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 the advantage of allowing the… Read More: Raspberry Pi: Installing, hardening and optimising Ubuntu 20.04 Server »
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 has been very stable and… Read More: Ubuntu: Installing/fixing TP-Link AC1200 (T4UH 1.0) drivers in Ubuntu 20.04… »
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 will discard unused blocks on… Read More: VirtualBox/KVM: Reduce VM sizes »
When launching a VM in Virtualbox I got an error saying that it can’t be started because a required module isn’t loaded. It suggests to manually load it. Re-installing Virtualbox also fails because the virtualbox-dkms package can’t be configured The last system update upgraded the kernel from 5.4 to 5.8, and there is something in… Read More: Ubuntu 20.4: Virtualbox not running after the last upgrade »
When running apt to update my system I kept seeing a message saying that bpool had less than 20% space free and that the automatic snapshotting would not run. What I didn’t realise is that this would apply to the rpool even if it had plenty of free space. They are run together and have… Read More: Ubuntu: ZFS bpool is full and not running snapshots during… »
For a few months now my main system would momentarily freeze or stall (usually about 20-30 seconds) and then continue working. It was something that started after one system update and wasn’t fixed with any further updates. I opened a bug with Debian without much luck. The system would notify that one of the CPU… Read More: Ubuntu: System freezing for a few seconds with iwlwifi microcode… »
In one of my systems the system log was reporting every 2-3 minutes the following error message: This was caused by a mismatch between the systemd configuration and /etc/resolv.conf. /etc/resolv.conf should be a symbolic link pointing to the systemd DNS configuration in /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf You can check if this is in place just by listing the… Read More: Ubuntu/Linux: systemd-resolved[2344]: Server returned error NXDOMAIN, mitigating potential DNS violation… »
After a recent system update I got the following error message: Luckily the system would boot up but ignoring errors isn’t best practice. This error is caused by a faulty GRUB2 environment block. This is a file located in /boot/grub/grubenv. You can easily regenerate it with the following commands. It is advisable to make a… Read More: Ubuntu/GRUB: Error: invalid environment block »
Ubuntu 20.04 offers installing ZFS as the default filesystem. This has lots of advantages. My favourite is being able to revert the system and home partitions (simultaneously or individually) to a previous state through the boot menu. One major drawback for me is the lack of an option to encrypt the filesystem during the installation.… Read More: Ubuntu 20.04: Install Ubuntu with ZFS and encryption »
On a new laptop I couldn’t get the external HDMI monitor to work with the nouveau drivers, so I installed the NVIDIA drivers (version 440). The NVIDIA drivers worked perfectly and the external monitor could be configured, but it didn’t take too long to notice that the built-in audio wasn’t working. Audio would only play… Read More: Ubuntu: Ubuntu 20.4 installing NVIDIA drivers breaks built-in audio on… »
