Category: linux

Today I Learned: Storage expensive, Data priceless

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

We have a combination Plex Media/Minecraft/Archive server that we’ve had since we purchased our first 6TB Hard Drive on December 30, 2019 ($99.99 at the time). After some time we upgraded to our massive 14TB Hard Drive ($293.00 at the time) on October 16, 2021. It took a bit over a couple years to fill things up, and now we recently invested into a 16TB Hard Drive ($279.00 at purchase) to continue our storage needs.

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3       457G  288G  169G  64% /
/dev/sda1      1014M  202M  813M  20% /boot
/dev/sdd1        13T   12T   52G 100% /mnt/usb14
/dev/sdc1       5.5T  4.3T  962G  82% /mnt/usb03

Now it’s time to get this new drive ready for usage.

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Jack and Coke? How about John and CUDA (w/ Rocky 8.7 Live)

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

In previous writeups such as xmrig with cuda for Rocky Linux 8.5 and nVidia CUDA with the wrong video card I’ve navigated Rocky Linux and Cuda. It’s now time to see if we can get John the Ripper CUDA’s components running on a Rocky 8.7 Live Workstation USB install.

Personally, I love projects like this. I started this on 1 8GB USB stick and quickly realized that not only the space required wasn’t enough but I’d need more to do what I needed. I ended up getting 3 SanDisk 32GB Ultra USB 3.0 Flash Drives from Amazon for $16.96.

The biggest help with the Live USB install is using balenaEtcher to get the 2.1GB ISO to an 32GB USB stick. Once that’s done we can boot directly to the Live OS and start our installs.

I did have some derps with balenaEtcher failing to burn the ISO due to a failure of diskpart not returning a positive result to the clean operation. To resolve this I had to use PowerISO to clean the USB volume before windows would properly do it’s clean operation. Minor note to PowerISO is that it contains bloatware during the install and a wrongly-clicked click can give you headaches.

Live Stuff

  • Booted up Rocky 8.7 Workstation Live Workstation from a USB to install Rocky 8.7 Workstation on a separate USB stick.
  • Root with password, user with password
  • rebooted into USB bootable
  • #win

Now onto the necessities to get to our final goal

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Listening to Skype Voicemail .dat files

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

Like thousands of other users I religiously used Skype to communicate with many friends and coworkers back in the early 2010s. It was a great platform, with the ability to send messages fluently from computer to phone and vice-versa, as well as make long and drawn out video calls. You could purchase a telephone number from anywhere in the world to have a presence in that country (as I did), and with it you gained voicemail. It did everything perfectly except save voicemails in a reusable format.

I’m not the only person that has a need/want to listen to these types of audio. There are forums of people who have their own needs, such as fathers voices and passed family members. The common solutions proposed are “download VLC”, “use Microsoft Word and run a repair”, or use a “DAT player”, all are non-functional or stupid solutions. There is a ton of common use cases for these old files and the technical solutions are far and none between.

Skype voicemails, once listened to, were downloaded from the Skype servers and stored in the users Skype profile as a dat file. Unfortunately, “dat” files are a general file format and have no immediate player that can open and listen to those files.

Time to dig in. Challenge Accepted!

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nVidia CUDA with the wrong video card

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

In trying to build my first crypto rig I wanted to be able to get it functional with the GPU instead of the CPU.

I had originally installed an nVidia GeForce GT 710 but came to find out later that its not a supported GPU for use with CUDA per developer.nvidia.com.

Lucky for me I had a video card to “Upgrade” to, which was an nVidia GeForce GT 630, which supports Version 2.1 of CUDA-Enabled Compute Capability.

I did have to download and install the nVidia Linux X64 driver, and without knowing that the install required kernel-devel so it could built the driver correctly.

The only thing blocking me is it seemed my build of libxmrig-cuda.so was built with the CUDA 11.6 API and the Linux X64 driver does not support that. In fact, running nvidia-smi tells me that the driver supports CUDA version 11.4, so looks like i’ll have to rebuilt my driver with 11.4.

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grub2 for Windows 10 after installing Rocky 8.5

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

So, I came into a hiccup, and the amount of time it took to diagnose and resolve seemed like it should be something I documented.

In doing the initial installation of Rocky 8.5 on the computer that my kids sometimes use that runs Windows 10 I wasn’t really given the opportunity to configure a multiboot. Instead, the system happily booted Rocky 8.5 and nothing else.

Additionally, running os-prober didn’t really find another operating system, so I had to do some manual work.

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