More and more I find myself quickly spinning up a new Windows VM on my unraid server. It is always a ‘temporary’ VM which, after setting up exactly how I like, I invariably then wish I’d set a much larger virtual disk size. The standard VM disk size is 30G and that always seems to be enough. Fast forward an hour or two and I really wish I had set something more realistic. Read more...

When accessing remote servers that I am responsible for, I always initiate a tmux session along with the SSH session. This means I am always in a tmux session and I will never forget to start a tmux session manually. There is something particurly frustrating about starting a process on a remote server only to realise that you I forgot to start a tmux session and the process is going to take > 1 hour. Read more...

I finally had chance to get a dedicated server at Hetzner for my own projects and use. No client requirements, no deadlines and no specification requirements. Seems like a simple thing but just about every ‘proper’ server I have ever worked on has been for a client or work project. Now that I had access to my own server, it was time to configure it exactly how I wanted. As usual, I decided to use Ubuntu - I’m familiar with it and I really don’t mind the bloat that could be avoided with the likes of CentOS or Arch. Read more...

The latest version of Ubuntu has recently been released (20.04 LTS) and along with it comes the latest version of tmux. Tmux is now at release 3.0a and this version is pre-installed with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. The problem is, when you want to import a tmux configuration file from tmux 2.9 or below, you get many errors. The fix for me was simple… tmux kill-server Once I killed all old sessions and stopped the tmux server the new tmux version loaded the existing configuration file without any issue or errors. Read more...

I recently purchased another Raspberry Pi 4 but this time I wanted to use Ubuntu 20.04 and I wanted to use a USB 3 1TB external hard drive as the boot disk. The reason for using a large boot disk is mainly to avoid SD card corruptions in future as all read/writes (once booted) will be on the external USB drive not on the SD card. The first step is install Ubuntu 20. Read more...