The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Power User’ Category

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Productivity is about focus, which is hard, so setting up your life can help a lot

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/07

Thanks Twitter!:

I use a single 4K monitor for this, and either different full-screen workspaces or remote desktop/screen/logon sessions per job.

My phone is always on vibrate, and sometimes in a different room.

I read e-mail usually once every few days, and try to do social media and chat outside my concentration sessions.

I try to concentrate on once thing at a time without getting distracted.

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Leave a Comment »

PCIe bifurcation to split an x16 or x8 slot into multiple x4 channels: allows PCIe adapters with multiple NVMe cars

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/07

It looks like some X9 and X10 Supermicro boards already support PCIe bifurcation (splitting of PCIe slots into multiple channels), which might be worth a try to upgrade some of my older rigs to use NVMe instead of SATA storage as it will allow me to use adapters that support multiple NVMe devices into a single PCIe slot.

The X9 motherboards uses an LGA 2011-R socket, and the X10 motherboards an LGA 2011-R3 sockets.

Both use chipsets not being that different: the X9 uses the C600 series (which are similar to the X79 consumer series), and the X10 uses the C610 series (which are similar to the X99 consumer series).

This is what I found out about the bifurcation support for my boards:

References:

–jeroen

Posted in Hardware, Mainboards, Power User, SuperMicro, X10SRH-CF, X9SRi-3F, X9SRi-F | Leave a Comment »

Archive.is blog: Twitter archival is slow, so limit the number of tweets you save in it

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/04

[Wayback] Archive.is blog — The website has been slow for some time when…

The website has been slow for some time when archiving Twitter pages, but works fine with other websites. Is there a reason for that? Thx!

Anonymous

1. There are too many pages from Twitter in the queue, which reduces their priority (if it wasn’t for this condition, it would slow everything down)

2. Twitter API sometimes responds with “429 Too Many Requests” or other error, so it usually takes more than 1 attempt to capture the page.

I would suggest refraining from saving pages from Twitter for now, especially those people trying to save dozens or hundreds of tweets

–jeroen

Posted in archive.is / archive.today, Internet, Power User, SocialMedia, Twitter | Leave a Comment »

How to make a full backup of your Windows 10 PC | Windows Central

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/03

Quite an OK guide on how to backup and restore on Windows 10 (since so much has changed since Windows 7, and some Windows 7 stuff is still there but has moved)

[Wayback] How to make a full backup of your Windows 10 PC | Windows Central

In this guide, we’ll show you the steps to create a full backup of your computer, which includes everything from settings, apps, to files using the System Image Backup tool on Windows 10.

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7 | Leave a Comment »

Some insights on how readlink approached canonicalisation of a filename having symlinks

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/03

Cool, I didn’t realise how readlink operated, but found out a bit more in the answers to [Wayback] symlink – How to get full path of original file of a soft symbolic link? – Unix & Linux Stack Exchange, thanks to [Wayback] daisy, [Wayback] Peter.O and [Wayback] Gilles ‘SO- stop being evil’:

  • Try this line: 
    readlink -f `which command`

    If command is in your $PATH variable , otherwise you need to specify the path you know.

    -f will return a path to a non-existent final target, so long as the intermediate link targets exist… Use -e to avoid this, ie. -e will return null if the final target does not exist. – Peter.O

  • Under Linux, readlink reads the contents of a symlink, and readlink -f follows symlinks to symlinks to symlinks, etc., until it finds something that isn’t a symlink.

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, ash/dash, bash, bash, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

MemTest86 for MBR booting systems: use the really old version 4.3

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/02

Sometimes you come across old systems that do not support UEFI booting, so for memory testing you need tools that either are embedded on something like a Linux image that os in MBR, or the plain ISO download of older versions.

I opted for the latest “older” version 4.3 of MemTest86 [Wayback]:

As MemTest86 V9 supports only the newer UEFI platform, older PCs without UEFI support would be unable to boot MemTest86. In order to run MemTest86, PCs with legacy BIOS platform must use the older V4 release of MemTest86. The download links for the V4 downloads are still provided for those that prefer to work with the V4 bootable images.

V4 Windows Downloads: Download
Image for creating bootable CD [Wayback] Download
Image for creating bootable USB Drive [Wayback] Download
Image for creating bootable Floppy Drive [Wayback] Download
V4 Linux/Mac Downloads: Download
Image for creating bootable CD [Wayback] Download
Image for creating bootable USB Drive [Wayback] Download
Image for creating bootable Floppy Drive [Wayback] Download

–jeroen

Posted in DELL-9200, Hardware, HP XW6600, Memory, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Too bad: ESXi busybox has `diff`, but not `patch`

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/02

On my ESXi boxes, I have a directory with local scripts that in part depend on the machine.

So I contemplated patching the dending parts with patch.

Then I found out that the BusyBox that VMware built for ESXi does have diff, but not patch:

# $(readlink -f "`which diff`")
BusyBox v1.29.3 (2021-01-17 01:25:00 PST) multi-call binary.
BusyBox is copyrighted by many authors between 1998-2015.
Licensed under GPLv2. See source distribution for detailed
copyright notices.

Usage: busybox [function [arguments]...]
   or: busybox --list
   or: function [arguments]...

    BusyBox is a multi-call binary that combines many common Unix
    utilities into a single executable.  Most people will create a
    link to busybox for each function they wish to use and BusyBox
    will act like whatever it was invoked as.

Currently defined functions:
    addgroup, adduser, arch, ash, awk, basename, bunzip2, bzcat, bzip2, cat, chgrp, chmod, chown, chvt, cksum, clear, cp, crond,
    cut, date, dd, delgroup, deluser, diff, dirname, dnsdomainname, du, echo, egrep, eject, env, expr, false, fdisk, fgrep, find,
    fstrim, getty, grep, groups, gunzip, gzip, halt, head, hexdump, hostname, inetd, init, kill, ln, logger, login, ls, lzop,
    lzopcat, md5sum, mkdir, mkfifo, mknod, mktemp, more, mv, nohup, nslookup, od, passwd, poweroff, printf, readlink, reboot,
    reset, resize, rm, rmdir, sed, seq, setsid, sh, sha1sum, sha256sum, sha3sum, sha512sum, sleep, sort, ssl_client, stat, stty,
    sum, sync, tail, tar, taskset, tee, test, time, timeout, touch, true, uname, uniq, unlink, unlzop, unzip, usleep, vi, watch,
    wc, wget, which, who, xargs, zcat

This list is much shorter than the applets that are supported in [Wayback] BusyBox – The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux, so VMware did cut out quite a few.

Generating the above output

The command-line trick above first expands diff using the output of which diff, then finds out where it links to through the readlink -f wrapper there the back-quotes “`” get this output:

# readlink -f "`which diff`"
/usr/lib/vmware/busybox/bin/busybox

Finally the $(...) executes the output of readlink.

It is based on [Wayback] bash – How to resolve symbolic links in a shell script – Stack Overflow

readlink -f "$path"

Editor’s note: The above works with GNU readlink and FreeBSD/PC-BSD/OpenBSD readlink, but not on OS X as of 10.11.GNU readlink offers additional, related options…

Need to devise a way to apply patches

Given there is no patch, I need to think about a good way to apply patches, for instance to snip this into /etc/rc.local.d/local.sh in a reliable way:

## BEGIN-PATCH-PATH

# local binaries are in /vmfs/volumes/NVMe980PRO_1TB/local-bin/
# link that directory from /opt/bin
# then add /opt/bin to the PATH in /etc/profile so that on each logon it becomes available
# this means you need to logon twice after reboot:
# - first to patch /etc/profile
# - second to have the correct PATH loaded from /etc/profile
# direcory exist trick from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59838/how-can-i-check-if-a-directory-exists-in-a-bash-shell-script

patch_etc_profile_PATH() {
    if [ -d "$1" ]; then
      ln -s "$1" "/opt/bin"
      sed -i -e 's!PATH=/bin:/sbin!PATH=/bin:/sbin:/opt/bin/!' /etc/profile
    fi
}

patch_etc_profile_PATH /vmfs/volumes/NVMe980PRO_1TB/local-bin/

## END-PATCH-PATH

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, ash/dash, ash/dash development, BusyBox, Development, ESXi6, ESXi6.5, ESXi6.7, ESXi7, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

Some links on repairing the Windows Recovery partition after cloning a Windows 10 disk

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/01

Somehow after cloning a Windows 10 disk to SSD, the regular partition worked fine, but the recovery partition (sometimes called WinRE: short for Windows Recovery Environment or Windows RE) didn’t.

In short, I only had to perform two actions to get this fixed, both from the Administrator elevated command prompt:

  • Set the partition ID of the Recovery partition from 7 to 27 (this is for an MBR disk; for GPT disks, these values are different, see the first link below). I did this using diskpart.
  • Re-enabling the Recovery partition by executing reagentc /info to check if it was disabled, then reagentc /enable (if it wasn’t disabled first, I had to precede it with reagentc /enable).

    Before this, bcdedit /enum would only return the Windows Boot Loader entry for the C: drive, but had no recoverysequence and now it had.

Since there are cases where much more action is needed, here are some links for just when I run into more complicated situations:

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Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10 | Leave a Comment »

Learned that figuring out Excel formula dependencies has been there since at least Excel 2000 (:

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/01

Sometimes, you figure out Excel functionality you have never needed before, but has been there for decades.

A while ago, I had a very complex with formulas referencing full columns back and forth when suddenly I got into something strange: when reloading the spreadsheet, values would not appear because of recursion errors. Before saving this was fine, so it was hard to track back where I want wrong.

So I was happy to find out that Excel has two cool features for this:

  • Trace Precedents
  • Trace Dependents

Heck, looking at the icons I had a feel these features had been there for a long time. Boy, was I surprised to find them in [Wayback] Excel 2000 – Student Edition – Complete (a great book by the way), as you can see in this picture:

Excel 2000 - Student Edition - Complete - Trace precedents, dependents, error

Excel 2000 – Student Edition – Complete – Trace precedents, dependents, error

As others can explain this feature so much better than I can, here are some links:

–jeroen

 

Posted in Excel, Office, Office 2000, Office 2003, Office 2007, Office 2010, Office 2011 for Mac, Office 2013, Office 2016, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Booting Windows 10 to the recovery console command prompt

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/01

I bumped into an old draft on notes on NTFS boot issues.

A while ago, I wanted to boot in the Windows 10 “Safe Mode” console, but the F8 option during the boot process was gone.

So I wondered how to get there. There seem to be a few ways, of which almost all require a functioning Windows installation. When you have one, it is relatively easy, as these options will work as summarised from [Wayback] How to open the Windows 10 recovery console:

  • Hold the physical Shift key when choosing “Reboot” in the user interface. There are various ways to get to the “Power” button:
    • in the lower right corner at the logon-screen
    • in the lower right corner at the lock-screen
    • in the lower right corner after pressing Ctrl–Alt–Del
    • in the lower left corner of the “Start” menu
  • In the Settings app, there used to be an “Advanced Startup” feature, but I could not find that any more in Windows 10 version 21H1 any more
  • From a console Window, run either of these commands (the second waits zero seconds before rebooting, the first 30)
    • shutdown.exe /r /o
    • shutdown.exe /r /o /t 0

There is also a possibility to restore the F8 functionality, but you need installation media for it. [Wayback] 3 ways to boot into Safe Mode on Windows 10 version 21H1 explains how to.

Some “notes on NTFS boot issues” links for my archive

(Note that for some of the links, only the [Wayback] ones work: link-rot of the links I saved 6 years ago)

–jeroen

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Posted in Internet, link rot, Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Leave a Comment »

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