These days mainboards usually come with some sort of wizbang tool that allow the user to update the BIOS from a USB drive or straight via network. Except, of course, that one single mainboard that absolutely needs a new BIOS version on a late Friday afternoon. And obviously the manufacturer only provides a flash tool for DOS and the mainboard… Read more »
Migrating a virtual machine from one host to another is usually no big deal if both hosts run the same VMM. But what if one wants to move a VM from a host running a different hypervisor than the target host? In the case of moving a VM from KVM to ESXi that’s just not (easily) possible. However, one can… Read more »
To temporarily change a console’s keyboard mapping there’s loadkeys, a little user space program that allows you to alter the kernel’s keyboard mapping. Loading the very handy US International keyboard layout, use To list the currently used keyboard layout or all available keyboard layouts, localectl can be used If localectl is not available, keyboard mapping files are usually found at… Read more »
If you try to start a graphical application on a minimal Fedora or CentOS setup, e.g. via ssh -X, you might face the situation that the program actually starts up, but no font appears (or a weird one, or only squares where the letters are supposed to be). If you start a program that uses Pango, like firefox, you get… Read more »
Running PulseAudio in system mode is usually a bad idea. There are use cases however, where PulseAudio’s system mode is a great tool, e.g. for building a PulseAudio streaming target to stream audio from multiple clients to speakers. First, install PulseAudio, avahi (a free implementation of zeroconf) to publish the service throughout the network and the corresponding PulseAudio module: Since… Read more »
There’s a bug in Fedora 20 and RHEL 7, where the legacy network service does not set the default route properly. This is due to the fact, that the network service does not evaluate the GATEWAY0 directive in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX that is used by NetworkManager. To set the default route with the legacy network service, simply change GATEWAY0 to GATEWAY: Of… Read more »
While the squid proxy server has quite a few different flavours of authentication available, one of the most basic ones, pam_auth, is also one of the most useful ones to get you started quickly. pam_auth let’s anyone who has a local account access the squid proxy. In large environments you probably want to use ldap authentication eventually, but pam_auth is… Read more »
Baikal is a lightweight, free and open-source CalDAV and CardDAV server implementation that allows you to synchronize your address book and appointments with multiple clients such as mobile devices or a desktop application like Thunderbird. It lacks a couple of important features for enterprise use cases, such as address book and calendar sharing between multiple users, but it’s very suitable… Read more »
Installing kvm on a recent Fedora OS is quite easy. Fedora already ships all the necessary software packages and kernel modules for running a kernel virtualised machine. 0. Prerequisites Since late 2005 / early 2006 almost every x86 processor is capable of hardware virtualization. To check if your CPU supports Intel’s VT-d or AMD’s Pacifica, which is a requirement for… Read more »
To invoke logrotate manually to debug configuration settings, there is a builtin debug flag: To force a log file rotation, regardless of the specified criteria (such as age, minsize, etc.), run: Keep in mind, that you can use individual logrotate configuration files from /etc/logrotate.d/ but settings are inherited from the global logrotate config /etc/logrotate.conf. For a comprehensive list of options,… Read more »