NT_STATUS_WRONG_PASSWORD

Server not using user level security and no password supplied. tree connect failed: NT_STATUS_WRONG_PASSWORD That happens when trying to use smbclient to connect to a share. The weird thing is that I can authnenticate just fine from Windows XP. It is partially my mistake, I forgot this share does have a password. I've tried authenticating with the correct user and also with "Guest" because this works in Windows. In Linux I ........

SSH Problem User username from 127.0.0.1 not allowed because not listed in AllowUsers

User username from 127.0.0.1 not allowed because not listed in AllowUsers What's going on? The user was created properly, it has been defined as having a shell entry and the entry for /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow is set just fine. This is a new and very smart/secure feature of SSHD. It is simple and yet effective, but also very annoying if you didn't know about it being implemented and that hand editing of /etc/ssh/sshd_config is required to allow a newly add........