ryv's blog

 It's been ages since I used a desktop Linux distribution - being up to my ears in the horror of implementing ISO 27001 doesn't leave you much time to play around with computers - too busy writing policies, auditing and generally trying to improve security to a formally acceptable and risk managed level. I need a quick, small OS though to do the occasional network scan, view the contents of a dodgy file on and for general, low impact activities. I remembered reviewing elementary OS ( elementary.io ) some time ago ( see  https://www.ryv.id.au/2015/01/elementary-os-review.html ) from 2015 so I thought it was worth a revisit.  I downloaded the ISO from their website, forgoing to donation for the moment while I review it. If it turns out I'm going to keep using it, I'll send them some love. The ISO is 1.38GB in size and I booted it in a VMware Player instance. From go to whoa (I won't include the install photos here) it took about 10 minutes with a dual vCPU and 4GB of

 If you've tried to upgrade pi-hole running on 18.04LTS then you might have gotten an error like this: The following packages have unmet dependencies: lighttpd : Depends: libssl1.1 (>= 1.1.0) but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. I've spent a bit of time poking around at this to no avail, until I stumbled upon a solution that is - install aptitude and use it to fix the dependency issue! Indeed. root@domains:~# apt install aptitude then: root@domains:~# aptitude install lighttpd and choose downgrade libss1.1 and lighttpd installs and pi-hole works again. This was a much harder solution to find than it should have been and something is really screwy with these packages.  Hope this helps!

Recently I upgraded from a Lenovo T560 to the HP 450 G7. While the T560 was a terrific machine, it lacked USB-C so I couldn’t integrate it to my USB-C Dock, it was a big heavy laptop and had an i5 processor. It was time for an upgrade, so I got onto this HP 450 G7. Here’s the link to one very similar on the HP website: https://h20386.www2.hp.com/AustraliaStore/Merch/Product.aspx?id=9UR34PA&opt=&sel=NTB There are a bunch of quite technical reviews on this laptop and I’ll leave that to the experts to discuss – my focus is on the usability of this device in a business environment, and how I’ve felt it’s performed. Now, I’ve had this device for about 2 months and during that period I’ve been intensively involved in working to ISO27001 Information Management Systems accreditation. It’s quite a complex standard and capturing the aspects of our business where we meet the standard, and write up the plans and procedures to meet other parts of the standard has been quite intense. I’ve