Using snaps might have its advantages, but the amount of RAM and CPU cycles that Firefox seems to take made me want to switch. The browser certainly feels more responsive. Remove the Firefox snap. You need to change the Firefox apt priority to avoid the snap version being re-installed. And install the Firefox apt. When… Read More »
About a week ago the SEC charged SolarWinds and its CISO with fraud and internal control failures. https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-227 There have been many comments from the security community, specially from CISOs that find outrageous to have a CISO charged for failings in security. I think that this is a dangerous oversimplification. What we know for sure… Read More »
While doing a distro upgrade with I kept getting failures half-way stating The errors showed several IPv6 addresses that couldn’t be reached. My router supports IPv6, but not my ISP. Somehow I was expecting that the router would be doing the translation or DNS resolution between the two but this wasn’t the case. Disabling IPv6… Read More »
After upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04 running apt shows an error message saying “Key is stored in legacy trusted.gpg keyring“: The key needs to be exported from the legacy keyring and then imported back to the current system. List the keys and find the key ID of the repository that is showing the error. In this… Read More »
Sometimes it might be necessary to start in single-user mode to do some administration work, or even reset an existing password. Normally this can be achieved via the GRUB boot loader. CentOS / RedHat (with root account enabled) Switch on your system. Press Esc until the GRUB menu shows up. This will bring up the… Read More »
On Ubuntu 20.04 after installing the NVIDIA driver 510 metapackage the system stopped booting. It will either hang with a black screen and blinking cursor on the top left or show the following error message: Attempting to revert from a snapshot ends up with the same error message. This wasn’t the case on another separate… Read More »
I had to check the file changes between two Backintime snapshots recently. You can always use rsync for that, but there is a more straightforward way by using diff. -q will display only the files that differ. -r will make the comparison recursive. There is a GUI application called Meld that provides similar functionality, but… Read More »
In this post, I am setting up a Time Capsule and Backintime server. I am using a Raspberry Pi that has Ubuntu installed, with a USB disk that has been configured into a ZFS pool. Setting up backup users You are going to have to create users for each of the services/users that will be… Read More »
If you are new to ZFS, I would advise doing a little bit of research first to understand the fundamentals. Jim Salter’s articles on storage and ZFS are very recommended. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/05/zfs-101-understanding-zfs-storage-and-performance/ The examples below are to create a pool from a single disk, with separate datasets used for network backups. In some examples, I might… Read More »
Preparing the storage Install hdparm and smartmontools Install hdparm and the SMART monitoring tools. Identify the right hard drive Make sure you identify the correct drive, as some of the commands will destroy data. If you don’t understand the commands, then check them first. You have been warned. Identify the block size Knowing the block… Read More »