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Dell BIOS Updates

I have just updated the BIOS on a Dell PowerEdge T110 II. The process isn’t too difficult, Google for the machine name and BIOS, download a shell script encoded firmware image and GPG signature, then run the script on the system in question.

One problem is that the Dell GPG key isn’t signed by anyone. […]

More About the PowerEdge R710

I’ve got the R710 (mentioned in my previous post [1]) online. When testing the R710 at home I noticed that sometimes the VGA monitor I was using would start flickering when in some parts of the BIOS setup, it seemed that the horizonal sync wasn’t working properly. It didn’t seem to be a big deal […]

systemd-nspawn and Private Networking

Currently there’s two things I want to do with my PC at the same time, one is watching streaming services like ABC iView (which won’t run from non-Australian IP addresses) and another is torrenting over a VPN. I had considered doing something ugly with iptables to try and get routing done on a per-UID basis […]

4K Monitors

A couple of years ago a relative who uses a Linux workstation I support bought a 4K (4096*2160 resolution) monitor. That meant that I had to get 4K working, which was 2 years of pain for me and probably not enough benefit for them to justify it. Recently I had the opportunity to buy some […]

KMail Crashing and LIBGL

One problem I’ve had recently on two systems with NVideo video cards is KMail crashing (SEGV) while reading mail. Sometimes it goes for months without having problems, and then it gets into a state where reading a few messages (or sometimes reading one particular message) causes a crash. The crash happens somewhere in the Mesa […]

WordPress Multisite on Debian

WordPress (a common CMS for blogs) is designed to be copied to a directory that Apache can serve and run by a user with no particular privileges while managing installation of it’s own updates and plugins. Debian is designed around the idea of the package management system controlling everything on behalf of a sysadmin.

When […]

QEMU for ARM Processes

I’m currently doing some embedded work on ARM systems. Having a virtual ARM environment is of course helpful. For the i586 class embedded systems that I run it’s very easy to setup a virtual environment, I just have a chroot run from systemd-nspawn with the --personality=x86 option. I run it on my laptop for my […]

More KVM Modules Configuration

Last year I blogged about blacklisting a video driver so that KVM virtual machines didn’t go into graphics mode [1]. Now I’ve been working on some other things to make virtual machines run better.

I use the same initramfs for the physical hardware as for the virtual machines. So I need to remove modules that […]

Video Mode and KVM

I recently changed my KVM servers to use the kernel command-line parameter nomodeset for the virtual machine kernels so that they don’t try to go into graphics mode. I do this because I don’t have X11 or VNC enabled and I want a text console to use with the -curses option of KVM. Without the […]

Ethernet Interface Naming With Systemd

Systemd has a new way of specifying names for Ethernet interfaces as documented in systemd.link(5). The Debian package should keep working with the old 70-persistent-net.rules file, but I had a problem with this that forced me to learn about systemd.link(5).

Below is a little shell script I wrote to convert a basic 70-persistent-net.rules (that only […]