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…
Linux: Booting in single-user mode
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.…
ZFS ‘Failed to start Mark current ZSYS boot as successful’ fix
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…
Raspberry Pi : Configuring a Time Capsule/Backintime server
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…
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…
Ubuntu 20.4: Virtualbox not running after the last upgrade
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,…
Ubuntu: ZFS bpool is full and not running snapshots during apt updates
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…
