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Showing posts from July, 2012

Tagging and fingerprinting MP3 files on Linux and Windows

Now that Spotify is shutting down their free (ad supported) service people are forced back to building own MP3 collections. As usual filenames are total mess and ID3 tags missing.

Installing Nomachine NX Free Edition on Lubuntu 12.04 x64

Usually docs for *buntu are identical, but not this time. This works for Lubuntu. It does not work for Ubuntu. See http://magiksys.blogspot.com/2012/05/ubuntu-1204-and-nomachine-nx.html for tips how to get NX working on Ubuntu.

Convert Outlook 2010 PST to mbox to maildir to Gmail

Officially this is easy. Configure Gmail IMAP on Outlook client and do drag-and-drop. Great unless you have 10GB of emails from over 15 years to transfer. Besides all of your emails will be to/from "undisclosed recipients" on Gmail. Finding some ancient email is already difficult, but stripping sender and recipient info makes it next to impossible.

Running WDIDLE3 and WDTLER from USB stick

I wanted to re-use few old WD disk on RAID. Since these were "green" versions and old enough I could fix their RAID incompatibility issues with WDIDLE3 and WDTLER.

Fixing manufacturer name, model and serial number on clone hardware

Soon after setting up fancy new asset management tool you realized that all your clone PCs show up with identical info. Fixable, but requires a lot of work. One more reason to go with name brand instead.

Convert Linux ext3 from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8

There's supposedly no character set issues with ext3 on Linux. Bet you already guessed how it really is. Yep, there is very real problems with it.

Creating bootable ESXi 5.0.0 Update 1 USB install media in Linux

VMware is weird company. They provide only Windows based management tools, but yet installing their products requires manual fiddling with Linux. Notes below are based on info from http://www.r71.nl/kb/technical/327-install-vsphere5-esxi-from-usb .

Quick and dirty OpenVPN bridge configuration

Quick and dirty configuration to bridge two ethernet segments using OpenVPN. With this setup you need two ethernet interfaces per host or alternatively one ethernet and wireless access to Internet.

Restoring full capacity of SATA disk on Linux with hdparm

For some reason some of my 2TB Hitachi SATA disks report 2000000000000 bytes instead of 2000396697600 2TB disk from all other manufacturer do. Even some Hitachi’s show 2000396697600 bytes.

Converting Ubuntu Linux with GPT system disk back to MBR

GPT and EFI. Worst. Idea. Ever. At least with WTF-8 aka UTF-8 your system boots while looking funny, but with GPT all you get is black screen with blinking cursor at best. Sometimes even your cursor is taken away.