ryv's blog

The last couple of servers I've installed on Hyper-V with Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS with 4.4 kernels have annoyingly hung shortly after setup. Here is an excerpt of the errors: info task rs main q reg 1162 blocked for more than 120 seconds not tainted  This is a very inconvenient feature and I think I've nailed it. From Microsoft's site they have details on adding bits to your install that add functionality and (hopefully) will help avoid this issue. The Microsoft page is here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server-docs/compute/hyper-v/supported-ubuntu-virtual-machines-on-hyper-v?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396 And the guts of it is to do the following (with 16.04): # apt-get update # apt-get install linux-virtual-lts-xenial # apt-get install linux-tools-virtual-lts-xenial linux-cloud-tools-virtual-lts-xenial and then reboot. It should fix it.  The error was something like Kernel not tainted or similar. So far it's working. Update 2016-12-22

I bought this little 11" laptop off Dell's site after poking around and thinking it would be nice to have a little laptop again. I really missed my MacBook Air after I sold it - silly move that - so I thought why not consider this one? It's specs are underwhelming: Celeron N3050 processor 4GB of RAM 32GB eMMC HDD Bluetooth version 4 WiFi - 802.11ac+ For what it is, it performs quite well. It's crippled though. In fact - so crippled I couldn't get the thing to start a week ago. It would try to boot into Windows 10 and just hang and hang and hang - you get the drift. I let the power completely drain then tried again. Repair windows install was the next question.... grr. After completing this it booted. That's the only problem I've had with it. I have had the chance to use it for a couple of presentations. The built in HDMI interface is amazingly handy and the Dell drivers work well for the system, allowing for quick and painless swaps between th

The last time I was out in Coober Pedy, I saw a lot of Toyotas running around. Landcruisers mostly - a great vehicle and out in the Red Centre with some pretty harsh conditions, they were the vehicle of choice. Solid, reliable, amazingly well built. It's a bit like the older Dell servers still kicking around. To my case in point - the Dell T110 Server. These servers, brand new, with a Xeon Processor, 4GB of RAM and a 250GB HDD were around $1400. We got several cheap, added RAM, disk and an OS and sold them to customers. The basic spec was pretty sound: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3430 @ 2.40GHz  4GB of RAM (maximum 16) Dell PERC S100 onboard RAID (fake RAID but still OK) space for 4 disks tower configuration  About 18 months ago I was given one of these servers by a grateful client after a particularly painful weekend migrating one server to another. After thinking about it for a bit, and knowing the S100 RAID card is Windows only (Linux won't see the arrays, jus

Everyone knows that newish install of Windows 7 will have problems updating. CPU usage and Memory usage climbs, and nothing ends up happening. No updates are applied and your computer becomes basically unusable. Here is the procedure we've found to be useful when working on this problem: Start run, services.msc Stop windows update service KB3102810 32bit: https://download.microsoft.com/download/A/0/9/A09BC0FD-747C-4B97-8371-1A7F5AC417E9/Windows6.1-KB3102810-x86.msu 64bit: https://download.microsoft.com/download/F/A/A/FAABD5C2-4600-45F8-96F1-B25B137E3C87/Windows6.1-KB3102810-x64.msu Stop Windows update service KB3135445 32bit: https://download.microsoft.com/download/2/E/D/2ED368A8-9967-4829-9CD5-9037AD48FF72/Windows6.1-KB3135445-x86.msu 64bit: https://download.microsoft.com/download/9/C/8/9C855F85-08B1-47B4-97DF-B6A7D187F0B7/Windows6.1-KB3135445-x64.msu Stop Windows update service KB3138612 32bit: https://download.microsoft.com/download/E/4/7/E47FB37E-7443-4047-91F7-16DDDCF2955C/W

Following the recent upgrade of OTRS on our servers to the latest version, I went one step further and decided to deploy https to wrap it all up. There is no significantly important data shared or entered in our OTRS configuration, but I think it a worthwhile exercise to put encryption in place. I've only really touched on SSL once or twice before with server configurations, and I started out by looking for a cheap certificate. The thing is, this is a commercial application of the system and I didn't want to use a non-profit or education SSL cert for something that is part of our money making enterprise. Enter "Let's Encrypt". I read about this somewhere - probably one of the many *almost* spam newsletter type emails I get during the week from a vendor. A Google search brought up a DigitalOcean write up on how to apply this to the particular version of Linux I'm running. I'm just going to say that I love the DigitalOcean walk through's. They're

First things first, we need to download the latest and that’s usually from the public FTP site on OTRS’ site. Here is a good place to start: https://www.otrs.com/download-open-source-help-desk-software-otrs-free/ I always grab the source .tar.gz file and usually with this command: # wget -c http://ftp.otrs.org/pub/otrs/otrs-5.0.13.tar.gz (for the latest one anyway – which at time of writing I 5.0.13) The upgrade direction is here: http://otrs.github.io/doc/manual/admin/5.0/en/html/upgrading.html and I want this to be my summarized version of this for ease of use both for myself and for you, gentle reader. I have a script that starts off the upgrade process with some of the basic stuff (note – run this as root): #!/bin/bash service cron stop service apache2 stop service postfix stop NOW=`date +%F` mkdir /root/backup/$NOW BDIR=/root/backup/$NOW cp -R /opt/otrs/Kernel/Config.pm $BDIR cp -R /opt/otrs/Kernel/Config/GenericAgent.pm $BDIR cp -R /o

Recently a friend asked me for advice on purchasing a new laptop. Here is the bulk of the email I sent him - perhaps you'll find it useful as you search for a new computer: There is a lot of stuff on the market and here are some basic, ground rules for what you need to think about when your purchasing: set a budget figure for the new machine and stick to it. I usually drop at least $200 below my actual budget so I can include a new laptop bag or some sort of accessory (I love gadgets!) Decide how big you want the laptop to be - i.e. are you travelling? If so, then a 17" notebook is going to be very heavy and cumbersome and you'll hate dragging it through the airport all the time. Are you doing complex work with a lot of information on it? If son, then an 11" notebook will probably be too small. Usually I suggest an 13" or if you are doing a lot of complex work, then a 15" is probably acceptable - although these can be heavy Are you more comfortable

Have you seen this in your error logs?: The Virtual Machines configuration 6ED5794F-DD19-46D3-8121-0880FEB592AE at 'D:\Hyper-V VM Data\ VM NAME ' is no longer accessible: General access denied error (0x80070005). With Event ID: 4096 and much sadness because your VMs won't boot? And did you move the folders that your VMs are living in to a new location but it should just work?! Well the chances are the security permissions on the files are wrong. I'm not talking about "Administrators" having all rights, but specific Virtual Machine rights. I recently upgraded my home server with a new array of disks - a jump from 500GB of storage to 2TB. It's a modest increase, but this is a hyper-v server, not a NAS. I copied off the VMs from the old disk to an external drive and then copied them back. Oh noes! Two of my virtual Linux servers declined to start again - bastards! So it was to the inter webs, and here, gentle reader, I hope you can find answers. If

All too frequently we are still seeing people being affected by ransomware. It's pernicious and hard to get rid of once you've got it. If you haven't had it, then this is what happens - you open an innocent email and your computer starts to perform a bit sluggishly. Most people shrug this off then go to open a Word Document or Excel Spreadsheet and can't. It has .ENCRYPTED after it and there are files appearing in all your directories on how to pay to get your data decrypted. A sense of doom starts to build in the pit of your stomach and you watch as the files on your network drives start being encrypted too. Hopefully you pull the power plug and call your IT guy at this point. Then the tough stuff begins.... To stop this from happening here are some tips to keeping your PC cryptolocker free: don't try to open a zip file emailed to you - if someone is sending one to you, make sure they establish contact first - it's OK to email them back to ask if they mean

Recently I was able to listen to a guest lecturer by a chap working the digital forensics field. There were a few interesting things to come out of the lecture. They are, in no particular order: document and timestamp everything you do - it doesn't matter if it's written down, or you use software, but you have to show the steps you went through to reach the conclusions you're putting forward EnCase is an industry favourite software small cases can take you in surprising directions and you can go from a $40,000 fraud case and end up with a $250,000 + fraud case! recovering RAID arrays can be a trick - but you can image each disk and use EnCase to rebuild the array which is pretty neat! you can't carve an SSD to recover data like you would a HDD That last point is the one I want to mention. On a magnetic hard disk drive (the regular type of drive people have been using) when a file is deleted, it's removed from the File Allocation Table and the computer reco

After my poor little TPlink Router bit the dust with a recent power fluctuation I was keen to get something with a solid WiFi capability. The TPlink router I was using didn't have the greatest coverage around the house, and certainly not outside the house, and with the recent installation of a Chromecast I was keen to find something with a bit more zing. Also, due to my dodgy cabling set up, I have half my machines on one side of the house, and the other half on the other side. The cabling between the two goes through the router and I wanted a gigabit link between the two halves. So a router with 5GHz wireless and gigabit networking? My local nerd supplier handed over the $399 Netgear D6300 and told me it was the best he had. He noted my sceptical look, but assured me that it was good to go. OK I'll have a crack at it and see how it goes. It took about 45 minutes to configure it - I've got a fairly complex network with a lot of crap all over the place, all sorts of forw

Another polished release - Xenial Xerus (at least I hope it’s polished!) I’m using it for a test WordPress system at the moment so I’ve been concerned mostly with that. PHP5 is gone, replaced by PHP7. The main issue with this is no more SSH2 PHP7 extension! It makes installing new themes or plugins, or updating them tricky in WordPress as it relies on this. I’ve had to default back to using vsftpd but even that is crashing at this time. To work around that, add: define(‘FS_METHOD’, ‘direct’); into wp-config.php See https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-wordpress-with-lemp-on-ubuntu-16-04 for a great walk through on this - in fact, check out Digital Ocean - they have some excellent stuff on there, including these tutorials. If you're like me and would love to delve into the intricacies of nginx or some other equally complex bit of software but don't have the time, Digital Ocean give you a way to get things up and going with very little in

This blog is written on Blogger - I am a big Google fan and I love a lot of their products. Blogger dovetails nicely with the other Google Apps I use and so it's a handy piece of kit. The interface hasn't really changed much in quite a while - it's simple yet user friendly. If you're looking for a blogging tool, it's really quite good. I started to play with WordPress a short while ago for a client. They are using it to power their website and the more I've played with it the more I like it. There's a great interface - and I really like the new posting experience on it. Here is a comparison of the three different ways you can create a post with Blogger, old WordPress and new WordPress: How meta! A blog post in a blog post - this is the Blogger interface The old interface for WordPress - it has some nice features indeed. The new posting experience in WordPress. Takes a bit to get used to. I like the stark simplicity of Blogger - I've creat

Another day and another chat with a client about cloud computing options. There are some absolute turkeys out there peddling cloud this and cloud that to people. Stop it! ADSL2+ doesn't provide enough bandwidth for your plans - in the war between reality and expectation, reality wins. This particular client is fortunately on the ball enough to realise that pushing all their key applications off their local server and into the cloud isn't a brilliant plan. So what else do we do for these clients? What clever options can we provide? It comes down to the application of course. If they're doing scanning or uploading large files to an offsite location it's not hard to use a Raspberry Pi or similar to get the data trickling out, or bulk upload it over night with a script. If it's email or something like that - then get it into the cloud. Just let 'em know the limitations that their server currently manages - i.e. sending a large email out will take time. Yo

This isn't so much a comparison, more of a discussion with myself about which one to focus on. First, the environment that you are in will determine this question much of the time - if you're on Apple, then the notes thing is built into their OS on desktops/laptops and into the iOS on your mobile devices. It has some nice features - encryption in transit, password protection, pictures and built into your iCloud experience. Here is where Keep has an advantage - it's available on nearly all platforms via the web browser. And it does most of those other things too. Both companies are very clever. The interfaces, while different, share the same characteristics of note taking - different options for getting ideas down and into writing, while trying to make it all as straightforward as possible. They have in the main, quite slick interfaces too and very user friendly. We are truly spoiled for choice and this is part of the problem. I use Macs, and PCs with Linux Mint and Micr

Last night I heard a lecture delivered by a chap from HPE - HP Enterprise for those of you who forget about their big breakup. He is in charge of innovation in the Asia Pacific region and he spoke a lot about the Internet of Things (IoT), drones, driverless cars etc. Sure, we really are moving towards a world where human interaction becomes far less of a factor when driving, delivering packages or even turning on the lights at home... It really got me thinking about the impact to humanity and whether the pros will outweigh the cons. The hyper-interconnectedness of the world has it's upside but I think it's darker downside needs light shone on it. If your whole house is wired with sensors, motors and control units, then is it a stretch to muse on when the first house is compromised? If an attacker took control of your home just what could he do with it? Annoy you with the lights going on or off, tracking your movements throughout the place, knowing when you're asleep and t