A colleague came into my office claiming the camera in his Dell Latitude E5540 didn’t work. Here’s a link to the Dell Latitude E5540 Owner’s Manual. After a bit of troubleshooting, I removed the display bezel. Lo and behold, the camera connector was halfway out of its socket. Once I pressed the connector into place, […]

Read More → Loose camera connector in Dell Latitude E5540

FreeBSD gives the user an option of installing the file /usr/local/etc/screenrc with some sensible defaults along with GNU Screen, aka sysutils/screen. Among the defaults are a format string for the hardstatus line. It shows the date using yy/dd/mm notation and the time as a 12 hour clock. That may be fine in the English speaking […]

Read More → Adding 24 hour clock to FreeBSD’s hardstatus string for GNU Screen

When upgrading from one major version of FreeBSD to another, in my case from FreeBSD/amd64 stable/9 to FreeBSD/amd64 stable/10, it’s customary to upgrade the installed ports afterwards, beginning with ports-mgmt/pkg. I forcefully upgraded all installed ports using portupgrade -afpv, but the upgrade of lang/ruby21 failed miserably. I removed all traces of Ruby 2.1, i.e. ports-mgmt/portupgrade […]

Read More → Ascertaining installed ports for a specific architecture

Creating new BE’s using snapshots and clones can get messy with dependencies all over the place. I had an epiphany the other day, why not create a snapshot on the current dataset, send that snapshot to a new dataset within the same zpool (or elsewhere), and subsequently destroy the (two!) snapshots? Instant transfer of data, […]

Read More → Cloning a ZFS dataset using only zfs snapshot, zfs send, and zfs receive

The 20150220 entry in /usr/ports/UPDATING contains no instructions for upgrading lang/php5 to lang/php56, at least not for us compiling our own ports. I learned the hard way using portupgrade what needs to be done. I have summarised my steps into the script below. Use the script as a guide, and if you do run my […]

Read More → Upgrading lang/php5 to lang/php56

A couple of postings ago, I complained a lot about the endless patch cycle when starting and quitting Star Trek Online over the last few weeks. With today’s release, Season 10, The Iconian War, all that hassle is gone, completely. However, I’m still of the opinion that the continous pre- and post-patching of the game’s […]

Read More → Star Trek Online, Season 10, The Iconian War

Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 fails to notify Windows 7 when the SSID changes. The result is that the wireless interface retains the previous and possibly invalid IP addresses and other settings. The latest driver, A11, only a few days old, isn’t helpful at all. I usually avoid installing Intel’s own utility for managing wireless […]

Read More → Dell Latitude E7240 and Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260