If I only had a brain

Microsoft PowerToys Cheat Sheet: How to Get It, and What Can It Do?

So many great tools! Always can use a reminder to check it out.

Source: Microsoft PowerToys Cheat Sheet: How to Get It, and What Can It Do?

Repairing SLES10 on VMware after Veeam

<TLDR> Use a recovery environment to re-install grub! </TLDR>

I have been getting the dreaded “No Operating System” when restoring a VMware guest using Veeam. Here is my story of how I fixed it.

I have two old SLES guests running on VMware 7. I use Veeam to back these systems up. One of my SLES guests has several virtual hard drives, which shouldn’t be a problem, but is. It will not start on restore from Veeam. The only way I’ve had consistent success is by (s)FTP and making a copy of the VMware folder of the guest, then using VMware’s datastore browser and uploading the files (also can use sFTP) and then adding a existing guest. Not a terrible work around, but the guest must be off to get it’s files. One can not do this with a hot guest.

After years of using the FTP solution, I decided to get to the bottom of this.

The first thing I noticed was the second virtual disk was being used as the primary disk in the VMware configuration. Odd. This particular guest has two drives, the primary disk at 68gb and the secondary at 66gb. The secondary disk has no partitions and is only defined at the hardware level – it is not mounted. When backing up, everything looks good – the larger disk is shown as primary. When restoring, everything continues to look good until you finish the restore and look at the machine in VMware. Now it shows the 66gb disk as primary!! Booting results in “No Operating System” being shown.

So I tried a few methods of swapping positions – simply editing the guest configuration and deleting both drives and repopulating them with existing drives pointing to the correct files – no effect same message of “No OS”. I also tried some fancy renaming of the .vmdk files… all no luck. Still getting the “No Operating System” when booting no matter what I tried.

So I suspected the virtual controllers may be the culprit – I am moving from a real ‘server’ with RAID and SAS drives to a simple i5 box I have at home, and VMware cares about SCSI/ISA Controllers. Any and all muckery here was wasted effort and added to my deepening dread that I had a major IT asset which I did not have confidence in being able to recover in case of a disaster.

After many attempts at editing the Virtual Machine – I tried modifying the .vmx file directly, copying and pasting sections from a working guest. As expected, this by in large broke the machine outright far more than fixed it. After only a couple hours it was clear this was not a path to success.

After a rare good nights sleep I decided to approach the situation differently. I have been working from the point of view that the guest VM is broken… not really listening to what it was telling me.. “No Operating System”. It wasn’t the guest, it was the OS! Grub was clobbered!

Fortunately I had a SLES10.1 .iso (same vintage is always best!), and was able to boot into a recovery session on the guest.

$fdisk -l showed that the swap partition was positioned in front of the data partition… it has been trying to boot the swap partition and finding nothing there!!

So, the fix:

fdisk -l to show the devices, noting the bootable partition is at (in my case) /dev/sda2
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
cat /mnt/etc/fstab and note /dev/sda2 mounting to “/” (good!)
grub-install –root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda

This reinstalls grub so that it looks to the second partition to boot from. Reboot and presto – it works!!

I tried this with SLES15 but no luck – that uses grub2. Tried a old SystemRescueCD.iso and had success using it’s version of grub. Seems pretty resilient.

A pretty straight forward fix, once I was on the right track! So hard to see the right track when you are working in a team of one and deep in your box.

Handy guide I followed:

Source: How to reinstall the GRUB boot loader | Support | SUSE

How to reinstall the GRUB boot loader _ Support _ SUSE (local copy)

ouch!

4tb Seagate HD running in a 2 bay Buffalo desktop NAS running at 136f!

in a 60 degree room. Great, now I need to monitor them?

Check if your USB 3.0 device supports USB Attached SCSI (UAS) Protocol

When used with an SSD, UAS considerably increases the random read and write speeds compared to BOT. To see if UAS is being used by Windows, do the following.

Press Win + X keys together on the keyboard and click Device Manager.
Expand the “Storage Controllers” node and see if it has a “USB Attached SCSI (UAS) Mass Storage Device” listed. If not, then expand “Universal Serial Bus controllers” tree node in Device Manager.
Double click on the “USB Mass Storage Device” for which you wish to check this.
Go to the Driver tab and click the Driver Details button. If it says USBSTOR.sys, then it means Windows is using the older Bulk-Only Transport Protocol with your USB device. If it says UASPStor.sys, then it means UAS Protocol is in use.

Source: Check if your USB 3.0 device supports USB Attached SCSI (UAS) Protocol

How to Run a Local LLM in Linux

I am using LMDE6 and a Nvidia RTX 5000 16gb to run various Local LLM A.I. models. I have been following this guide with good success: How to Run a Local LLM with Ubuntu

Libre Hardware Monitor

Source: Releases · LibreHardwareMonitor/LibreHardwareMonitor

How to generate a Battery Report on Windows 10 and 11 | Windows Central

Source: How to generate a Battery Report on Windows 10 and 11 | Windows Central

Windows 10 Support ends in 1 year. My thoughts.

So back in August there was a flurry of activity around this subject. In the time since, we have seen MS capitulate on the hardware requirement, now stating that your incompatible hardware ‘may’ not receive updates in the future.

I am still undecided at this time – mostly because Microsoft has pissed me off one too many times and I have lost faith in them. They are liars. They are unfaithful. They are drive by greed and are insecure as to what they stand for.

These traits do not contribute to a supportive foundation – whatever they build today will fall tomorrow as they have no belief in their own work. Windows 11 is the best evidence of these statements as possible.

Additionally, it appears that Windows 10 will in fact get updates for quite some time – MS is offering paid support for at least 3 years, and as we can see with their continued support of Windows 7 in 2023, they likely will continue to release critical patches for years to come.

0Patch has already publicly stated that they will offer patches for Windows 10 until at least 2030.

On top of all of this, I am unsure as to why anyone needs to patch anything anyway. Perhaps browsers, when critical faults are addressed, but at a OS level I have serious questions as to why one should update at all. With a basic firewall and trusted local users, some common sense regarding what you click on and download, I fail to see the need for updating. In fact with as rushed and haphazard as Microsoft’s updates are, applying updates immediately after release is a foolhardy practice and not recommended by most industry pros.

I have several Windows 10 systems on my home network that do not receive updates (for years now) and they are just fine.

The article linked below has some smart comments, I’ll post a few of the links suggested within, but give it a read.

Source: Windows 10 Support ends in exactly 1 year – here are your options – gHacks Tech News

https://www.0patch.com/pricing.html
https://massgrave.dev/
https://quad9.net/
https://safing.io/features/

File Types to Block for email filters

If you have the means, then by all means block these 241 file extensions from your incoming email. I have provided both a flat text file of the extensions and a formatted text file for Barracuda Email Gateway Defense. Once you bulk add, you can easily remove any specific extensions you want to allow through.

file extensions to block

barracuda file extensions to block