Windows Refusing to “Open With” Using Notepad++ Portable…

Posted on by dk

So, fed-up with an outdated, “sanctified” version of Notepad++ “published” by the IT team at my workplace on my work laptop, I uninstalled the published version, grabbed a copy of the portable version (choose the appropriate .zip or .7z package) and proceeded to live happily ever after…

Well… Not quite… Whenever I attempted to use Windows Explorer’s “Open with…” context menu option, attempting to select the Notepad++ portable’s executable would not have any result – the dialogue would just continue to sit there…

After some soul Google searching, I stumbled across the solution.

The registry key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications\notepad++.exe\shell\open\command was still pointing at the uninstalled, (now) non-existent executable. Pointing it to the correct location made Notepad++ show up immediately as one of the selectable applications.

KVM: Installing Windows…

Posted on by dk

So, I had a spare, official Windows 7 Pro key that was never installed on the intended laptop. I was thinking that it was a good chance to install it on KVM…

So, what was supposed to be a straight-forward “new VM” + “install Windows 7” + “Windows 10 upgrade” turned into another headache…

Fortunately (and probably yet another reason to stick with the “tried-and-tested”/popular VM solutions), KVM has a “large enough” community, with lots of help online…

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There Is No Spoon…

Posted on by dk

So, attempting to set up a virtual machine on Ubuntu now leaves me some choices (again, which is mostly a good thing).

Attempting to set up a secure Windows environment is never easy. Maybe one of the better/best ways to do this is to simply use VMs and virtualised software…

First, I need virtualisation host software. VMware ESXi and any other hypervisors are out of the question, because we already have an OS. Besides, despite being comfortable with ESXi (and also have somewhat generous “limits” on their “free” version from v5.5 and up), ESXi is pretty strict in terms of supported hardware.

Having looked at some of the “popular” ones out there, including Oracle’s VirtualBox, Citrix’s Xen, and Red Hat’s KVM (not to be confused with the common abbreviation KVM), I finally decided on KVM.

Even with VirtualBox’s ability to use “integrated mode“, I still believe that having low-level integration with the kernel and open source is more important than reliance on a specific kernel version (note: linked search only shows results from past year to show “current” reported issues as at time of search).

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WhatsApp… On Your Desktop…

Posted on by dk

This post was long overdue… As with most of Asia (less China, because, you know, China), I use WhatsApp extensively for communication…

Unfortunately, typing on the phone just plain sucks, and typing on the phone at work is not the best of ideas.

Some time back, WhatsApp introduced the ability to run mirrored sessions on your desktop via supported browsers (meaning you still needed to keep your phone connected to the WhatsApp service).

If you have Google Chrome, you could run this in a separate window (as if it is a separate app) by following the steps below…

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Sidetracked!

Posted on by dk

So, I saw that there were some updates, and proceeded to do everything from the shell:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get autoremove

Happy that everything “just works” (so far), I confidently restarted the machine… Only to find I could not SSH back into, ping, or otherwise see my server…

Using the console (i.e. locally attached KVM), I found out I was now a “victim” of this. Although the errors were different, the “fix” was the same:

dpkg --configure -a
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get -f install
apt-get update

As per the post linked to above, YMMV.

My Name Is Bond… eno1 and enp3s0 Bond…

Posted on by dk

With two NICs available on my motherboard (one Intel I217V and one Atheros AR8161B), whereas the product specifications warns that “teaming is not supported”, I am aware that any capable network stack would be able to handle teaming via software (disregarding drivers and assuming certain hardware acceleration features like TCP offloading is disabled).

Of course, proper LACP/802.13ad (bonding mode #4) set up requires upstream networking equipment support (i.e. your network switch also requires such support). Fortunately, I happen to have a TP-Link TL-SG3424P managed switch which does support this. Obviously, this is overkill, but I highly recommend the TP-Link TL-SG2008 if 8 ports are sufficient. As I had the chance to run multiple Cat6 cable runs from the closet/store to the various rooms in my apartment when it was renovated, I could, and do, use a SG2008s as a trunk port in my study which is link-aggregated to the SG3424P.

Network Manager

Some instructions on the big, bad Internet mentioned using the Network Manager from the desktop. All that did was to mess up the settings.

Fortunately, I had backups of the /etc/network/interfaces file which I could revert the damage the Network Manager did. So, I finally did the sane thing and just disabled the Network Manager:

If You Want Something Done Right, You Have To Do It Yourself…

So, we come back to the good ol’ shell…

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Sharing The Love…

Posted on by dk

So, the ZFS datasets have been created, and we now have to start creating the shares…

<rant>No thanks to Micro$oft, NFS support on is now only available on Enterprise versions of Windows 10, and therefore I will cannot use (the more efficient) NFS in my largely Windows environment network.</rant>

Goals

My goal was to:

  1. set up several different shares, mapping directly to the ZFS datasets
    1. this meant setting up SAMBA in a “WORKGROUP” environment
  2. allow different users to map this share on Windows, and be able to view only, or modify any objects within (add/delete/edit) according to their permissions per share

What follows is the steps required to:

  • create the SAMBA share(s) and securing it (or at least setting the correct permissions)
  • set-up the SAMBA user(s)

Note: There is a difference between Linux uid/user and gid/group and SAMBA SID/user and GID/group; within this context, I attempt to refer to the latter as “SMB User” and “SMB group” for disambiguation.

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RAIDZ2… Finally

Posted on by dk

Finally, we start installing the ZFS packages and start the RAIDZ2 set-up (no screenshot):

apt-get zfsutils-linux

For several reasons, I chose to use:

  • vdevs created “by-id”:
    • as per advice from multiple places online, using the “easier” /dev/sdx identifier may break things should the order be changed (e.g. you swapped cable ends or drive cages, etc.)
  • lz4 compression
    • as per statistics from some places, the “cost” of LZ4 is relatively low/negligible

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Reading Up On ZFS…

Posted on by dk

Attempting to implement ZFS and the decisions that go into it is enough to make any newbie give up (and/or get terribly confused)…

Unfortunately, Google does not help, what with old information (e.g. installation instructions: old vs. new; possibly outdated information) and different “package variations” of ZFS (e.g. Ubuntu-native ZFS packages vs. ZFS-native), and the endless arguments on the “correct number of disks” for RAIDZ/2 (mirrored vdevs only? RAIDZ? RAIDZ2? mirrored RAIDZ/2? block size?)…

I read through all those articles linked above, including some other helpful(?) ones:

Some other “associated” links/articles/comments/posts that I came across:

My decision?

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