unimportant

idrac7 + ipmitool stopped working with firmware 1.56.55

by .pQd
i use ipmitool to check health of the poweredge servers from nagios. in essence i execute: and alert if the exist code is non-zero, then i execute and again – i alert on non-zero exit code, i also grep the file in search of lines not containing ok/ns. this was working fine for DRAC 5 ... Read More

Samsung CLX-4195FW – displaying only samsung logo on the front screen

by .pQd
newly arrived Samsung CLX-4195FW greeted me with just blue samsung’s logo on the white background presented on the front LCD screen; at the same time printer correctly acquired IP via DHCP and i could access the management interface via the network. i’ve called Samsung 3x and luckily enough at the 3rd attempt i spoke with ... Read More

mac changing on DW1501 wifi card

by .pQd
in dell’s e6220 that i use for work travels i have dw1501 wifi card. in theory it’s possible to change card’s MAC address in the control panel > network and sharing center > change adapter settings > wireless network connection > properties configure > advanced > locally administered MAC address. problem is the values i’ve ... Read More

open maps + own routes

by .pQd
over time open street maps got better and better; i started to rely on them more than on google maps when hiking around – osm gave me more detailed maps of hiking trails in Barcelona and Singapore, Las Palmas and Slovenia. i wanted to share some of the interesting paths here; the best i could ... Read More

openvpn throttled from ovh’s bhs datacenter?

by .pQd
for work we rent a dedicated server from OVH. it’s been 5 months now and i’m pretty satisfied with the service provided. at the initial stage we’ve bumped into a problem that was never really solved; i cannot be even 100% sure if it’s OVH’s fault. UDP-based OpenVPN connection established from OVH’s BHS datacenter to ... Read More

wordpress hangs when uploading an image

by .pQd
i’ve moved my wordpress to a new server few weeks ago. all appeared to work fine but i forgot changing the configuration and providing new upload dir path. result? the media page [ wp-admin/upload.php ] did not open and apache2 appeared to be hanged using 100% cpu. i could not add any media in the ... Read More

clipboard service, rdp

by .pQd
did the clipboard suddenly stopped passing text between your local computer and the remote desktop session? the first thing i do in such case is: start the task manager on the remote host go to processes, find rdpclip.exe and kill it start again rdpclip.exe on the remote host and try copy and paste again

squeezing water out of jepgs, pngs

by .pQd
jpegoptim can reduce size of JPG files. if used without -m option it’s lossless. apt-get install jpegoptim find . -type f -exec jpegoptim -m80 {} ‘;’ for pngs there are few tools out of which i found pngcrush to give best results. unfortunately it does not work ‘in-place’ and temporary file needs to be created ... Read More

hibernation for windows 2012 server

by .pQd
run cmd as admin and there: after that control panel>hardware>power options>change advanced power settings and hibernate is available that did a trick for windows 2012 server on an old poweredge 1950 server. unfortunately wake on lan refused to work despite of: in the control panel > network and internet > network connections for the lan ... Read More
by .pQd
i’m setting up some rented server. it has 2x ssd drives on which i’ll be running raid1 with mdadm with ext4. installation of debian wheezy went fine but i wanted to use fstrim to prevent write performance degradation over time. it did not work under 3.2.0 kernel giving me: after quick googling i learned that ... Read More

vmware esxi 5.1 keeping mac address after moving to a new hardware

by .pQd
i had to move hard disks containing installed esxi 5.1 from one server to another. after i booted up a new server there was an unexpected surprise for me… vmware ‘kept’ the mac address assigned to the management interface from the old machine. so for a while i had duplicate mac address: legitimately on the ... Read More

legitimate mail classified by amavis as

by .pQd
i use amavisd-new as content filter for incoming messages. today it decided to classify a plain-text part of the message containing: as a python executable and did not deliver the message. my solution – in the config file for amavis i’ve added an exception for anything that is detected to be python scripts:

dell 2135cn – 016-317 restart printer, contact support

by .pQd
i’ve bricked one of our printers. over the network upgrade of the dell 2135cn was interrupted and printer was most probably rebooted at the worst possible time – when it was flashing the new firmware. result? printer no longer responded over the network, the lcd panel displayed just: 016-317 restart printer contact support but… i’ve ... Read More

updating bios / firmware with help of linux, without cds and usb pendrives

by .pQd
from time to time i have to upgrade different types of firmwares in PCs – sometimes it’s bioses, sometimes raid/network/ssd firmware. until now i was either burning cd-rw with iso provided by the vendor or making some bootable usb pen-drive with free-dos or sth similar. but i stumbled on this one and it worked surprisingly ... Read More

poor man’s vm clonning under vsphere 5 without downtime

by .pQd
how to clone a virtual machine under vmware vsphere 5: using the vsphere client create a new vm with similar parameters [at least the same number and size of hard drives] using the vsphere client create a snapshot of the original vm log in via ssh as root [ to enable the ssh access check ... Read More

excel 2010 displays garbage when opening xls documents from the web

by .pQd
while migrating few dozens of users to new desktops with the new office 2010 i’ve encountered a problem: when users open xls [saved in the excel 97-2003 format] directly from the web browser and allow editing excel displays garbage. amount of garbage depends but sometimes it makes the spreadsheet completely unusable. things get even worse ... Read More

gtd

by .pQd
i like gtd, i’ve heard first time about the idea around 2006. since then i use some tiny-little-miniature form of it on daily basis; it boils down to writing things down, using reminders, tasks and todo lists. in other words – having OCD / being anal. i still manage to miss things, but in general ... Read More