Linux

Things to change on a default Linux install

O/S

/tmp as tmpfs - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/tmpfs

logs that don't go on forever - https://github.com/azlux/log2ram

systemd logs that don't go on forever /etc/systemd/journald.conf:

SystemMaxUse=50M 

Faster, more responsive kernel (if stuck on an LTS for everything else) : https://liquorix.net/#install

Falken Sun, 03/12/2023 - 09:35
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Monitoring Powerline speeds ( TP-Link TL-WPA8630P, TL-PA8033PKIT, AV1300)

Submitted by Falken on Sun, 02/26/2023 - 13:37

Get or compile https://github.com/qca/open-plc-utils in particular `plcstat`

For some reason it only reports devices other than the one connected to, so you will need at least two machines to monitor the whole network, and it has to be run as root.

So I have two root crontab's that sync to the same place the results of `....plcstat -i wlan0 -t` which looks like

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Using a Sun Type 7 USB keyboard in KDE

Submitted by Falken on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 18:47

If you look around, everyone make it complicated. It isn't.

* Settings > Hardware > Keyboard
Select the correct keyboard modal, then on the Layouts tab add a new one for your language, layout, and select the 'type 7' variant.
Move it to the top of the list so it's default.
Enable nothing in the 3rd Advanced tab

* Reboot - you should find the volume and power keys work

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Monitoring TP-Link Powerline speeds on a TL-WPA8630P

Edit This no longer works on the latest firmware because the calls are now encrypted. It's trivial to reverse with the AES key just being based on timestamp, but there is an easier way :
Monitoring Powerline speeds ( TP-Link TL-WPA8630P, TL-PA8033PKIT, AV1300)

Firstly, you'll need to use your web browser's network debug panel to intercept a login request to the access points web GUI.
You'll want to find the 'Basic admin' cookie.

Falken Sun, 12/29/2019 - 10:37
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Raspbian and media keys

Submitted by Falken on Sun, 03/06/2016 - 18:49

Just got a Raspberry Pi3 and a bluetooth keyboard and annoyed that the media keys for doing things like change the column don't work ?
Just add these to ~/.config/openbox/lxde-pi-rc.xml after all the other <keybind> before the </keyboard>

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Epson XP-312 ink status script

Submitted by Falken on Sat, 01/24/2015 - 14:29

The following script outputs the percentage of each ink tank from an Epson XP-312 313 or 315 series WiFi enabled printer.

The output looks like

K:96 C:80 M:12 Y:34

which is perfect for feeding into Cacti or other monitoring systems. Guess I'd best go get some magenta ink !

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Linux (Kubuntu) on Dell Latitude E5430

Submitted by Falken on Thu, 04/25/2013 - 21:50

tl;dr important stuff all works. Minor stuff like finger print scanner easily fixable

The hardware is 'certified' by Canonical but this is meaningless because it doesn't say what of the many options Dell offer for the E5430 was used. It also doesn't list correct details for hardware such as Bluetooth, or even that the finger print scanner exists. And there is no way to submit fixes. And the contact us page is 404 compliant. So let's hope Google finds this for you instead :-)

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ColdFusion forgets to use UTF-8 files after logs rotated

Submitted by Falken on Wed, 12/19/2012 - 10:03

For a long time, it's been recommended to set up Linux's logrotate system to manage the size of cfserver.log, which can easily grow to be a very large size on production systems, and ColdFusion seems unable to manage itself, unlike the other logs.

I recently discovered however, that a restart of ColdFusion via logrotate was changing the way files were written and read.

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