Hardware

Mount network drives in Ubuntu

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"blades" by gothopotam, on Flickr

Network drives sitting in a server rack. Credit to Flickr user gothopotam.

The situation

A workstation is running Linux Mint 17 (based on Ubuntu 14.04), and the user needs permanent access to network drives stored on a Windows Server. The drives appear on Windows workstations like so:

M: Data

N: Secret Files

What we need to do is make sure that each network drive is automatically mapped and mounted on boot. Luckily for us, doing this is easy with a little help from the CIFS package and a few tweaks.

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Dell Latitude E5510 Network Boot

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Recently I’d been set the task of imaging some recently-wiped and donated laptops for one of our clients. Because I was imaging a Linux distro (or more specifically Edubuntu 14.04), I decided to set up a DRBL server (also known as Clonezilla Live), which allows you to use a computer’s network card to distribute images. The laptops were imaging fine, at least until I came upon a Dell Latitude E5510 laptop.

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First DDR4 capable servers starting to arrive

First DDR4 capable servers starting to arrive

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Supermicro DDR4 RAMA couple of months ago I posted about DDR4 SDRAM being one of the next exciting developments in computing, and now we’re starting to see our first servers becoming available running the much faster DDR4 options. The new servers are dual-CPU (no single-CPU servers running on the new platform just yet, but they’re just around the corner).

A recent Supermicro release profiled their move from their existing Platinum DXR motherboard platform to the new Platinum DXG. Front and center in the improvements (indicated by bold lettering in the table below) is the support for up to 1TB of DDR4, which will allow for greater server performance and reliability.

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Custom Servers

Business, Hardware, Server , , , , , 0 Comments

Computerworld released an interesting article not too long ago, which mentioned that recent market trends had seen demand for custom servers grow by a whopping 47.2% in the final quarter of last year, while demand for servers from more well-established vendors fell by 4.4% in the same period. This poses an interesting question: what exactly is the worth in going with a custom server for your business, and is it a better option than going with the large & established “traditional” vendors?

Businesses would likely buy a custom server over a brand-name one for the following reasons:
  • Cost benefits:  a custom server can often be up to 50% cheaper than those offered by traditional vendors (Dell, HP, IBM, etc).
  • Provider flexibility:  Many smaller IT companies have no access to the reseller channels that Dell, HP, or IBM sell through.  If this is the case for your IT provider, it can exclude them from being able to provide the solution.
  • Hardware flexibility:  Businesses may have requirements that vary slightly from the configurations provided by bigger vendors. If you’re buying an HP server with a support plan, your only option is HP hardware – and these costs can add up incredibly quickly.
  • Support local commerce: By buying a custom server, businesses can support smaller, local IT support companies. It means that you are helping to create jobs in the local community, rather than seeing most of your outlay go offshore.
These are all great reasons to buy a custom server.  But what about the downsides?
  • Vendor Reputation:  With a smaller company comes a greater risk that you’re buying something of poor quality – or the risk that the company might go bankrupt. When it comes to the piece of equipment that will be storing most of your sensitive data, as well as being a centrepiece of day-to-day operations, you don’t really want to buy an over-priced coffee table.
  • Uncertainty:  There are lots of smaller computer shops out there who simply don’t understand the difference between consumer-grade hardware, and server-grade hardware.  These companies will sell their customers a “beefed-up” PC instead of a genuine server-grade machine, because it’s cheaper.  While consumer-grade hardware is just as capable in terms of speed, it provides nowhere near the same reliability or management options.
  • Vendor Support Plans:  Finally, server support plans from big vendors are good.  They’re expensive as heck, and require your server to only make use of their proprietary hardware, but when something breaks, they’re there.  Depending on which service level you buy, they can get a replacement server to you in as little as 4 hours!
Here at Gravity, we have experience with both IBM servers, and custom-built servers.  In our experience, the custom servers have outperformed the IBM servers by miles.  We haven’t done enough with the HP servers to pass any judgement, mostly because the pricing of their components is such that I’ve never been able to recommend them to any of my clients.
Configurability, compatibility with non-proprietary hardware, out-of-band management, and price are all key reasons why I would recommend a custom-built server over an IBM server any day.
Brother HL-2240D on Debian/Ubuntu/Mint misaligned on page

Brother HL-2240D on Debian/Ubuntu/Mint misaligned on page

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I’ve had the problem a few times, where a Brother laser printer seems to misunderstand the alignment or margins on a page. This results in the left margin being too far towards the middle of the page, and the right margin being beyond the printable page area, making the page quite unbalanced.

Brother HL-2240D

Brother HL-2240D

For me, this problem manifested even with the official Brother Linux drivers for my printer.

Turns out this is actually a problem with CUPS itself, not the print driver. There’s a confirmed bug for this issue, filed against CUPS here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cups/+bug/1184663

A quick & tidy workaround for this issue is to manually override the print renderer for the printer, like so:

lpadmin -p PRINTER-NAME -o pdftops-renderer-default=pdftops

You’ll need to change “PRINTER-NAME” to reflect the name of your printer.

If this fixed your problem, please subscribe to the bug report so the package maintainers prioritise it.

I found this fix through an AskUbuntu question here: http://askubuntu.com/a/349800

Ubuntu (all variants): wireless USB keyboard unresponsive with LUKS full-disk encryption

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If you’ve been following my posts lately, you’ll have seen that I’m quite keen on encryption and privacy, particularly following the ongoing Snowden revelations, and the 2013 GCSB furore here in New Zealand.

So I went out and purchased my favourite flavour of super-robust USB drive, the beautiful Corsair Survivor 3.0, and proceeded to install Linux Mint on it with LUKS full-disk encryption.  You can see an overview of how I did this at my blog post here:  http://www.gravitycomputing.co.nz/installing-linux-mint-usb-drive/

But there was a problem.  When the system prompted me for the password to unlock my newly-encrypted drive, the password prompt wouldn’t take any input.  In fact, the keyboard was completely unresponsive, even though it worked fine in the BIOS!

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