I was excited to see that Synology have recently integrated a PXE solution in their latest version of Diskstation Manager – DSM 4.2 beta. This makes their NAS devices even more ideal in a home virtualisation lab as they are both cheap to buy and to run (the DS212 unit that I own consumes less [...]
Setting up SSH authorized_keys with SELinux enabled
If you have ever added your SSH key to an authorised_keys file on server running SELinux, but for some reason you still can’t connect with your key, then it may be because the SELinux contexts have not been correctly set on the .ssh folder and authorized keys file. This normally causes the following error on [...]
Creating a bootable USB stick from OSX
I was having some trouble getting my ML110 Proliant lab server to boot from a USB drive that I had created with UnetBootin on my Mac. Initially, I thought it was a problem with the ML110 server, but it turns out that Unetbootin does not currently make a fully bootable USB stick in OSX. The [...]
Showing total disk use on Linux – a.k.a How to sum the output of df
If you want to find the total amount of disk space used on Linux, and other Unix based systems (such as OSX), you can do so quite easily with the following one liner… df -lP | awk ‘{total+=$3} END {printf "%d G\n", total/2^20 + 0.5}’ What this does is… df -lP … shows a disk [...]
Fixing keyboard problems with OSX and virt-manager
If, like me, you have been running virt-manager over an SSH tunnel, and are getting problems with the keyboard / key mappings, then you may be able to fix them by changing the keyboard settings in the virtual machines configuration. 1) Click the details button in the virtual machines virt-manager window. 2) Navigate to the [...]
Installing Ansible on OSX Lion
We’re currently evaluating configuration management (devops) tools at CATN to help us deploy and manage our new vCluster hosting platform in a production environment. Many of the tools we have looked at are fairly complicated, with a steep learning curve. Then we came across, Ansible. It’s developed primarily by the guy who wrote Cobbler (our [...]
How to bulk add an ssh key to multiple servers
If you need to add a colleague’s ssh key to multiple servers that share a similar name, you can do it with a simple one liner. In this post I will show you how. Assuming the servers you need to add they key to are called: server1.example.com server2.example.com server3.example.com server4.example.com etc… And your colleagues key [...]
Raspberry Pi Measurements & Dimensions
I was asked by Tim Lossen on one of my previous Raspberry Pi posts if I could take some measurements of the Pi board so that he could complete a 3D model of it that he is working on. Unfortunately, we don’t have a ruler in our house, so I’ve printed off some ruler sheets, [...]
Raspberry Pi playing a 1080p video
In this short clip, I use my Raspberry Pi board to play a 1080p video – Big Buck Bunny. The playback is flawless with no interruptions. The commands used were: sudo /opt/vc/bin/vcfiled sudo /opt/vc/bin/ilplayer /home/pi/big_buck_bunny_1080p_h264_ac3.mkv Big Buck Bunny is a short animated film by the Blender Foundation - (c) copyright 2008, Blender Foundation / www.bigbuckbunny.org.
Raspberry Pi #8 First Photoshoot
I came home from work this evening to find a small brown parcel containing a Raspberry Pi beta board that I had won in an ebay auction earlier this week. It was a charity auction with all the proceeds go to supporting the Raspberry Pi foundation whose aim is to promote computer science and electronics at [...]
Subscribe / Connect
Subscribe to our e-mail newsletter to receive updates.
