Category: Geekery

Ubuntu Server installer woes

Alright, Google, do your thing and make this available to other sysadmins don’t waste the ungodly amount of time on this that I did. Scenario – you’re installing Ubuntu Server 20.04 / 22.04 / 24.04 on Dell hardware. You’re using hardware RAID. You may be rebuilding the machine or you may have moved some disks

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Creating a Bramble

So, my current Raspberry Pi cluster isn’t really a true cluster – it’s really just a bunch of individual machines running BOINC which happen to all netboot off a single node. Other than basic configuration and filesystem provision, there’s no real oversight of the day-to-day running of the machines. All of this is about to

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Platform Update (what, again?)

Well, it’s that time again! Nelefa.org has another new home. Still on a Raspberry Pi 4 (sort of) but instead of being on a little dedicated Pi, it’s now on the world’s smallest and most pointless compute cluster. The cluster is built with a single Raspberry Pi 3B+ control node providing web servers, dhcp, nfs

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OUTAAAAGE!

So, nelefa.org fell off the internet last night, for the first time since 1997. This was thanks to the company hosting the domain screwing up the renewal process by, well, not renewing :-/ As their tech support department are only around during UK office hours, this resulted in the domain vanishing until lunchtime today. This

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The Holy Grail of .muttrc Colors

Well, folks, it’s taken me a bazillion and eleventy years to finally decide my “killer” Mutt colour scheme, but here it is. Stick this in your .muttrc and bask in the glory. color hdrdefault yellow black color quoted brightred black color signature magenta black color indicator brightwhite red color attachment black green color error red

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A conversation with JD

j.daniels: 15 minute job to move disks and filesystems? That’s impressive. What’s your secret? j.dow: no, fifteen minute job to shut down box, add disks, and bring box back up j.daniels: Ahh. j.dow: the rest of it can be done hot. This is the cunning nature of sysadmins. j.daniels: Sadly, not cunning enough to dodge

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Syncing ratings from iPod back to iTunes

It doesn’t do this, by default, unless you’re syncing your whole music collection automatically. Which is a bit rubbish if, like me, you have an 8Gb iPod Touch and a 60Gb music library. See, what I tend to do, to make sure I actually rotate my music and listen to more than one album (:-))

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The Strange Case of the Unexpected Fruit

Ok, so there I was standing in my kitchen and gazing with a little horror and a touch of disgust at my fruit bowl. It had, as memory serves, contained a couple of bananas, a chinese pear, and a solitary wizened looking apple. Imagine my shock to discover a small colony of unexpected grapes lying

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A conversation with Dave

(15:19:21) j.dow/Home: Matey – can I schedule a two hour outage some evening to take a cold backup of live? (15:19:41) Dave: aye (15:19:54) j.dow/Home: or morning would work just as well (and be quieter) (15:20:01) Dave: get a date in mind and then i’ll pass to Simon to notify the clients (15:20:13) Dave: Morning

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Happy Birthday Nelefa.org!

So, set the way-back machine to June 1996. A hairy, bearded, UNIX nerd sits in the back office of Cyberia Cafe on Hanover Street in Edinburgh. He’s been writing these games and, as he hosts web sites for a living, he reckons he should actually have somewhere to distribute them from. So he sits and

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