How to identify a disk on a Dell server

I have a Dell R730 server at work, which connects to a back-end storage with optical fiber cables. In addition, the server itself also has 6 disks. Two of the disks have already been configured as RAID1 and has the operating system installed on it. Today, I want to configure the remaining 4 disks as RAID10, and setup logical volume on it. The first part was easy. All I had to do was to login to the Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC), and create a new Virtual Disk from the 4 physical disks....

January 24, 2018 · 4 min · 765 words · kenno

How to find the motherboard model on Windows 10

To find the motherboard model number on Windows (10), run cmd, and type: C:\Users\kenno>wmic baseboard get product,Manufacturer,version,serialnumber Manufacturer Product SerialNumber Version Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. Z170N-Gaming 5 To be filled by O.E.M. x.x Ref & credit: How to Find Computer and Motherboard Model Serial Number on Windows 10

January 14, 2018 · 1 min · 48 words · kenno

How to set system locale on Ubuntu 16.04

TLDR; just follow this guide. At home I run DHCP and DNS servers on Odroid U3, a system on a chip (SoC) computer. This allows me to have lots of control over my home network and most importantly – fun. I also run some web sites and Postgresql databases for testing purposes. The SoC computer runs Ubuntu 16.04 as the operating system. Recently, the Odroid U3 died. A coworker also has an SoC, an Odroid XU4....

December 31, 2017 · 2 min · 223 words · kenno

Change the urxvt font size on the fly

urxvt or unicode-rxvt is a terminal simulator like Gnome-terminal or Konsole. Recently I’m trying to switch to use i3 (i3-gaps), a tiling windows manager, and urxvt is good compliment to i3. Unlike Gnome-terminal or Konsole, the font name and size for urxvt are configured in ~/.Xresources. To make change to font size, for example, I’d edit ~/.Xresources, reload it with xrdb ~/.Xresources, and finally close and re-open urxvt itself. Though there is no built-in function to allow changing font size on the fly, urxvt allows us to do this via extensions....

December 24, 2017 · 2 min · 294 words · kenno

ZFS on Linux is now available for Fedora 27

My main machine at home has been upgraded from Fedora 26 to 27 since the day the 27 was released. Everything has been working great, except the ZFS file system. I’m a ZFS-believer and I store my important files on ZFS-based storage. For a while there was no repository for Fedora 27 provided by zfsonlinux, until 6 days ago. I have been using packages provided for Fedora 26 as work around solution....

December 19, 2017 · 1 min · 104 words · kenno

How to remove a copr repository in Fedora

This is just a quick note to remind myself how to remove a Copr repository. What’s a Copr? “Copr (Cool Other Package Repo) is a Fedora project to help make building and managing third party package repositories easy.” – https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Copr. Why do I want to remove it? One of the Copr repo I added a while back seemed to be no longer working, so I wanted to remove it. To list all repos on Fedora (27):...

December 11, 2017 · 1 min · 91 words · kenno

How to unban IP from PF firewall

This post is probably more relevant to my use case of PF firewall running on FreeBSD 11.1, and I need to remind myself how to unblock an IP from the block list. Here’s a snippet of what’s in /etc/pf.conf: table persist # Don't send rejections. Just drop. set block-policy drop # Exempt the loopback interface to prevent services utilizing the # local loop from being blocked accidentally. set skip on lo0 # all incoming traffic on external interface is normalized and fragmented # packets are reassembled....

November 17, 2017 · 2 min · 269 words · kenno

Set the HostName and Computer Name via command line on OS X

Work recently acquired a few MacBook laptops to be used and shared by staff. Though the computing staff is not expected to have immense knowledge about OS X, when things break down we are the first point of contact. The last time I used a Mac machine extensively was around 2007. Then I switched to Debian and could never look back. Anyway, there must be lot of new things and I’ll try document or post snippets here as I learn new things....

November 17, 2017 · 1 min · 114 words · kenno

How to list all installed R-packages

I don’t use R, and nor I do know much about it. However, I maintain R’s installation on linux machines at work. Today, I learned a new trick to list all installed R-packages. Here it is: ip = as.data.frame(installed.packages()[,c(1,3:4)]) ip = ip[is.na(ip$Priority),1:2,drop=FALSE] ip And here is the sample output: Type 'license()' or 'licence()' for distribution details. Natural language support but running in an English locale R is a collaborative project with many contributors....

October 5, 2017 · 1 min · 201 words · kenno

Build Docker Client for ARMv8

The other day, after successfully building Docker-ce 17.06.0-dev for Odroid C2 which has ARMv8 CPU, i couldn’t find Docker client. Maybe it was just me not building the Docker engine correctly. Anyway, after some more times, I also managed building the Docker client for the Odroid C2. It turned out, like many things, it wasn’t that hard after you figured it out. It’s worth to note too that the build instruction on https://github....

October 1, 2017 · 1 min · 213 words · kenno