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Dell PowerEdge T320 and Linux

I recently bought a couple of PowerEdge T320 servers, so now to learn about setting them up. They are a little newer than the R710 I recently setup (which had iDRAC version 6), they have iDRAC version 7.

RAM Speed

One system has a E5-2440 CPU with 2*16G DDR3 DIMMs and a Memtest86+ speed of […]

Scanning with a MFC-9120CN on Bullseye

I previously wrote about getting a Brother MFC-9120CN multifunction printer/scanner to print on Linux [1]. I had also got it scanning which I didn’t blog about.

found USB scanner (vendor=0x04f9, product=0x021d) at libusb:003:002

I recently upgraded that Linux system to Debian/Testing (which will soon be released as Debian/Bullseye) and scanning broke. The command sane-find-scanner would […]

HP ML350P Gen8

I’m playing with a HP Proliant ML350P Gen8 server (part num 646676-011). For HP servers “ML” means tower (see the ProLiant Wikipedia page for more details [1]). For HP servers the “generation” indicates how old the server is, Gen8 was announced in 2012 and Gen10 seems to be the current generation.

Debian Packages from HP […]

Basics of Linux Kernel Debugging

Firstly a disclaimer, I’m not an expert on this and I’m not trying to instruct anyone who is aiming to become an expert. The aim of this blog post is to help someone who has a single kernel issue they want to debug as part of doing something that’s mostly not kernel coding. I welcome […]

PSI and Cgroup2

In the comments on my post about Load Average Monitoring [1] an anonymous person recommended that I investigate PSI. As an aside, why do I get so many great comments anonymously? Don’t people want to get credit for having good ideas and learning about new technology before others?

PSI is the Pressure Stall Information subsystem […]

RISC-V and Qemu

RISC-V is the latest RISC architecture that’s become popular. It is the 5th RISC architecture from the University of California Berkeley. It seems to be a competitor to ARM due to not having license fees or restrictions on alterations to the architecture (something you have to pay extra for when using ARM). RISC-V seems the […]

Weather and Boinc

I just wrote a Perl script to look at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology pages to find the current temperature in an area and then adjust BOINC settings accordingly. The Perl script (in this post after the break, which shouldn’t be in the RSS feed) takes the URL of a Bureau of Meteorology observation point […]

MPV vs Mplayer

After writing my post about VDPAU in Debian [1] I received two great comments from anonymous people. One pointed out that I should be using VA-API (also known as VAAPI) on my Intel based Thinkpad and gave a reference to an Arch Linux Wiki page, as usual Arch Linux Wiki is awesome and I learnt […]

Testing VDPAU in Debian

VDPAU is the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix [1]. I noticed an error with mplayer “Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_i965.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory“, Googling that turned up Debian Bug #869815 [2] which suggested installing the packages vdpau-va-driver and libvdpau-va-gl1 and setting the environment variable “VDPAU_DRIVER=va_gl” […]

KDE Icons Disappearing in Debian/Unstable

One of my workstations is running Debian/Unstable with KDE and SDDM on an AMD Radeon R7 260X video card. Recently it stopped displaying things correctly after a reboot, all the icons failed to display as well as many of the Qt controls. When I ran a KDE application from the command line I got the […]