This is going to be one of those posts where I just dump stuff. Power failures are shite, and if your server isn't talking with your UPS, it won't shut down gracefully. This is the story of my trying to get APC's PowerChute Network Shutdown working on a ProxmoxVE 5.1 environment.

Note I opted out of using either nut or apcupsd, because I had a nice fancy Network Management Card (NMC2 / Schneider AP9631) available. Also, I wanted to shut down more than a single server, so a USB or …

Back when I was getting this blog set up, I had a short whinge about the default way that the Flex theme created links to pages.

Specficially, creating a link to "Tuna Patties" (for example), Flex would append the link with an identical stub, such as https://www.ericlight.com/tuna-patties.html#tuna-patties

I thought this was silly, so I found a way to fix it, but never bothered submitting a Pull Request to Alexandre because I figured it was intentional.

Well, it turns out I wasn't the only one …

My personal laptop is an old Dell Latitude E6410. One of the things I actually love about it, is the fact that the keyboard has a backlight.

However, because Linux, sometimes that backlight just stops working. When this happens, you'll see error messages in dmesg, such as:

dell_wmi: Unknown key with type 0x0011 and code 0x01e2 pressed

If this happens to you, just run this command:

$ sudo echo 7 > /sys/devices/platform/dell-laptop/leds/dell\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness

You can echo a higher number if you want your keyboard brighter, but …

While trying to monitor the status of one of our wireless access points, I discovered that RouterOS returns an incorrect SNMP status code for the wlan interfaces when there are no clients connected to the interface. This is at least present in RouterOS v6.40.3, on a Mikrotik cAPlite (RBcAPL-2nD).

Specifically, when the wifi interface is up, but has zero connected clients, the OID returns an SNMP value of 2 ("down"). This status is incorrect - the interface isn't down, it's merely waiting for an external connection.

The specific OID …

I discovered a while ago that NFS requires DNS to function correctly: https://redmine.ixsystems.com/issues/4983

That's somewhat annoying, because when your DNS server goes down (and your backups are stored on your FreeNAS server and accessed over NFS), is precisely the time when you really want your backups to be accessible.

However, turns out it doesn't aaaaactuallyyyyy need DNS... it needs name resolution. Specifically, FreeNAS just needs to be able to resolve it's own hostname. Cue the handy-dandy hosts file.

Under Network -> Global Configuration -> Host name data …

I got a second-hand Samsung Galaxy S5 for my mum yesterday (a G900I model, from Telstra), and I spent some time getting it ready.

Firstly, I downloaded the most-recent Telstra firmware image. At time of writing, that's G900IDVU1CQJ2. Telstra appears to be the only carrier still releasing stock firmware for this phone, so I downloaded the Telstra version even though we're connecting to Spark New Zealand. This means the phone will at least be running the most up-to-date baseband and modem firmware.

Note - if you try this, and find that …

We had accumulated a certain amount of technical debt, due to a Wiki solution that was selected a few years ago: Dekiwiki, by MindTouch. Unfortunately a few months after implementation, MindTouch Core (which Dekiwiki builds on) was well-and-truly deprecated back in 2013.

It all happened before my time, but it seems as if Dekiwiki came as a pre-built VMware Appliance, based on Debian Etch (Debian 4.0; released in 2007). After giving our Dekiwiki environment some serious side-eye for a while, I finally decided to get my hands dirty and …

During my recent Wrecked-phone Saga, I had some trouble flashing my firmware. My phone was broken at the time, so I couldn't enable ADB Debugging - therefore adb wasn't an option. OEM Bootlock was on, so fastboot wasn't an option. My Recovery bootloader was also broken. I thought my phone was bricked.

That's until I remembered Heimdall.

Heimdall is specifically a tool for working with the partitions on Samsung phones - other visitors need not apply. It works a treat for my Samsung Galaxy S5 (kltedv) though.

Heimdall, however, is old. The …

So... I wrecked my phone last night. :-(

Android's phone encryption feature has been around for aaaages, so I was confident when I started the encryption process last night. Unfortunately, something went wrong, and last night I discovered that everything was toast.

After a bit of digging, I found someone else with exactly the same problem!

"unable to boot into my phone as it sits at the boot screen. When I try to boot into TWRP, it asks for my password. [...] it appears to decrypt the partition and mount, but then …

I've spent a little while working with the APC Network Management Cards now, and firmware updates are a total pain.

The biggest issue is that the UPS power outlets need to be powered off in order to flash the firmware, otherwise there's a terrifyingly-high chance that the NMC (a ~$700 card) will completely shit itself, and die permanently. Aside from that, I've never managed to get updates working properly from the web interface.

Fortunately, the card is hot-pluggable, so if you have a spare UPS hanging around, you can unplug …