By default many Linux network interface card drivers set their SMP affinity mask to either all zeroes or all ones (“ff” — the length of the mask depends on the number of CPUs on the system). The former results in all queues and interfaces running on CPU ID 0, which can become a performance bottleneck due to insufficient computing power. The latter results in all queues and interfaces being scheduled on multiple CPUs, which can become a performance bottleneck due to increased CPU memory cache misses. (more…)
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- I’ve released roller 1.21 for ease of packaging in pkgsrc. The only change is to match the new option names in pflogsumm 1.1.5.
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- I’ve fixed matching of IPv6 addresses in sysutils/pflogsumm and also updated it to version 1.1.5 in pkgsrc. Note that the naming of options has changed from using underscores to using hyphens.
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- I fished out a couple of upstream commits (patch #1 and patch #2) for net/mtr to silence the Error decoding localhost address messages.
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- I applied a small patch to mail/postgrey to silence an error about the PID file when stopping the service.
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- I fished out an upstream commit to graphics/gd to address CVE-2018-1000222. While there, I also restored the option to make linking with libtiff optional.
14.3.17
Skype settings
For whatever reason my Windows desktop profile is not reflected to my Citrix apps. So I get to figure out the settings that I’ve changed over the years all over again.
In Skype for Business I want a fixed width font and no emoji.
- Click the Settings menu in the main Skype window (the cog icon).
- Select IM on the left.
- Uncheck the box for Show emoticons in messages.
- Click the Change Font button and choose Consolas.
12.3.17
Alexa, what time is it?
This morning Alexa was an hour behind — she hadn’t moved to DST. A quick search on Google showed that last year DST switching had worked.
The top hit, however, was a fresh Reddit thread with Alexa users reporting the same issue. After keeping an eye on it, I saw a user come up with the solution that worked for me (and it is the only solution on the thread so far).
Launch the Alex app and go to Settings, select a device, and change the timezone
- from America/Eastern Standard Time
- to US/Eastern Standard Time
The fix takes immediately: just ask “Alexa, what time is it?” — no power cycling needed.
2.12.16
Uncloudable photos
Since switching to the iCloud Photo Library, the Photos app on my laptop has kept telling me that
- 1 Item on This Mac Only
- Unable to Upload 9 Items
To identify the oddball photos, I created the following smart folders respectively:
- [Photo] [is] [referenced]
- [Photo] [is] [unable to upload to iCloud Photo Library]
Referenced photos can be consolidated into the library and would then be uploaded to iCloud — mine was a duplicate, so I just deleted it. The photos that could not be uploaded were photos that had been deleted, but somehow a reference had been kept or imported.
References:
16.10.16
Switch back to sysvinit
If you have already upgraded to jessie and have systemd as init, you can switch back with these commands:
apt-get install -y sysvinit-core reboot apt-get purge -y systemd
Running with sysvinit works better on my servers, as daemons have a chance of doing their own graceful shutdown before the network is brought down.