Networking at home

VirtualBox has a built in solution for automatically starting and stopping vitual machines, as it is well explained in this post . However, I have a lot of virtual machines, and depending on what I am doing a different set of machines are running. I am not in a critical environment, therefore my vm host is set to automatically install updates, and if needed restart. In order not to loose the virtual machines I have written a small systemd service, which on shutdown saves all running virtual machine states and on restart starts them again.

An a server it has no advantage the GRUB and the Linux kernel is booting up in graphical mode, as it is only hiding the potential error messages. The following is a simple receit to switch it off.

We all know that to have the array device names persist you have to do:  mdadm --detail --scan >>/etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf However this is not enough, this has to be also updated in initram, so the easiest way to do it, is by running: dpkg-reconfigure mdadm This will automatically update the initram. (I do not mention here, that after piping the array list to /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf, it is very practical to manually check if everything is correct, to avoid duplicate arrays or old not-any-more existing arrays.)

Using iSCSI is very usefull even in home environments. In Linux on the server side you can use TGT for this purpose, usually you can manage it weasily with Webmin , but I did not found the correct way to add a file name with spaces to the /etc/tgt/targets.conf. So finally I maked a symlink to the file and added the link to the config file and it workied. ln -s /media/disk/file\ with\ spaces\ in\ name.img /home/user/iscsitarget And put the /home/user/iscsitarget in yout TGT config file.

I have experienced very poor performance on the RAID set up on my new computer, so I decided to do a short test of the speed and capacity of different RAID configurations.

Sometimes you may need to move your contacts from Outlook to your Google account. Most sites recomend doing an Outlook export to csv and then import it to Google Contacts, but that doesn't transfer your pictures, and if you are not using English language, you have to play arround with the field names. Here is an easy way to transfer your contacts with all details.