Author Archives: Kirk Kosinski
Stuck drive tray on Panasonic Q
I recently dusted off my Panasonic Q GameCube to play some Mario Kart: Double Dash!!. It powered on successfully, but unfortunately the drive tray would not open. Thus began my quest to fix this classic game console.
STEC SSD firmware updates with IBM SAS/SATA update utility
I have an IBM-branded STEC MACH8 SSD installed in a Supermicro server with a PDSME+ motherboard. This 50 GB SLC SSD works great as a Logzilla for ZFS, but updating the firmware can be a hassle. Getting the latest firmware … Continue reading
Fixing a Windows PC that fell off the domain with netdom resetpwd
Recently I had a problem with a Windows 7 desktop serving as my HTPC. It stopped automatically connecting to my PEAP-secured Wi-Fi network at boot time, and would only connect if someone with Wi-Fi permissions logged on to it. The … Continue reading
Configuring CentOS 6 and Windows VMs for virsh console on KVM
Accessing the console of a KVM VM directly rather than via SSH (Linux) or RDP (Windows) can occasionally be useful. For example, if a Linux VM suffers a disk issue and is stuck at a single-user mode prompt, SSH won’t … Continue reading
Securing Wi-Fi with PEAP and FreeRADIUS on CentOS
I recently read Low-cost RADIUS servers for Wi-Fi security, a review of four RADIUS servers with an emphasis on Wi-Fi network security use cases. The main complaint about FreeRADIUS, the only no-cost option mentioned, is the difficulty of configuration. To see … Continue reading
Install VMware Tools in CentOS using yum
When running CentOS (or RHEL, or Scientific Linux) in a VM on VMware ESXi, you may want to install VMware Tools. Modern Linux distributions include the drivers necessary to run the OS in a VM on VMware ESXi, even those for PVSCSI controllers and … Continue reading