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…
ZFS: Setting up ZFS storage on Ubuntu
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.…
Linux / Ubuntu / hdparm: Identifying drive features and setting sleep patterns
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…
NTP: Setting up an NTP server
Setting up an NTP server chrony is the default service on newer OS releases (Red Hat 7.2 and later, any recent Ubuntu release). chrony has several advantages over ntpd: Quicker synchronisation. Better response to changes in clock frequency (very useful for VMs). Periodic polling of time servers isn’t required. It…
SNFS/Xsan: Quantum SNFS metadata controller and Xsan client compatibility chart
In a previous life, I designed and built many SANs based on Xsan (I believe I started with Xsan 1.3). I then migrated to looking after SANs based on SNFS, either from 3rd party vendors, or Quantum. I believe that the age of Fibre Channel is long over (although SNFS…
macOS : Removing caches and temporary files in macOS
The easiest way is using an application like Onyx. You can check the amount of space taken by the files using du. Before using any deletion command you can check with ls what exactly is going to be deleted. When using rm enable verbose mode (-v). Don’t delete the root…
Raspberry Pi: Installing, hardening and optimising Ubuntu 20.04 Server
I have been trying to document the process of configuring a Raspberry Pi as a Time Machine Capsule, but the article became far too long. It covered far too much information and was really hard to read. I then decided to break the stages into more manageable steps. This has…
Ubuntu: Installing/fixing TP-Link AC1200 (T4UH 1.0) drivers in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
I wrote an entry about this adapter and Ubuntu 18.04. This week my 20.04 LTS installation started to freeze randomly. I suspected several things, but through a process of elimination it ended up pointing to the Wi-Fi adapter. I can’t rule out a hardware issue yet, but the new driver…
macOS: Application stealing focus
A few weeks ago I had an issue with a macOS system which focus kept being stolen by an unknown application. All the windows were displaying as inactive so it had to be a background process. A StackExchange user called medmunds had adapted a script from another post, that seems…
VirtualBox/KVM: Reduce VM sizes
There are two utilities that can help discard unused blocks so that VMs can be shrunk. zerofree finds unused blocks with non-zero content in ext2, ext3 and ext4 filesystems and fills them with zeros. The volume can’ be mounted which makes the process of running it a bit convoluted. fstrim…