Update 2015-01-05: I was more or less forced to adopt VT, UTF-8, KMS, and DRM2 when I upgraded my laptop from stable/9 to stable/10 in the time between Christmas of 2014 and New Year of 2015. My laptop, a Dell Latitude D531 of mid-2007 design, is equipped with the AMD/ATI Radeon X1270 GPU. What an […]

Read More → FreeBSD VT aka newcons in base/head

FreeBSD’s local_unbound DNS resolver was introduced in head in September 2013, and later in stable/10 when that branch became available. Its configuration out of the box, particularly its treatment of the /etc/resolvconf.conf, assumes the local_unbound resolver is the sole resolver to be used. The reason for this blog entry is that I appreciate being able […]

Read More → FreeBSD’s local_unbound in mobile environments

Enabling Personal Printer Data Stream (PPDS) on a Lexmark MS510dn is pretty well hidden. None of the first two suggestions by Lexmark worked on this model. (Suggestion 1, suggestion 2.) You need to send the printer a PJL command like this one: Why on earth can’t this option be available in the menus with the […]

Read More → Enabling PPDS on Lexmark MS510dn

After long hours of googling at work and at home, I finally arrived at http://www.excaliburtech.net/archives/192, stating this is the way to disable IPv6 autoconfiguration, say when you’re more keen on using a manually configured IPv6 address: netsh interface ipv6 set interface “Local Area Connection” routerdiscovery=disabled

Read More → Disabling IPv6 autoconfiguration in Windows servers

See http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-xen/2013-August/001681.html and http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-xen/2013-August/001683.html. [R]emove [the] DVD device from [the] problem[atic] virtual machine: # xe vm-list params=uuid name-label=”<your-vm-name>” # xe vbd-list empty=true params=uuid vm-uuid=<your-vm-UUID> # xe vbd-destroy uuid=<vbd-UUID> I can confirm the above steps really makes a FreeBSD stable/9 amd64 XENHVM kernel tick on XenServer 6.2.0. stable/10 and head works out of the box without […]

Read More → Making a FreeBSD/amd64 XENHVM kernel boot on XenServer 6.2.0

A student came into my office today and wondered if I could assist him with replacing the BIOS battery on his HP Compaq Presario CQ56 laptop. Sure, I said, not knowing what a daunting task I soon would be facing.

Read More → Replacing the BIOS battery on a HP Compaq Presario CQ56 – a complete disaster from an engineering standpoint

The latest Oracle Java RE 7u51 at its normal level of “High” security causes the Dell iDRAC6 virtual console (version 1.95 (Build 05)) to die with this Java trace: java.lang.SecurityException: Missing required Permissions manifest attribute in main jar: https://hostname.some.domain:443/software/avctKVM.jar at com.sun.deploy.security.DeployManifestChecker.verifyMainJar(Unknown Source) at com.sun.deploy.security.DeployManifestChecker.verifyMainJar(Unknown Source) at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.doLaunchApp(Unknown Source) at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.run(Unknown Source) at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source) Simply […]

Read More → Dell iDRAC6 and Oracle Java RE 7u51