This issue seems to affect not only ODROID-U3 but many other devices and seems to be present on multiple OS too (Arch Linux ARM in my case). What happen is that after some hours/days of intense network traffic (e.g. a torrent client installed on the board) the system logs are flooded with errors and a page allocation error occurs which results in a network disconnection. In my case the tool journalctl report a moltitude of smsc95xx 1-2:1.0 eth0: kevent 2 may have been dropped errors. The workarounds that should (time will tell…) solve the issue consist in creating a file named for example smsc.conf in /etc/modprobe.d and put in it the following string: smsc95xx turbo_mode=N Disabling turbo mode will prevent the network adapter from sending multiple frames at the same time, single file copy performace in my case is invariated (9.4 MB/s ~) with and without turbo mode and the errors from syslogs are completely gone.

I have this small Odroid-U3 board hooked to a 2 TB USB HDD that every once in a while is also used to download torrents. Since quite often I manage it with a device connected to the LAN via wi-fi I am definitely a bit more confortable if the web interface of transmission is encrypted. Like many other times nginx come in our help. – Arch Linux ARM is the OS used – First of all, edit the following two lines of transmission config file: …

In the last month or so despite not having much spare time I spent a few hours reading an interesting book: Implementing Samba 4 It actually is more than a simple book, it is a well written step-by-step guide on how to install (on Debian 7, not that it makes much difference, the installation is really similar on CentOS for example), configure, manage and even migrate an existing Active Directory domain controller from Windows Server to GNU/Linux. It consists of 9 chapters each one covering the most important features of Samba 4; everything explained in the book is also integrated with code snippets, scripts and command line examples. I am sure this book will come real handy in case I will have to setup a GNU/Linux based AD domain controller.

Today I installed Linux Mint on an Asus X551CA laptop. Everything was fine except Mint being shit and the damn Elantech touchpad being even worse than Mint. I will never understand why the fuckers at Canonical and whoever is in charge of Mint development are always 6 months late with important updates like new kernels with added hardware support. The damn Elantech touchpad is supported since kernel 3.12., too bad Mint is stuck with 3.11., so to make it working I had to manually install a newer kernel (version 3.13.9). Download the following packages… …

Since fstab (even with <em>nofail</em> option enabled) doesn’t seem to behave too good when trying to mount at boot something that isn’t actually plugged in (like an USB HDD) I realized it was a good idea to write a small script to run at startup which will be able to handle the situation a bit better. Arch Linux uses Systemd and even though a rc.local file can be created I decided to take the opportunity to understand a little bit of how it works and write a mount script for it. Following what’s written here it seems pretty easy, just write a text file and put it in <em>/etc/systemd/system</em>: …

From wikipedia: Avahi is a FLOSS Zero-configuration networking (zeroconf) implementation, including a system for multicast DNS/DNS-SD service discovery. Long story short: Avahi is used to resolve hostnames of LAN devices. I happen to have an ARM box on which runs a pretty minimal Arch Linux installation. Installing Avahi is pretty easy: [root@k* ~]# pacman -S avahi nss-mdns The latest version of Avahi (0.6.31-11) makes use of SO_REUSEPORT which is a new feature introduced in Linux kernel 3.9, the latest official Arch Linux kernel for my platform is 3.8.13.19-2-ARCH so when I try to start the service systemd reports the following error: …

To password protect a directory xyz and every file and subdirectory in it open the configuration file (nginx.conf or one of the virtual host configuration files) and add the following two lines: location /xyz/ { auth_basic "Restricted Area"; auth_basic_user_file conf.d/htpasswd; } htpasswd file must be encrypted, it can be created using a tool named htpasswd. [root@xenserver ~]# cd /etc/nginx/conf.d/ [root@xenserver ~]# htpasswd -b htpasswd user password

XenServer, like many other bare-metal hypervisors, only supports a small bunch of RAID controllers. The difference between it and for example VMware ESXi is that XenServer is pretty much a CentOS minimal install with some proprietary administration tools and a pretty decent remote manager (only for Windows as long as I know…) while ESXi is a completely proprietary closed source blob. XenServer being based on CentOS makes it possible to do many weird unsupported things, like installing it on a software fake RAID on ICH8R. To install it on a software RAID1 all we have to do is perform the usual installation (without configuring any local storage) on a single HDD (/dev/sda), copy everything on a second drive (/dev/sdb) and use mdadm to build a couple of RAID volumes. – I’m pretty much only reposting things I read somewhere, I don’t take any credit for this guide – …

Let’s say we have a big single FLAC file we want to split into multiple files, we are on Fedora and we don’t want to use anything but the command line. First of all: [root@fedora ~]$ yum install lame ffmpeg shntool cuetools To split the single FLAC file run: [user@fedora ~]$ shnsplit -o flac -f file_name.cue -t "%n - %p - %t" file_name.flac This will produce n single files, -t parameter is used to specify file name format (in this case: track_number – performer – track_name). To copy metadata from CUE to the single files run: …

One year ago or so I wrote about my experience using the Logitech G500 on Linux, I like the mouse a lot, especially the scroll wheel, but there were also a couple of issues I couldn’t live with: no driver for Linux, tuning DPI settings is a real PITA; the fucker doesn’t track on close to every surface, be it a gadget mousepad you got for free at a meeting, a wooden table, a plastic-something table or a 20 € mousepad. I don’t want this post to be a rant against Logitech even if I think I’ve all the right to be at least a bit angry since I bought a quite high priced mouse which basically doesn’t work. Anyway, before using the G500 for 1 year or so I did like 6 years with a Razer Deathadder and I LOVED it (for the reference, it still works like the first day but is in really bad shape aesthetically speaking). This Zowie is pretty much a Razer Deathadder with the plus of being plug-and-play, no drivers, a button for switching between 450, 1150 and 2300 DPI and tracks on every mousepad I have. …