Category: Tips and Tricks

QNAP NAS RAMDisk Full [Resolved]

A problem that has been lingering around for over 10 years and does not seem to hold a resolution other than rebooting the QNAP is resolved, well at least for my particular situation.  Even on a fairly modern TS-1273AU-RP QNAP this problem persists. This QNAP has only one application installed, everything else is removed that can be removed.  Those apps…

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UFS Explorer Data Recovery to Recover Data from Buffalo LinkStation NAS

A Buffalo LinkStation Pro Duo Network Attached Storage (NAS) – LS-WVL/E recently developed a problem where one of the drives had failed. The symptoms indicated that it was a drive, with the clicking sound and the red light for the drive as a fail. A replacement drive did not resolve the problem. After several other tests, it turned out that…

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Windows 10 Path to Current Desktop Backgrounds

Microsoft has made it increasingly impossible to easily manage a Microsoft Windows 10 system.  The act of applying a new background to the desktop is relatively simple. But what if you would like to use that image elsewhere; where is this file stored. This wouldn’t be necessary if the background that was applied still existed at it’s original source. Here…

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iDRAC 7 and Java 8 Connection Failed Easy Work-a-round

There is an older Dell PowerEdge (“PE”) R720xd; it comes equipped with the Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller 7 (“iDRAC7”) Enterprise. The iDRAC has recently been provided a network connection and upon any attempt at launching the console from the Virtual Console Preview, it quickly resulted in the Connection failed messages. This guide will demonstrate how to download and install…

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CentOS 7 vs CentOS 8 differences

I have had several of my scripts break, that had worked on CentOS 6 and CentOS 7, when applying them to CentOS 8.  Here are a couple of examples and their fixes. curl A script inspired by 802.1x in Lion for Macbook Air needing AD domain authentication and a script on GitHub contained a line similar to the following. # curl…

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iPhone Sucks! Another Reason

As a user of Windows and Linux desktop and server operating systems and a user for Android phones, I find it particularly annoying to have to figure out a problem on an iPhone.  A little background.  Someone I know became an iPhone user several years back because they wanted a stable phone with good support, battery life, and ease of…

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Thin Provisioned Logical Volumes

One virtual machine for some unknown reason is utilizing thin provisioned logical volumes.  This one virtual machine is the only one in a series of virtual machines.  In any case, I didn’t understand what it meant to have a system running thin provisioned logical volumes until it crashed and I couldn’t revive it.  Fortunately, there was a snapshot that the…

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NFL Pick ‘Em for 2019 Season

NFL PHP Pick ‘Em is a free php web app that allows you to host a weekly NFL pick ’em football pool on your website.  This fantastic tool replaced the use of spreadsheets.  There was a time that this tool was not supported.  However, I just checked out the www.phpickem.org website it is is updated for 2019. I wish I…

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CheapSSL is NOT so cheap anymore!

I don’t remember the specific dates or versions of the applications, but what I can state is that somewhere in recent years, Internet browsers and search engines, specifically Google, Google Chrome, and Firefox started to enforce the use of SSL certificates on websites. Websites will have higher page rankings with an SSL against those who do not. Chrome and Firefox…

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Winamp is back!

Winamp is a media player that has been around since 1997. I know that in this world of modernization and simplified user interfaces some may not be too excited about the news of Winamp as a triumphant return, but it was one of the earliest applications that I had grown to love.  Winamp had and has the user interface that…

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VMWare Workstation 11 and Windows 10 Blackscreen [Resolved]

There is a case where a user has Windows 10 running on VMware Workstation 11.  While this is recognized as an unsupported setup by VMware, Microsoft Windows 10 has been fully operational and running until the latest mandatory update.  The latest update from a really early version of Windows 10 (1511), presented the black-screen and made Windows inaccessible.  A roll-back…

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Check Microsoft Windows Uptime

If you ever wanted to know how long Windows has been running without a system reboot, there are many ways to determine that.  However, hare are a couple of commands that I found useful. One will require a note to remember as it is a little long winded, the other, a little easier to remember. wmic OS GET CSName, LastBootUpTime…

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Determine which processes are using swap in Linux

Some servers may have several applications, each running in their own allocated piece of RAM and SWAP.  It seems easy enough to use `top` to determine memory usage, but it wasn’t so obvious (to me) as to how to determine swap usage.  A nifty little command called smem to the rescue. So what is smem?  It is a “Report memory…

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Capture Lock Screen in Windows

If you ever wanted to capture a screenshot of the logon screen on a physical machine, you may have used whatever means necessary to do so. Which for me, was through the use of a digital camera. The digital camera may have captured the spirit of the screenshot, but always seems to lack in quality. Wouldn’t it be great to…

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How to add desktop icons on CentOS 7

For the most part, I prefer to work using the terminal on a minimal install of Linux; however, there are those occasional times where the GUI is necessary.  Recently faced with having to add a few desktop shortcuts to the Desktop posed a bit of a problem for me. Basically, wanted to achieve two things, a Desktop icon to launch…

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Icinga2 Monitoring for Windows Disks Not Working [Resolved]

Among the many possible services to monitor a Windows based operating system using Icinga2, the service that utilizes the check_command of disk-windows has not quite worked as expected.  It may have been a combination of things that was done incorrectly over the years, or maybe plugin versioning. In any case, a snippet below demonstrates a thought to be working service…

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VIM: Join Lines

I had a document where I wanted to join every other line.  I tried several approaches on a Windows box using Cygwin but only one worked with a couple variations.  Using the vim editor.  This is a new trick to me, and wanted to jot it down before I forget about. The file looked something like this. One approach was…

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