January 18 2021 by linc in BSD, Friends, Linux, NetBSD |Comments Off on What’s old is new again!
NetBSD in my infrastructure
Wow. So what’s old is new again. It does kinda seem like things are cyclical right? Well, it sure does to me. Many years ago I ran NetBSD on a BUNCH of things. Really, it run’s on just about anything but your toaster, so I had it on Sparcstations and Alphastations and HP boxes and Vaxes and, oh, bunches of things. It’s kind of a go-to fopr anyone with aging hardware and I learned a lot of Unix(tm) by plugging aqway at NetBSD.
After I got rid of all my old hardware years ago I really haven’t done much with it. My Jobs all used CentOS or RHEL for their environments so I kind of mirrored that at home. CentOS everywhere. And then we got the announcement that CentOS, as a RHEL replacement is going to be no more. What’s a guy to do? Well, really the only good free options now to use at home are Oracle Linux, which is a RHEL clone from Oracle which is just about binary compatible with RHEL minus a couple Oraclized changes in the kernel, and NetBSD which is an easy to use BSD version that, IMHO, doesn’t get nearly enough good press. I plan to use them both as my infrastructure at home is now aging and no CentOS to replace it. To that end I did my first NetBSD 9.1 install on my KVM server and it was a breeze to get going.
lottalinuxlinks.com
The other old thing that has become new again is LottaLinuxLinks.com, which is one of my favorite old sites, run by Dave Yates, has been revamped and is pushing new content. It sure is great to see Dave back in the community. Please head on over to lottalinuxlinks.com and check it out!
Both of these things have sort of nudged me back into putting some of my own content online again. If you were paying attention you may have noticed the change in wordpress themes. If you weren’t paying attention, I changed the wordpress theme and started adding posts again 😀
January 15 2021 by linc in Recipe |Comments Off on Beef jerkey
I know it’s been a long time since I have written anything here. Been super busy wioth the covid junk (I’m essential) and I have also started a new website at reverendlinc.com …
This post, as the title indicates is about beef jerkey. My Sister and Brother-in-law moved recently and gave me their dehydrator and after waiting some months I decided it was time to stop looking at it and actually use it. I came up with my signature recipe for beef jerkey. I think it’s delicious!
1/2 cup soy sauce (low sodium ok)
1/2 cup worchestershire sauce
1/4 honey
1 tsp ground black pepper
1 tsp red pepper flakes
wisk together all to make the marinade.
Use any beef you like sliced in the jerkey size you like and mix well with the marinade and covcer for EXACTLY 3 hours in the refrigerator.
Pull marinated beef and pat dry. Place in dehydrator for between 8 and 10 hours depending on thickness of beef.
WOW! Does anyone even read these things anymore? Been a long time since I even attempted a post on my weblog, but here goes:
I was going to read my email on my local mail server the other night when presented with a cert error. Geez, I HATE pissing with ssl certs. Anyhow I needed to fix because my default self signed cert had expired (why do they only default to one year anyway??).
I started off by looking for my certs (locate *.crt), but all the certs that showed were not the right ones. Where the heck was it? After some digging I decided to go back tohrough the docs for my mail server config. I am using postfix and dovecot, and then it struck me that MAYBE my cert wasn’t a .crt file.. MAYBE it was a pem. A quick locate later and violla! seems dovecot has a pem file at /etc/pki/dovecott/certs/dovecot.pem and checking the dates in that cert revealed this was the offender. I found a doc online which says you can generate a default cert by running /usr/libexec/dovecot/mkcert.sh. GREAT! It also says you can adjust the default cert length by editing that script, so I did just that and set it for like 9000 days. Anyhow, I ran the script and it barked because it doesn’t want to overwrite the existing cert. The fix is to rename the existing cert and its companion private cert located at /etc/pki/dovecott/private/dovecot.pem and then rerun the script and WOOT! It works!
One more thing before I go tonight. I was alerted to the fact that the Jak Attack podcast is being produced and added to again. How exciting! Run on over and make sure to give a listen, They are already on episode 2 for this year! Tell my friends Jon and Kelly Penguin Girl that Linc says hi!
Amazing. Amazing on two fronts. First that I have actually gotten off my bum and decided to make another post, and secondly that I have finally decided to pull the trigger on getting a new laptop.
I am one of those guys who likes to talk himself out of making a purchase, even though I need it. I have been working with some pretty old equipment for a long while. Using two old Dell laptops, one of which has a bad (dimming) screen, and the other whos dvd drive and sound card have blown out. Of course the parts are not interchangeable between the two. Well, at Christmas time I finally decided (my Mom talked me into it) that maybe since I spend most of my life banging on my computers that I ought to just go out and get a decent one to use.
I actually decided on a 13 inch Macbook Air, which is really a pleasure to use, runs linux just fine (of course I would run linux on it) and is aesthetically pleasing, light and durable. Well, it just so happens that I had my wife shopping with me and she started looking at the Dell laptops and saw one that was similar in look and specs to the Apple and a couple hundred dollars cheaper (bingo!).
This Dell is a 13 inch 2 in 1 i7 laptop encased in aluminum with 12Gb ram, 256Gb ssd, backlit keyboard and a *gorgeous* high def display. It has all the usual ports and, like you would expect, everything works right out of the box with linux. I am running Mint 18.1 on it at the moment and couldn’t be happier. Now not only can I see what I am doing, but I can hear sound on the laptop too! Having good battery life is another bonus with a new laptop 😉
If you are looking for a really sweet deal on a darn good new linux laptop, definitely go give this one a look. I found it for $700 at BestBuy and it was the last one they had in stock. Plenty of the i5s and i3s still there though, of course 😉
That’s how long it took, and that may be overestimating things. I opened the box, pulled out the unit, plugged it in, switched it on and noticed on the top there was a touch sensitive display that said “Link” so I touched it and then poked the bluetooth icon on my phone, paired the device and just like that I was playing music! It really happened as quickly as you just read it.
It was many months ago I had heard that Aiwa had been resurrected. Purchased by a Chicago company headed by CEO Joe Born, a fellow I have come to know as an innovator and generally one smart cookie through my interraction with him through the Linux Link Tech Show. I was thrilled. I knew big things would be coming, and now, here it is sitting in my livingroom!
The first (that I know of) product release from the new Aiwa is, and this is how it should be, a “Boombox for the new millennium” called the Aiwa Exos 9. This is in essence, a BIG portable bluetooth speaker. It’s big in size, big in sound and big in features. It’s about 12×19.5×7.5 inches. It weighs about 12-15lbs (my scale is not great) and does 200 watts. In short, it rocks.
I just happen to have been born in 1970 and, as a child of the 80s, this whole thing brought memories flooding back to me of how EVERYONE back in the day used to run around with a boombox, playing their favorite toons. Remembering scenes from “Say Anything” where John Cusack is holding his boombox up playing “In your eyes” by Peter Gabriel. Those were good times with great music and this felt like a welcome homage to that (and Aiwa made some rockin’ boomboxes and sterios back in the day).
Now, it should be noted that I am NOT an audiophile, so if you are, and you are dying for more technical specs, you should look what these guys say. I have been heavily involved in music my entire life. I have studied it and was even a union card holding professional musician for a while. I have listened to a LOT of music, and *I* like the way this sounds. It’s clean. It has good base response that doesn’t distort the music and it sounds good at low and high volume levels. This reminded me of this great pair of Bose 901’s I used to listen on (and they are wickedly expensive). I really liked this and if you read the reviews on Amazon, etc., I am not at all in the minority on that sentiment.
Did I mention this is portable? That’s right. Like a boombox, this is ready to go on adventure with you to your patio or to a pool party or picnic or beach. It has a rechargeable battery that lasts 8+ hours and you can buy an extended battery with double the time. And don’t forget the built in handle on the back to make it easy to take it with you.
There were a couple of things I might change though. Firstly, with the speaker grill on the unit looks pretty plain. I took off the grill to expose the speakers and found that much more aesthetically pleasing. The unit also includes an equalizer with 8 programmable presets. It would be helpful for non audiophiles like me if *some* were pre-programmed for things like Jazz, Rock, Classical, etc.. I would LOVE to see them include a spectrum analyzer to give the unit some bling while it’s playing at those late night parties. Lastly I have heard several people mention perhaps side clasps for a carry strap, although I seem to be able to make due just fine with the back built in handle.
So, where does that leave us? Why, the price of course! This sells for $299 on Aiwas site or on Amazon. I think it’s a steal. You are SURE to spend a similar amount of money on a decent sounding stereo for your home and this will give you robust sounding music in your home and abroad for the same price point. Slam dunk! And for the seriously adventurous, these units will allow 2 to link together for bigger sound! I have yet to be able to test this myself but I can only imagine being able to rock the entire block with a similar setup.
It’s time to let your music run free of your earbuds again, and hear it the way it was intended, and Aiwa has just the thing to help. The Aiwa Exos 9. I would grab one now while they still have stock. You’ll be glad you did!
I am no stranger to replacing bad equipment in servers, desktops and laptops, but some laptops don’t make it easy. This was one.
A couple years ago I swapped out an aging hdd in an older Dell Inspiron with a new ssd and, boy, the performance improved drastically. Lately, I have been using a new(er) Inspiron, an N5110 and have noticed that it sure took a while for things like bootup and Chrome to initially load. It was really starting to annoy me, so I looked up the specs on the original hdd and found that there was a squirrel in there pounding out the bits with a chisel, so I decided it was high time for a modern drive and splurged on a 240Gb ssd. I assumed that this was a simple pull the panel off the bottom and swap kind of procedure like the old Dell, so I pulled off the hdd sized panel and boom. The only thing under there was more plastic and a small memory slot???!!
Not to be outdone I turned to youtube, just like an self respecting techie would and was pleased to find some instruction there. You can find the video i used here if you are interested:
That is where is starts to get fun. Apparently you have to disassemble THE ENTIRE LAPTOP to get the hdd out. You have to pull out the battery, memory, all the screws on the bottom, the dvd drive, then flip the machine over and pull off the keyboard, unscrew and pull off the top plate and all the ribbon cables, then unscrew and remove the entire motherboard and one of the monitor mounts. The hdd is underneath the motherboard. Unreal.
Believe it or not, after all that I only had one extra screw(?) and the laptop booted up on the first try. Now came the good part. How to get my existing Linux Mint install onto the new ssd. Normally I would have just used a disk cloning program or dd to do it but the old hdd was 500Gb and this new ssd is only 240Gb. There are also some complicated tutorials on the web on how accomplish this task but let me share with you the easy way.
Do a clean install of your OS. Really. With Linux it takes 15 minutes tops. Don’t bother with any of your configs or personalization. It’s a dummy install to not only get the partitioning correct on your ssd but generate the correct /etc/fstab file (or get the new uuids and make the correct partitions bootable.
Once you are done, boot into your install media again (I used USB because it was faster) and mount your new installation AND your old hdd (I used an external usb drive case for this). I made the directories I needed by doing (as root) “mkdir -p /mnt/newdisk ; mkdir -p /mnt/olddisk” and then putting things in place with “mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/newdisk ; mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/olddisk”. I should mention here that my partitions were the default Mint layout with a big Linux partition first, then an extended partition, then swap, on both drives.
Once mounted I made a backup copy of the /etc/fstab on my olddisk (the hdd) and then I copied the /etc/fstab from the newdisk to the /etc/fstab on the olddisk. Now the fun part. Go to (cd) the /mnt/newdisk directory. MAKE SURE IT’S THE NEWDISK DIRECTORY, and “rm -rf *”. That is going to delete all the files you just installed. It’ll only take a second.
Next is the long part. I used rsync to copy all my old files over. If you aren’t a hoarder like me with six linux dvd isos in your download directory and 50Gb of music files, it’ll go a lot faster, but all the same, it’s pretty cool to watch. I did a “rsync -rvlpogdstHEAX /mnt/olddisk/ /mnt/newdisk”. Make note of those /’ in there or you’ll end up having to move stuff around afterwards. In retrospect, I think you could use just rsync -av, but ymmv. What you will see is every file on your old drive being copied to the new one. Like I mentioned, this takes a few minutes, just sit back or grab a coffee. Once it’s done you are *almost* ready.
The very last thing you’ll need to fix is your grub.cfg file. These days everyone wants to use uuid to assign devices and your boot file is still looking for your old hdd. Open up a couple terminals. In one, vi /mnt/newdisk/boot/grub/grub.cfg and in the other vi /mnt/newdisk/etc/fstab. In the fstab file you will see the uuid for your new ssd drive. It’s the first uuid mentioned and mounted at /. Io You need to replace the old one in there with the new one from your fstab. It’s easier than you think in vi. Just do a “:g/olduuidstring/s//newuuidstring/g” and hit enter where olduuidstring is your old uuid and newuuidstring is your new uuid from the fstab file. Once it is finished replacing you probably need to save it with a “:wq!” because your system will undoubtedly say it’s a read only file. The reboot! You should be greeted shortly with a much faster but very familiar linux install, complete with all your goodies.
One last note. You may want to increase the life of your ssd ehink in vi. Just do a “:g/olduuidstring/s//newuuidstring/g” and hit enter where olduuidstring is your old uuid and newuuidstring is your new uuid from the fstab file. Once it is finished replacing you probably need to save it with a “:wq!” because your system will undoubtedly say it’s a read only file. The reboot! You should be greeted shortly with a much faster but very familiar linux install, complete with all your goodies.cat by adding a couple options to your /etc/fstab file. Those options are discard and noatime. These options deal with extra disk writes that you really don’t need on ssd. Your / line options in the fstab should look something like “ext4 discard,noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1”.
I was on a trip to visit my uncle recently and while there and talking shop (he’s a techie kinda fellow) he started telling me about this old tablet he had that I could have if I could get it fixed. It seems he purchased a tablet years ago, didn’t like it, then the os became corrupt and he just sort of shelved it, probably some 5 or 6 years ago and got himself an iPad instead.
He dug this thing out and it happened to be an Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101, a tablet that I actually had long ago myself. This one was dirty and no charge and badly in need of a fresh reimage of the OS but after that, it’s a perfectly functioning, practically brand new (hardly been used) TF101, now updated to the latest OTA update available for it, 4.0.3 (Ice Cream Sandwich).
So now I have this new old stock tablet and I have decided to get some use out of it (came from my uncle so it holds some sentimental value) and I actually kind of dig it. Of course it is no rocket ship compared to modern android devices but it does chug along and the 4.0.3 OS is still viable in the android store so some apps are still current. I can get my mail and social media and watch videos, listen to music and the like just fine (even netflix). What I like most about it right now is using it as a portable terminal (juice ssh). The included keyboard dock makes that particularly nice.
I have been wondering, though, what else I can do with such a device and am seeking opinions and experiences. I know there are several server suites available for android. I could use it hooked to an external USB drive for a file server or web server, etc.. Perhaps I could somehow shoehorn an actual Linux as a native OS on this thing. Then, there is the possibility of putting custom Android ROMs on it – I think there is one called KATKIT that people are having great success with. Never having installed a custom ROM before on android I am a little hesitant and don’t want to brick the machine. So, what do you think? What should I try first?
OK, so it is telecommuting – but hear me out for just a second..
I have been involved in a job search as a Linux admin for a few months now and one of the barriers I keep running in to is (get this) physical location, or company location. WHY? Business owners, let me reason with you for a moment here.
Your servers are “in the cloud”:
There are a LOT of companies these days who are using cloud servers and services. Buzz words like Paas, Saas and Iaas are all the rage now, along with their providers AWS, Rackspace, Azure, Google and the like. These services that you use locally for your business are not actually located at your business. Likely, they are not even in the same time zone, and, in some cases, country. Every time one of your server administrators or users access those services and systems, they are doing so remotely, even if they are sitting at a desk next to you in your corporate headquarters.
You have “datacenters”:
For those of you who have your own datacenters for your machines, you have the same issue. Most companies have at least two such facilities for redundancy and either one or both of them are typically located away from your corporate campus. This, again, means that when you are working on them in any capacity, you are doing so remotely, or “telecommuting”, whether it be from your corporate campus, from, home or across the world.
So you see, in almost every scenario in these modern times, you are already telecommuting to use your own resources. I am here to implore you to consider expanding your employment pool by letting computer workers do their jobs remotely. Save yourself some real estate space. Use conference calls, instant messaging, emails and video chats (free) for your office communications. Dramatically lower your corporate utility bills and *paper costs*. And give someone like myself a shot. You’ll be happy you did!
A couple days ago as I was browsing my google+ feeds I noticed an article about Neverware’s CloudReady solution for turning aging computing resources into more useful devices. They have put together a good Chromium OS install aimed at older hardware, which for schools and businesses, can be hooked to google management services, which makes it sound pretty attractive to any IT department with a budget. As it happens, my buddy Joel must have been reading about it too, because I saw him post something about being in the middle of creating the boot media. That got me wondering, and with an old laptop to play with, I decided to do it myself.
Many years ago I got a cool new Dell Latitude D630 and I likes it so much that a few years later I picked up a used one. It’s one of my test boxes – 2.mumble ghz and 2gb ram – a perfect candidate for a chrome(ium)book test. I also have the perfect thing to compare it to – a genuine chromebook I bought last year for my wife – who I refer to as the destroyer of laptops.
Anyhow, first I downloaded the software from their site, which is free to use if for home and experimental use. The image is a zipped binary image about 5.5gb uncompressed. Big file so it’ll tale a while to get it. Be patient. There are what look to be pretty good installation instructions on the site itself for Windows and MacOS users, however I am neither so I had to improvise a bit.
On Linux, once you have the file downloaded and uncompressed (again big file and takes a few mins), you need to write it to a usb stick for installation. For explanation purposes say my usb device ended up being /dev/sdb. I used the dd utility to get the image onto the drive but because the file is so large I wanted a progress indicator for the process so I installed “pv”. Do this – trust me, you’ll want it.
The command line (as superuser) to install the binary installer image to the usb stick is “dd if=/path/to/installerimg.bin | pv | dd of=/dev/sdb bs=4M” and make sure that’s a capital M at the end for a 4 Meg blocksize. Like the download and decompression of the file, this take a LONG time, which is why you will be happy that progress indicator is in there.
In essence, that is all the hard and interesting stuff. The rest of the installation instructions are quick and simple – boot off the usb stick, log in, click on the time bar in the lower right, select install. A few minutes later (minus a couple no-brainer questions) you have, for all practical purposes, a chromebook!
I’ll be darned! I tried a ChromiumOS install several months ago on some even older hardware and wasn’t really impressed. I thought it was a bit laggy and buggy, but this time it works a treat! Multiple accounts work well. All my google settings were imported correctly. The chromebook shortcuts work. It works so well I am typing this review on it right now. I even handed it off to the destroyer of laptops and she was able to successfully install her profile and use it just like her chromebook. Outstanding Neverware, and a lot of fun too!
Although the other articles I read on this glowed and gushed about how well it worked, I have to say I was skeptical until I tried it myself, due to my previous experience. I am happy to find I was wrong. I can really see something like this being able to not only stretch that IT budget a little, but responsibly so, making good use of still functional hardware and keeping the end user experience consistent and manageable at the same time.
