Xubuntu 18.04 on Dell XPS 8930

TLDR: XPS 8930 works perfectly with Xubuntu 18.04. Installation only requires one minor tweak.  Like the system but it seems a little cramped. My primary home system (E5-2660 v0, 24GB RAM, GTX960, SSD boot, NZXT H440 case) has been getting a little long in the tooth.  I haven’t update it in several years other than to add additional drives.   I had been telling myself that processors and things hadn’t really gotten much faster but most of the servers I am using now have NVMe…

Mounting shares via CIFS after disabling SMB1

A long explanation should be inserted here, but I am too busy lately to do any updates here much less write up a lengthy explanation.  So, this is what you came to look for. If you have an fstab mount that stopped working after you disabled SMB1 in your Samba server make the following change: OLD //servername/sharename /mnt/foobar cifs noauto,guest,uid=1000,iocharset=utf8 0 0 NEW //servername/sharename /mnt/foobar cifs noauto,guest,uid=1000,iocharset=utf8,vers=2.1 0 0

Fix for Pixel 2 MMS images on Cricketwireless

So, I love my Pixel 2.  The photos are incredible.     But, actually sharing those photos with other people has been a pain in the butt. Every time someone tries to send me a photo or I try to send a photo using MMS it failes.  Every time.  I’ve been too busy travelling to look into this seriously, so I’ve been sharing through email and Skype instead.  Just got back home so I played around with it this morning.  Turns out it is…

OpenVPN DNS resolution problem on Ubuntu

It has been a while since I had this problem, and I was a little sleepy because of travelling so it gave me a hard time for a few minutes.  In trying to resolve the problem I noticed that there are no good answers about this that can be googled.  Everyone seems to suggest extreme changes to your system.  So, let me cover this quickly and easily.   Problem: You are using Linux to connect to an OpenVPN server.  You are using hotel or…

Raspberry Pi 3B with AM2303 Temperature Sensor

I know it has been quite a while, and the template is all screwed up.  I’ve been working a new job for several months and haven’t really had time to write up much of what I have been working on.  Because I ignored the security of the site some WordPress security issue allowed a hacker to get in so I just reloaded everything and slapped on a template I had laying around. I’ll eventually get around to fixing it up but I’m just a…

More photos from the installation

Some photos from the installation of five Oceanstor 9000 storage systems, ten Huawei x6800 with eighty H620 nodes, six switches, two racks, eight APC PDU, cables, and a little blood that will be in those damn cabinets forever.

Getting increasingly annoyed with Huawei

Customer spends half a million on servers, storage and network.  Documentation is not available in PDF, or if it is it is 1000 PDF files.  Rackmount screws aren’t magentic, and they send EXACTLY the number you need. Screws are in 10 different sizes so if you lose one in the rack while trying to get the system mounted you are screwed (no pun intended). The screws are trash, strip easily which is a problem if you are trying to rearrange a rack at a customer’s…

Simple configuration dump script for web servers

I build this script long ago, using another script for reference. Lost track of the original long ago, sorry if it was yours. Basically, I run this script daily on web servers along with a tar backup of the /etc and any other vital directories. In the event of a disaster it is much easier to recover with this information. This isn’t as important now that we use virtual machines for almost everything, but it has come in handy quite a few times. I…

Host your own Trello style Kanban board for Free

Kanban board like Trello have become pretty popular for managing projects. They are simple to understand and easy to use. But finding one that looks decent, works well, at a decent price can be difficult. Last year I setup one internally using the open source Wekan. Someone recently posted a Virtualbox image for Wekcan, but I prefer to use KVM and usually promote its usage. So I thought I would put together a similar how-to using a Proxmox KVM server. With the Proxmox distribution…

Building a Magento Testing and Development Environment – Setup a local APT proxy

Part 5, Setup a local APT proxy Most of the hosts in my Magento development environment are going to be running Ubuntu. I will want to install security and application updates, but I don’t want to kill the Ubuntu repositories with my requests.  I’d also like a little bit of control over the updates.  If I want to install an update on production I need to test it first, and make sure the version I install on production is the same version I installed…

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