Holy crap what a disappointment. I've been jonesing for an upgrade for about 6 months now (my current desktop is a Mac Mini 2009) and was eagerly awaiting an updated mini.

So the new mini has a new Ivy Bridge cpu. Whoop-dee-doo.

It only has one Thunderbolt port but at least it does have USB 3.

It only has Intel 4000 graphics. That's a crappy gpu that uses main memory. The reason I wanted a newer mini was so I could play a video game made in the last 5 years. As far as video games go, this mini is worse than the last one and only marginally better than my 3 year old one!

Looks like it's Hackintosh for me because this mini sucks.

I currently have a two disk raid1 array (2TB in size) that is the storage for my LVM but is running out of space. I want to add two more drives to bring available storage to 4TB but I also want to convert raid1 to raid10 to increase the performance of my storage. Here's how I did it.

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To autostart the very excellent SickBeard and SABnzbd on OSX (Snow Leopard in my case) you need to create two plist files and then tell launchd to start them.

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Any Standard Template Library (STL) pro doesn't need to be told this but for somebody moving from MFC to the STL like me, the following would no doubt be handy.

The problem is that std::map creates a new object anytime you have map[key], even as an rvalue. So here is a super simple template function to quickly check if a map has a key.

template<typename T>
bool has_key( const T& map, typename const T::key_type& key )
{
    T::const_iterator iter = map.find( key );
    return iter != map.end();
}

// eg. has_key( my_map, "key" );

The tiny bit of magic here is the typename in typename const T::key_type&. typename is required due to deep c++ voodoo that I really don't understand.

Or you could just…

map.count( key ) > 0;

Always learning.

There is something seriously wrong with my server, I can only write over nfs at 5 MB/s. Local writes rarely break 35 MB/s. I've tried disabling sync but to no avail. So… I'm afraid I'm going to have to dump Solaris for Linux and part of that is re-arranging my drives.

As a stop-gap measure I want to run Solaris in a virtual machine, and I want my LSI 2008 controller to be pci passed through, so I had to move my rpool from one controller to the LSI.

Like everything Solaris, this was harder than it should have been. Solaris 11 does not have failsafe mode so all of the awesome howto's only apply to Solaris 10.

# boot to single user mode via grub
kernel$ ... -s
# can't boot, can't find rpool

# boot with solaris cd, thankfuly my motherboard is awesome and I
# can redirect an iso into a virtual cdrom via ipmi

zpool import rpool
# error, previously mounted on other host (or something like that)

zpool import -f rpool
zpool status
# very different disk ids

reboot
# success!

I was trying to get multicast working and all of the ancient howtos weren't helping.

Purely by accident I found the solution to the multicast “hello world” of pinging 224.0.0.1.

# setup the routes
ip route add 224.0.0.0/4 dev eth0

# try to ping the multicast aware hosts on your lan with 2 pings
ping -c 2 224.0.0.1
# 100% packet loss

# stop ignoring broadcasts
sudo echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_broadcasts

# try to ping the multicast aware hosts on your lan with 2 pings
ping -c 2 224.0.0.1
# 100% packet success!

# make your change permanent
sudo echo "net.ipv4.icmp_echo_ignore_broadcasts = 0" >> /etc/sysctl.conf

Installing Virtualbox 4.1.6 on Solaris 11 Express hung my machine and even prevented it rebooting successfully. I suspect a faulty kernel module. Thankfully I have auto-snapshots running and could rollback my rpool after booting from the install cd.

This was a truly miserable experience as my Solaris-Fu is much weaker than my Linux-Fu.

• Boot from install dvd
• zfs rollback rpool@thismorning

Based off of a script by Adam Pierce. Mine is a little more user friendly.

Get latest version here.

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If you use (or are trying to) the very excellent Roundcube but you keep getting the white screen of death, then here's something to try.

As a quick test, disable the curl extension in your /etc/php.ini

;extension = curl.so

and restart your webserver…

sudo service httpd restart

If that seems to solve the problem (you can see the login screen and not a whitescreen) then try the fix that worked for me. Move curl.so after imap.so.

extension=imap.so
extension=curl.so

Your mileage may vary.

I have two Fedora 15 machines, they both authenticate using NIS and mount home directories via NFS. The first machine worked perfectly, the second did not. I could login via ssh (nis works) but all my file owners were nobody:users.

Anyhow, through much trial and error I learned about /etc/imapd.conf. So after booting my machine, if I restarted rpcidmapd and autofs then the file permissions were correct.

After much Googling I found this

Solution:

edit /etc/idmapd.conf
uncomment and edit Domain = <your nis domain>

If I had to guess, I think the NIS domain isn't being set until after rpc.idmapd and automount are started. That's why restarting the services later seems to work. Or whatever. Why it works on one fresh install but not the next I'll never know.