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 [...]
UTC Conversion to United States Timezones
Setting CRON jobs on servers can be painful to wrap your head around the shift of UTC to your timezone. Especially thanks to daylight savings times where a UTC-6 becomes a UTC-5 for a few months of the year. CST ⇒ Central Standard TimeCDT ⇒ Central Daylight Time 2018 daylight savings start March 11, 2018 2AM to Nov 4, 20192019 daylight [...]
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 [...]
Xcode to Swift Versions
Recently I’ve ran into an old legacy project that my company built years ago and was then left untouched for a while. Having to open up that old code quickly ran into the issue of what version of Xcode do you need to be able to run Swift 2.3 code? Download Older Xcodes from https://developer.apple.com/download/more/ Swift 2.2 [...]
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 [...]
