Q's Place, Q's Space
Windows via Microsoft 365… except it isn’t
I hit something recently that took longer to figure out than it should have. I bought a laptop for a colleague as a custom build; I do this from time to time when the standard laptops from our distributor don’t meet the requirements. All our standard laptops come with a Windows Pro OEM license in the BIOS, and we have no choice about ... Read More
The Memory Winter Is Here and It’s Dragging Storage With It
I keep having the same conversation with different people. It usually starts with “is now a bad time to buy servers?” and ends with someone quietly realising that the spreadsheet they trusted six months ago is now complete fiction. Not optimistic fiction either. Fantasy. This isn’t just DRAM being awkward again. It’s not a temporary wobble. ... Read More
Frustrating Experience With Out ‘n’ About: A £1000 Order Review
My Experience With Out ’n’ About: A Surprisingly Frustrating Journey for an Almost £1000 Order I do not usually write posts like this but my recent experience with Out ’n’ About deserves a proper write up. When you spend close to a thousand pounds on a pushchair setup you expect the service to match the product. Instead I found myself dealing ... Read More
Resident Elliptic SSH security key’s (Not just for Yubi Keys)
I’m writing this post to document my experience with SSH security keys, specifically when trying to make SSH keys resident on compatible FIDO2 tokens. What finally pushed me to write it was frustration. Almost every article, guide, or walkthrough I came across assumed you were using a YubiKey 5C. I understand why. They are excellent devices. ... Read More
When your hotspot is too clever for its own good
This one bit me while roaming in France and it is worth writing down because it masquerades as a network problem when it is actually the device trying to outsmart everyone involved. The device in question was a ZTE MU5001 5G hotspot on ID Mobile. In France the MU5001 happily attached to the Three partner network. Signal strength was fine. LTE ... Read More
APISCP – postfix issues
So a few days ago, the Q’s Place web server ran out of space; this was related to Kopia backup caching as it couldn’t reach the remote storage server but that’s for another day! Unfortunately because of this, when I cleared the Kopia cache up and freed the required space up my mail server failed. lipwig.qsplace.co.uk ... Read More
Joining an additional Zentyal server to your PDC
About a year ago I added a secondary domain controller to my AD setup, unfortunatly this died and I had to build a redeploy another. When joining this system to the PDC I saw the following issue in the zentyal.log “Unable to open tdb ‘/var/lib/samba/private/sam.ldb’: Permission denied”) Could not find machine account in ... Read More
Adding a USB GPS device to KStars
I’ve recently been trying out KStars on a RaspberryPi 3 (I intend on using something a little more powerful later on) to help reduce the reliance on running LOOOOOONG USB cables and instead swap to ethernet. One of the issues I also wanted to solve is removing the requirement of entering my long and lat co-ordinates everytime I move the ... Read More