Danny's Space

Windows 10 forced updates is in the news and a senior CNET editor who personally experienced the ordeal is encouraging others to share their experience. I don't use Windows anymore. The last time I used MS Windows Anything was around 2006. I switched to Linux in the desktop back in 2007 and I've been using Linux in servers before that. When I say use I meant exclusively. Not that I am against un-prompted updates, I do have automatic updates turned on in my machines, desktops and servers. In Debian and Ubuntu they call it unattended updates and as it is in the rest of Linux, I can customize which packages are included or excluded. I can blacklist certain packages not to update. It automatically checks for available new versions of packages (software, apps) and I have it configured to download and install them in the background. Yes in the background. It is logged of course and an email sent out to my Gmail account. If something fails to install I am also informed...

What kind of race are we? Are we naturally war-like, violent or peaceful and friendly? The answer would vary, from history and race and geography. Are we a failed race because of our disunity? Or are we denying our nature and impulses for violence? Morgan is a film about a machine-human hybrid produced by a corporate entity for profit to produce a superior soldier. It stars Kate Mara and Anya Taylor-Joy (whose performance in The Witch is also noteworthy) as laboratory produced human hybrids. The interactions of Anya's Morgan character and her scientists-guardians are the films plot driver. There is constant reference to Helsinki which is I guess what happened to another similar effort by the company which failed. Helsinki being a metaphor to civilian scientists losing their detachment from their subject, or Helsinki being a metaphor to hostages shifting their loyalty to their captors. ...

End of January 2017 is coming. Most taxes for the year current has been paid.

Income, Expense and Profit Chart From January 2016 to December 2016 The 2016 story is income goals were not realized. There was vacancy throughout the year.

Life's Edge - green,linear gradient on GIMP

First I got an email telling me of a fail event detected on my RAID device. Then 12 minutes later a second email this time from SMART monitoring complaining that one of my hard drives could not be opened. There is a difference between a failed to open device and a failed device situation. So I verified these situations with the terminal. I verified the SMART monitoring report. #smartctl -a /dev/questionable-device I verified the status of the RAID array. #mdadm --detail /dev/md0 I have a degraded array, one device is removed and faulty. The device is /dev/sdd. This is the 1TB hard drive which is the oldest of the 4 I'm using. I opened the black box. I pulled the SATA cables and examined them for anything out of the ordinary. I put them back again. I opened the terminal to check if I have access to the hard drives. #smartctl -a /dev/all-the-drives I added the faulty drive to the RAID array with: #mdadm --manage --add /dev/md0 /dev/faulty-drive ...

I have to find out if the property tax for the house is ready by Friday. I am sure that the 20th is the deadline for payment. I want to avoid penalties. I will call the Assessor's office today or tomorrow.

Some required apps in my Android tablet and mobile phone are: email app (default), messaging app (default), Chrome browser are on top of the list. Calendar app, To-do app, Facebook, Twitter, Feedly and Keepass. VLC for media player. Dropbox and another cloud app in my case it's Megasync. The default file manager always sucks so I download ES File Explorer. Spotify, Skype (for some friends who aren't in Messenger), FBReader (ebook) and a document scanner.

I watched a Youtube clip of Copying Beethoven. It's the scene where the master composer was performing Symphony #9 and was nearly totally deaf. He had an assistant conducting behind the scene. Symphony #9, Ode to Joy, one of the most loved among his works. I am inspired to listen for the rest of the day to the classics.

I think this is only the second time it happened to me. Tied in a race.

It happened in the early morning, at 5 AM, while I'm sleeping. Unattended-upgrades checks for updates. It ran and downloaded the patch along with the regular updates. It sent a mail to root which is sent to me, or my regular email. So I know that the update manager ran and downloaded the packages. Installed it. But see the warning below the header! A reboot is required because the kernel is involved. To finish the kernel install I have to reboot the system.

I prefer to have 3 partitions by default when I'm installing Linux. It's usually a good idea to prepare the hard drives, partition it before hand when installing your operating system. I prefer to have /boot, / (root) and /home in separate partitions. I have /boot so I can ensure that my system will boot at least into a console if I needed to make some maintenance jobs to grub or to /etc/fstab. With /boot I have some way of editing the system files. Of course / is where the operating system files are. I have /home to protect my files and to ensure I can make backups. If you need to jump from a distro to another one, all that you have to do is install it on / and then mount the existing /home to your installation. A lot of new users are asking how to install a distro without wiping out their data. Keep your data on a separate partition and your /home (user data) becomes portable. Some other partition schemes are available according to one's needs and u...

Apticron is a computer program that runs on a Unix shell. What this means is it runs on a command-line interpreter. It runs once a day and generates a mail listing packages which are pending an upgrade. So this shell script tells you through email that your machine have pending upgrades. If you want to keep track of what packages were upgraded the last time Apticron ran, what packages were upgraded or not upgraded, the information is an email away from an system administrator. Files are in /etc/apticron/apticron.conf and /etc/cron.d/apticron.

I like Android Marshmallow a lot and I like that Wave8 does not add anything to it. It has the vanilla android. WV8-M HD+ has a quad core A17 processor, a 2 GB RAM and a 12 GB storage. I would like it more if it has at least 4 GB RAM for multi tasking. I have delay issues in launching apps. I have lags in click / swipe responses. The battery is fine. The front camera is 2 MP and the back camera is 8 MP.  I have not used it extensively but so far it takes excellent pictures.

I posted a how to the last time I talked about Postfix here.   I neglected to add that if you are using a firewall, which I highly recommend, then you should add an entry to your firewall rules regarding Postfix. I happen to use ufw as frontend for iptables. So just type: #ufw allow Postfix #ufw reload Check your ufw status by typing: #ufw status verbose or #ufw status numbered Happy New Year!  Cheers!