If Docker Sandboxes reports 'daemon failed to start properly after 10 retries' while the daemon log says the API server started successfully, check where your XDG directories live.

I have several Ubuntu servers running Docker, and wanted a quick summary of the Docker environment whenever I logged in using SSH.

I could run docker ps, but most of the time I only need to know whether the containers are running and healthy.

The Ubuntu Message of the Day (MOTD) is a convenient place to display that …

One of the (few) things I liked about using Windows in the lab was being able to use bginfo to show basic host information as the background.

For my lab machines, I like being able to see basic information, without a resource-heavy application doing the display.

Conky meets that need.

Highly configurable, with a lot of …

I have a few virtual machine deployed on in my home lab, and my general OS of choice is Ubuntu Mate.

Not as barebones basic as XFCE4, and not as resource-intensive as Gnome3 or KDE.

One of the first things I do after rolling out a virtual machine is to disable the screensaver and lock screen on any OS.

On Ubuntu Mate, …

Most computer new computer hardware that will fail quickly, will fail within the first month of usage, if not sooner.

Given that, it's recommended to do a burn-in test for any new computer hardware, including hard drives.

I've been using a disk burn-in test to stress test hard drives as I've been replacing them in my …

Sooner or later, every system will have a drive failure.

ZFS was designed with this in mind.

I noticed in my /var/log/kern.log file error messages about one of the drives in my ZFS pool.

Dec  8 07:11:17 nas kernel: [738110.398391] ata8.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x80000004 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
Dec  8 07:11:17 nas …