Linux

Warning: If you run fdisk on the wrong drive here or there is some important data left, you might lose all your data and it will be very hard to restore. Before running these commands, triple-check that you’ve used the correct device (e.g. /dev/sdh)!

In order to create a partition table on a device (e.g. /dev/sdh – /dev/sdh1 is not a device but a partition, so using that does not make any sense!), run these commands

sudo fdisk <device file>

If the device doesn’t have a valid partition table, fdisk will automatically create a partition table (but not write it to the disk yet). It will show this output if that is the case (the identifier is random and different every time):

Device does not contain a recognized partition table.
Created a new DOS disklabel with disk identifier 0x81ee11ff.

Command (m for help):

If you are sure that you want to run the partition, enter w and press return to write the partition table to disk & exit.

The partition table will be effective immediately, but will not contain any partition. In order to create a partition (for this example we will create one partition being as large as the entire device), run

sudo fdisk <device file>

again.

This time, enter the n command (new partition). When it asks you about the partition type and its size, just press return every time to select the defaults. It should look like this (<return> added to show you where you should press return).

Command (m for help): n
Partition type
p primary (0 primary, 0 extended, 4 free)
e extended (container for logical partitions)
Select (default p): <return>
Partition number (1-4, default 1): <return>
First sector (2048-31143935, default 2048): <return>
Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G,T,P} (2048-31143935, default 31143935): <return>

After that, when fdisk prompts for a command again (i.e. when it says Command (m for help): ), enter w in order to write the changes (i.e. the new partition) to the disk & exit. After fdisk exits, you can see the partition in /dev, e.g. /dev/sdh1

After that, you’ll likely need to create a filesystem on that partition, e.g. sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdh1 or sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdh1 . Make sure to create the correct filesystem for the operating system and usecase the device will be used in.

This error is caused by an expired GPG key that is used in the MongoDB repository.

This key has already been renewed, but you need to tell GPG to update it. Run:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv 0C49F3730359A14518585931BC711F9BA15703C6

For more details, see this GitHub post.

Just press Ctrl+X. If you dont have unsaved changes, this will exit nano immediately.

In case you have unsaved changes, it will ask you whether to save those changes after pressing.

• Press Y to tell it to save the changes you’ve made. It will then ask you to check or enter the filename to save to. Once you are finished with the filename, press Enter.
• Press N to discard all changes (you won’t be able to restore your changes later) and exit nano immediately.

baloo is a KDE desktop search component that indexes files in order to speed up the search.

The index can get quite large, e.g. my index consumes more than 2 GB of HDD space:

$ balooctl indexSize
Actual Size: 2,04 GiB
Expected Size: 1,33 GiB

           PostingDB:     313,32 MiB    22.924 %
         PosistionDB:     521,05 MiB    38.122 %
            DocTerms:     167,93 MiB    12.287 %
    DocFilenameTerms:      53,46 MiB     3.912 %
       DocXattrTerms:            0 B     0.000 %
              IdTree:       9,79 MiB     0.716 %
          IdFileName:      41,71 MiB     3.052 %
             DocTime:      25,80 MiB     1.887 %
             DocData:       2,02 MiB     0.148 %
   ContentIndexingDB:      14,86 MiB     1.087 %
         FailedIdsDB:            0 B     0.000 %
             MTimeDB:       9,12 MiB     0.667 %

If you don’t want to use baloo anyway or if you just want to re-index all files, you might want to delete the entire index:

rm -rf ~/.local/share/baloo

Note that if you haven’t disabled baloo using balooctl stop ; balooctl disable it might silently re-create the index in the background.

Problem:

You’ve uploaded a DEB package to a Launchpad PPA (e.g. using dput), but you get an error message similar to this:

Solution:

You need to use a proper email address (which must be registered in Launchpad) in debian/changelog .

In order to do this, set the $DEBEMAIL environment variable before running dch

Example:

export [email protected]
dch [...]

If $DEBEMAIL is not set, [username]@[hostname] will be used

When running smartctl on your hard drive, you often get a plethora of information that can be hard to interpret for unexperienced users. This post attempts to provide aid in interpreting what the technical reasons behind the error messages are. If you’re looking for advice on whether to replace your hard drive, the only guidance I can give you is it might fail any time, so better backup your data, but it might also run for many years to come.. Furthermore, this article does not describe basic SMART WHEN_FAILED checking but rather interpretation of more subtle signs of possibly impending HDD failures.

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A few days ago, Let’s Encrypt into public beta. At the time of writing this article, almost 120k certificateshave been issued, including the certificate for TechOverflow.

I really like the Let’s Encrypt service and I believe it might actually change the way people perceive HTTPS encryption. However, there is one rarely-mentioned side-effect when protecting your domains with their certificates.

Let’s Encrypt publishes certificate transparency logs at crt.sh. This transparency does not come without side-effects, however: crt.sh effectively publishes.

In other words, hiding sites from the public by not publishing their (sub-)domain names anywhere will not work when you issue a certificate for the domain on services like Let’s Encrypt.

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After upgrading my server from Debian Wheezy to Jessie, I encountered the following error during apt-get update:

/usr/lib/apt/methods/https: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libhogweed.so.2: undefined symbol: __gmpn_cnd_add_n

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Problem:

You want to query the current resolution of a screen connected as framebuffer device (e.g. /dev/fb0). Continue reading →

Symptomatics:

I have both the Toshiba Z830 and R850 for a couple of years now. On both, I’m using the current LTS versions of KUbuntu (at the time of writing this, 14.04). Although, I’m absolutely satisfied with them, there’s a little issue regarding the backlight:

On startup, the backlight works perfectly well. I can change the settings using FN+F6/F7 without any issues. However, after putting the device into standby and waking it up again, pressing said hotkeys shows the backlight percentage dialog, but does not change the brightness.

Because Ubuntu’s SSD reboots are pretty fast Iimply didn’t care about the issue for the past few years. However, out of curiosity, I successfully fixed the issue today.

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Problem:

You want to create a binary DEB package of the msgpack C++ binding. However, there is no official DEB package available.

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