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 …

One of the things I always like about using VMWare's ESXi servers was the ability to access the console of the virtual machine (VM).

This ability also exists when using Linux KVM and Linux VMs, and is pretty simple to set up.

Bonus points after a small config change, it's much more usable.

Enable the console from …

Logging into one of my Linux boxes, I noticed I had a zombie process.

Welcome to Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS (GNU/Linux 5.4.0-88-generic x86_64)

  => There is 1 zombie process.

A zombie process is

Processes marked are dead processes (so-called "zombies") that remain because their parent has not destroyed them …