Author: gec

I’ve talked about running a SAMBA Domain Controller before. It definitely has its ups and downs, but damn Microsoft loves being hostile to SAMBA.

I have deployed multiple computers with Windows 11, including the latest 24H2 update, but we recently had a specific Device, a Microsoft Surface Pro 9 to be precise, which received the 24H2 update “naturally” via Windows Update.

As soon as it rebooted, the user ran in to an issue.

Upon trying to login, the user was greeted with the following error:
“insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service.”

In 2017, I had stumbled on an issue with Facebook: while you are entering your password, adding a superfluous extra character at the end of the password would STILL allow you to login to https://Facebook.com.

I’m not a I’m not a quantum physicist, nor a computer scientist. But Microsoft released this video a few months ago which sparked a thought.

While they were quick to point out the obvious benefits of “teleporting” the quantum state, i.e. the computational results, from one pair of entangled qubits to another.

This quickly begged the question: given the hyper-advanced nature of supply chain attacks (see Israel planting explosives in the pagers of Hezbollah operatives, recently), could a nation-state simply take entangled qubits of an adversary’s quantum computer and see what it is they are working on at any given time? Further, could communications networks be compromised for real time ‘eavesdropping,’ so to speak? Perhaps not even internationally, but perhaps in an intelligence gathering platform akin to the NSA’s own PRISM program? If there is, according to some theories, no limit to the number of particles that share an entangled state, nobody would know if you simply “cloned” a few more, right?

Am I understanding that well enough? Or would it not be the Qubits that become entangled, and only the ‘data’ that flows through them?

I’m not the person to write the research paper on this topic. But I certainly hope someone out there will produce it – because I would love to read through it. Just an interesting thought I had with an eye on the future. Whether that future is 20 years, 50 years, or even further out is another question.

We have an Ubuntu based mini computer at which serves as little more than a network switch. CPU and other resource utilization should be next to nothing, but frequently this computer would have CPU temperatures around 80 degrees Celsius, and when you would watch the resource monitor the CPU activity was all over the place. Despite the computer only really showing a few percent of CPU usage, if you went toe the Resources Tab of System Monitor, the per-core CPU activity was all over the place.

As I mentioned, the computer in question is a simple network appliance that would never need to print, and upon closer inspection, it was the Linux “CUPS” Service. Once we disabled that, the CPU settled right down.

A co-worker came to me recently because they had an Ubuntu Linux 22.04 computer on which restored a “Timeshift” backup, but suddenly Firefox wasn’t working. How or why it became corrupted was beyond me, but by the time I was ‘called in’ he had already tried several troubleshooting techniques, which had only seemed to make things worse. He had tried resetting, removing, and purging Firefox, and as other errors popped up they became things like cannot locate base snap core 22, or something about an inability to run certain hooks. I honestly didn’t even get a shot of the error message, but the good news was, that I had a fix.

The simple fix for this is to have your core runtime environment (the Core 22 base snap, or Core 20, or any other core you may be having this issue with) switch over to the beta branch, and then immediately switch it back to the production / stable branch. Two quick commands will take care of this:

sudo snap refresh --beta core22
sudo snap refresh --stable core22

Once finished, you can simply reinstall your problem snap: sudo snap install firefox – and then it began redownloading and reinstalling correctly.

While I consider myself a long way from being an absolute master, I think I have more experience with Microsoft Hyper-V Virtual Machines than your average Joe. I have had to convert a few virtual machines If you have an existing Generation 1 virtual machine, converting it to a Generation 2 and, these days, it can be remarkably simple. At least if the computer already has Windows 10 or 11 installed.

People often get a lot of annoying pop ups down by their clocks in Windows 10 and 11, and what they don’t realize is that they have accidentally allowed “notifications” to come from advertising driven websites that are sending them notifications even when they aren’t visiting that website!

In my opinion, the “notification” feature was the worst thing ever added to modern web browsers, but they all have it: Chrome, Edge, and Firefox all include this ability and with more and more browsers being powered by Chrome (Brave, Opera, etc…) this feature doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon. So here’s how to disable it!

Originally published on Reddit in the /r/Sysadmin subreddit which was often filled with negativity and frustration, I shared this:

I’m probably the very last of a generation.

I wasn’t part of the earliest days of silicon valley. I grew up watching them, wishing I was just 10 years older.

My first computer was a Commodore 64. Then I had a Packard Bell w/ an Intel 486DX4 80Mhz, Windows 3.11, 8MB of RAM, and a 600MB HDD. We upgraded the HDD to a whopping 4.2 GB, added another 16GB of RAM, and eventually upgraded to Windows 95. My first modem was 19.2Kbps. I watched the first “dot com” bubble burst. I was an unabashed geek who loved learning things, but I could never wrap my head around math skills. I was told there was no way I could make it in “computers” because of my weak mathematics.

I went off to college, got a degree in English because I thought I was going to be a school teacher. Couldn’t find a job as a journalist, teaching jobs required years of being a substitute before you could find something good, so I fell back on my geeky skill set. I found a place that was willing to take a chance on me in an entry level help desk. I think I’m the very last of a generation that was able to get into this line of work without a formal background or degree or even certificates.

I then worked from one position to another… technician’s jobs at small companies where a title was more of career stepping stone than the work I did while I was there… another help desk, a “Director” title at a job where I was the only IT guy… now I’ve pivoted to a place where I’m the “IT Administrator” but I’m doing all kinds of things I never thought I would do.

I never learned programming languages… after all, I am still pretty bad at math. The company I work for is small enough that I can work directly with end-users and see that I still make a difference when I solve their problems. I’ve always loved that feeling. But I have zero formal training, and I’ve made a pretty great career out of “I don’t know everything, but I know that I can figure it out.” My attitude is always if there’s a problem, there’s a solution.

Last night I spent two hours troubleshooting an Ubuntu Linux server because I’ve spent the last 35+ years of my life being a “Windows Guy” and only the last 14 months or so learning about Linux. I called a friend of mine when I took this job (full time RHEL admin) and he basically had nothing but encouraging things to say! ‘You’ve spent your whole life figuring things out, this is just something new to figure out!’

ARE there times when an end user tries to throw the IT Department under the bus? Sure. Bring your receipts, show your logs where the email was delivered to their inbox, and it’s not that it wasn’t delivered, it’s just that they didn’t see it. ARE there times when an end user frustrates me? Sure, but there are days when those same people make me laugh. It’s all “water off a duck’s ass” as my dad used to say; it’s very rare that you have to completely avoid someone for the sake of your own sanity, and even when there are people like that, you learn which ones. ARE there times when I wish the biggest decision I had to make today was which font to use on a graphic or on which date I need to ship something out to make sure it doesn’t arrive too early or too late for an event? Absolutely. ARE there times when I’m overcome with existential dread that if I my backups don’t work correctly the whole company is sunk and dozens of people are out of a job and all I want to do is vomit at the mere thought of how much weight rests on my shoulders? Occasionally.

But DAMN I love what I do. I love knowing that I fixed a problem and made a difference that day. I love the tangible nature of puzzle solving. I love that I always get to tinker with something new. Even in small dead end IT jobs where the work is repetitive – make a project up for yourself! Download something new and tinker with it! I love that just because I don’t have any credentials that require “Continuing Education” credits doesn’t mean that I should ever just STOP learning new things!

What gets YOU excited these days? What got you excited when you first STARTED this career? Let’s have a thread that’s different from all of the rants!

I have a Virtual Machine running Ubuntu Linux that I use for testing purposes, but it recently started popping up this message saying “Pending Update of Snap-Store, Close the App to Avoid Disruption.”

No matter what I thought I closed correctly or how many times I rebooted the VM, the error message still came back.

In my personal life, I regularly have people come up to me and ask “Why does my IT guy always tell me to reboot before calling him?” My reply, often times, is simply: because it works.

These days, many phones, in particular iPhones, will shoot photographs in raw or in High Efficiency Image File formats. But when those files are emailed to Windows computers, sometimes they just can’t be easily opened.

Installing this free extension from Microsoft should allow your computer to open these files natively in the Windows “Photos” app.

This goes hand-in-hand with the Free HEVC extension for playing videos.

Microsoft offers the HEVC Video Extension necessary to play videos from iPhone users on their store, but they often try to charge a dollar for it. Just $0.99, in fact! In many cases, I don’t mind spending a dollar, and I encourage others to do the same. But sometimes you’re just in a pinch and you don’t have your credit card on file, or you aren’t logged in to your normal Microsoft account and it’s just a pain.

Have no fear! Microsoft also provides a link in the Microsoft store where you can download the HEVC Video Extension completely free of charge.

Why are there two, and why does this link exist?