Ubuntu: apt upgrades failing with “Cannot initiate the connection to ports.ubuntu.com”

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…

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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…

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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.…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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,…

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