I'm a 32 year old UIUC Computer Engineer building mobile apps, websites and hardware integrations with an interest in 3D printing, biotechnology and Arduinos.
Mounting USB exfat drive on Ubuntu
If you run ubuntu in command line, it doesn't auto mount usb devices like when you have the GUI up. Here is how I handle removable drives that transition between Mac, Linux and Window computers.
Jenkins SSH Errors and How to Fix Them
Dealing with Jenkin’s SSH issues is definitely not enjoyable to troubleshoot. It’s a curse of Jenkins plugin architecture, connecting with SSH requires multiple SSH plugins to work together and to Jenkins, it just reports an error somewhere down in the plugin layer. The good news, is once you get through this issue, [...]
Setting Ubuntu SSH/CLI Prompt to have a user friendly server name
This is something I change on all new servers I setup, by default a lot of servers use their hostname as its IP, and if you are on a local static network, that might be meaningful to you. But if you get random IPs from cloud hosting like AWS, it isn’t too helpful. When I have multiple SSH terminals open, I want to make it clear [...]
Installing Ubuntu Linux on a PCIe NVMe drive
During my installation of Ubuntu 19.10 to a PCIe NVMe drive, you might run into a problem as soon as it starts copying data with an error like this: Current device storage tree: Shutdown Plan: Error: Could not stat device /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-eui.0100000000000000 Waiting on device path: /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-eui.0100000000000000 An error [...]
Retrofitting USB port on older APC BackUPS with RJ50
Before companies have standardized on USB, it was pretty common to find some strange connectors on equipment. Especially if they don’t want anyone to accidentally plug in the wrong thing. APC battery backups are a perfect example of using a RJ-50 plug to connect the USB signalling cable. To be fair, the RJ-50 plug with 10 [...]
Dell RPS-720 Cable Pinout
If you own a Dell Redundant Power Supply unit (e.g. RPS-600 or RPS-720), hopefully you have the original 4 cables it came with because they are very difficult to find and you can’t even order them from Dell. There are not many details about these cords online which adds to the mystery of them. Interestingly, they are not as [...]
Increasing EBS disk space to a running EC2 instance
One of the best parts of running a cloud solution is the ability to make some “hardware” level changes without even a reboot. First, in the AWS Console, go to the EBS Volume Screen and hopefully you have labelled your EBS volumes with human readable labels (or you will have to click on each volume and see what [...]
