At some point, starting a zsh (I’m using iTerm2 here) took almost 10 seconds on macOS 11 Big Sur. This only happened the first time when I opened iTerm2 after a reboot. After mentally going through all the software changes I had done to my rig, I was pretty sure this happened right after installing […]
Author Archives: Jan
GA-Z97X-UD5H and macOS 11 Big Sur with OpenCore
Interestingly, my 6 year old Hackintosh rig is still going strong and so I decided to upgrade it from macOS X Mojave to macOS 11 Big Sur. Since OpenCore is pretty well documented by now, I wanted to give it a try and replace Clover (which seems to use OpenCore as well by now).However, the […]
The best cloud desktop solution for Linux is… Windows!?
I like using a remote desktop work/office environment for various reasons, travelling being on of them. This is also known as a cloud desktop. Thanks to the awesome Apache Guacamole remote desktop gateway software, I can access it everywhere, just by using a web browser (and an Internet connection). While I love Linux, it sucks […]
How to use IPv6 on Quickline/WWZ and pfSense firewall
Here’s how to configure your pfSense firewall for IPv6 on Quickline/WWZ. The settings may work with other ISPs too but YMMV. I’m assuming your modem is already in bridge mode and pfSense is up and running for IPv4 DHCP on the WAN interface. Activate IPv6 and DHCP6 in the router We’re configuring pfSense to use […]
Auto-restart crashed mining processes in ethOS 1.2.9
ethOS 1.2.9 brings a few changes which break my auto-restart script for ethOS 1.2.7. Since 1.2.9 contains improved GPU crash detection, I rewrote the restart script to use the built-in detection mechanisms. For the required cron job please see my initial post which is available here. As long as the DRY_RUN variable is set to […]
Auto-restart crashed mining processes in ethOS 1.2.7
I have been running a crypto-currency mining rig on the Linux based ethOS distro for quite some time now. While I realize that ethOS is problematic license-wise, it’s still a great distro to get a mining rig up and running in almost no time. The Nvidia GPUs in my rig are well tuned to operate […]
How to display crypto currency rates on macOS menu bar
BitBar has been around for a while but I didn’t notice it until I wanted to display crypto currency rates (who isn’t into crypto these days :)) on my macOS menu bar. BitBar is as simple as it can get: it takes the output from a shell script and displays the result on the menu […]
Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H and USB 3.0 in macOS Sierra 11.12
A commenter recently asked if I had any USB 3.0 related issues with my Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H equipped Hackintosh. Since every USB port was working out of the box I thought everything was fine. However, having a closer look at the USB section in macOS Sierra’s System Information revealed that none of the USB 3.0 ports were […]
Random delay for cron.daily, cron.weekly, cron.monthly
Wouldn’t it be nice if cron’s daily, weekly and monthly jobs could be run with a slight offset? At least that’s what I thought when 20+ servers were hitting my backup infrastructure at once. The scripts in /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly and /etc/cron.monthly are triggered directly from crontab at fixed times. Here’s what /etc/crontab looks like in […]
How to generate daily PowerDNS statistics reports
PowerDNS has been powering authoritative DNS lookups to this web site for quite a while now. It’s such a remarkable piece of software. Here’s how to create a daily statistics report for PowerDNS. Put the lines below in /etc/cron.daily/powerdns-report: #!/bin/sh /usr/bin/curl -s localhost:8081 | mail -s “$(echo “PowerDNS Daily Report\nMIME-Version: 1.0\nContent-Type: text/html”)” root Make sure the […]
How to migrate a LVM-based KVM guest to another host
In the past, I have been using the immensely useful virt-backup.pl script to migrate a LVM-based (raw volume) Linux KVM guest from one host to another. However, there is an even easier way to cold-migrate a KVM guest. This approach is particularly helpful if there’s not enough disk space on the host to create a […]
Intel Gigabit CT kext for macOS Sierra 10.12
The Intel Gigabit CT Desktop ethernet PCI adapter is still one of the fastest and most robust NICs for the Hackintosh. This did not change with macOS Sierra 10.12. I’m still using the IONetworkingFamilyInjector.kext in Clover’s kext folder to override the compatibility list in Apple’s own Intel82574L.kext. However, while the installation of macOS Sierra went smoothly, I lost […]
Installing Ubuntu Server 16.04 on PC Engines APU or APU2
Most people use PC Engines APU series (APU1D4, APU2C4) system boards for pfSense firewalls (pfSense is awesome!). However, the Ubuntu Server x86-64 version runs on these boards very well too which can turn them into a lightweight, portable Plex Media Server for instance. The APU series doesn’t have a video port, that’s why the Ubuntu Server 16.04 […]
Adding a DS3231 Real Time Clock to the Raspberry Pi 3
Since the Raspberry Pi 3 doesn’t come with a battery-powered real time clock, it will only show the correct time once it has Internet connectivity (thanks to the NTP daemon). If the Raspberry Pi 3 is not connected to the Internet, you might want to add a hardware clock to set the current date. Here’s how […]
Query status information from Huawei’s HiLink 3G/LTE modems
While Huawei provides status information for its HiLink modems via a web page, this is hardly useful when using the modem on a headless Linux server. I just published a small Python-based command-line tool on Github which displays some useful information about the modem’s status. root@wopr~#: python ./hstatus.py Huawei E3372 LTE Modem (IMEI: 121032526613216) Hardware […]