The ramblings of a computer geek
I had a bit of a read about that issue you were talking about with the fire suppression system causing system outages for Channel 4 recently (article). The reports all used seem to use the phrase “sucked the air out of the room”, this would imply a vacuum, which it wouldn’t have been. So in … Read more
The Synology NAS range can be used to run the Plex Media Server. However the Plex service needs to be configured with permissions to read your media files. In my example I have a Shared Folder on the NAS called “tv”, and I want Plex to be able to read, index and play these files. … Read more
A single-mode or multi-mode duplex fibre optic patch cable a simple enough item, commonly you’ll find these with an LC connector on the end. What are the types? The default type is typically a UPC (Ultra Physical Contact) type connector, if you were to ask a supplier for a fibre patch cable this is normally … Read more
OpenManage Enterprise version 3.4 allows automatic discovery of servers that have iDRAC firmware version 4.00.00.00 or later. The appliance can be configured to allow these servers to automatically locate the console by querying the DNS and initiate their discovery. The instructions (and this) give the use of the TUI or manual creation for Dell Openmanage … Read more
If you need to copy files from one storage location to another Robocopy is a great tool, but like every great tool it comes with loads of options. In this scenario I was needing to copy a directory structure (and all the files) from one location to another but preserving all the permissions, ownership and … Read more
I had this issue today, on a host that had recently had a software upgrade. Problem: A host to which I was connecting with SSH gave this error: “Couldn’t agree a key exchange algorithm (available: Curve25519-sha256@libssh.org, ECDH-sha2-nistp521, ECDH-sha2-nistp384, ECDH-sha2-nistp256)”. Solution: In my case I updated to a later release of Putty.exe and the issue was resolved. … Read more
Here is a cheeky script to drive the API on the Philips Hue lighting system to change the colour of a lamp based on the temperature. That’s right you can colour the light based on the temperature outside, quite neat so you can quickly see if its cold, hot or indifferent just by the colour … Read more
The Raspberry Pi lacks a real time clock, which means that the time can drift, so much so that NTP fails to update the software clock because its skewed so much. To resolve this you can do the following: Add this to /etc/ntp.conf: tinker panic 0 That will cause ntpd to sync despite the large … Read more