Anyone who has a file server or just a lot of disks in a workstation knows that the best and most reliable way to connect them is with a proper server grade HBA or RAID card, usually with a chipset made by LSI, such as the famous SAS2008. One thing you may have noticed is […]
After selecting “No automatic updates” in the Ubuntu 16.04 server installer, I expected that the system would not attempt to upgrade anything without my permission, just like every version before. Turns out that is not the case. I found out the hard way when my production database shut down to upgrade in the middle of […]
zfs-auto-snapshot not being available for 16.04 was not a situation I thought I would run into, yet here we are, disappointed by Canonical once again. In the meantime, I have ported the package from Trusty (14.04.5) to work on Xenial (16.04.1) and Debian Jessie. You can download the Ubuntu 16.04 package here, and install it by […]
I use an SSD and can’t install all my Steam games onto my SSD. I don’t have a large HDD in my workstation as all my files are on my huge ZFS file server. I simply wanted to install Steam games onto the share. Seems simple, right? I used to bind (using mount) the steamapps […]
Yesterday I assembled a new ZFS array. It’s a 7x 1TB SATA RAID-Z1 array. Having to replace a failed drive within the first hour of the array’s life, I decided adding a hot spare would be a good idea. After installing it in the server (hotplugging) I checked with dmesg that it was detected as […]
A long time ago I bought an ASUS TF300T Android tablet and have been very happy with it. The only thing that it never did correctly was play FLAC audio files. According to Google, all versions of Android after 3.1 can natively play FLAC files, and since my device runs 4.1 it should be no problem, right? […]
I’ve had many people ask me over the last week how to set up a simple Windows domain with a Samba primary domain controller. This is a pretty complex topic and can get really messy really fast. This “guide” (if you can call it that) assumes that you have Ubuntu 12.04 installed on a server […]
I woke up this morning and what do you know, one of my RAID arrays in my workstation was degraded. Just great. This particular array was made up of 3x 1TB disks in RAID level 5 running on an Intel RST fakeRAID controller. After Ubuntu had some serious difficulty communicating with the drive on bootup, […]
Just a few days ago, my Vuze installation on my Ubuntu powered server simply stopped working. It would start and almost immediately crash. In my case, the problem was caused by the Java Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) library being 64-bit, while my server OS is 32-bit. This architecture mismatch caused the crash. I have no […]
Driver – every Windows user cringes at the utter sound of the word let alone the thought of having to deal with one. Regardless, they are required in order for your software to interact with hardware properly (or at all). The manufacturers of computer peripherals and components usually provide the drivers for their own equipment, and so […]