Posts

Fixing non-bootable CentOS 5 after VMware converter P2V

Did P2V for old CentOS 5.5 i686 install and it failed to boot. Recreating initrd helped. Also see thread on VMware support forums .

Disappearing show desktop button on Windows quicklaunch

There's bug in some Microsoft hotfixes that causes show desktop button to disappear from Win XP / Win 2003 quicklaunch bar. Run " regsvr32 /n /i:U shell32 " and logoff+logon to get it back.

Handbrake auto-crop and channel logos

Same as old post except with updated patch for fresh Handbrake SVN version. Handbrake does good job auto-cropping black bars from source and calculating resulting aspect ratio. However if you're encoding digital TV recordings it's common to have channel logo on otherwise black portion of image.

Smartmontools 6.1 on Ubuntu 12.04

Please see updated version:  http://blog.asiantuntijakaveri.fi/2015/07/smartmontools-v64-and-ubuntu-1204.html

Linux and unwanted disk spinups

Some process was spinning my suspended USB disks back up every few minutes which is bad, mmkay. To monitor processes accessing disks I used following commands

ZFS using USB3 disks

Intel Core i5-2400, 4GB RAM, 11 x Seagate 3TB USB hard disks connected via 4 x D-Link USB3 hubs to StarTech PEXUSB3S400 PCIe card. Ubuntu 12.04 with ZFS 0.6.1. Disks were configured as RAID-Z3 (triple parity). write: 137438953472 bytes (137 GB) copied, 250.822 s, 548 MB/s read:  137438953472 bytes (137 GB) copied, 197.451 s, 696 MB/s

Virtualizing headless Windows on headless Linux server

I have remote Linux server and needed to run some Windows-only utilities. Since Wine is as great as always I decided to virtualize Win7. Since remote Linux is headless not only I needed headless Windows but also headless virtualization.