I recently moved from an i5 2018 MacBook Pro to an M1 MacBook Air and I thought I’d see if I could keep everything native rather than using Rosetta 2. Two items have popped up so far – there is no driver for my printer, and native Java requires some hoops depending on your needs. Before I dig any deeper, you can absolutely go straight to the Azul download site and download the ....
Namecheap vs RunCloud and Linode for WordPress Hosting
It’s really difficult to find a good review of web hosting options, most are swayed by affiliate programmes and other activities or by those repeating others’ experience. With that in mind I wanted to do some real world tests to understand performance of just a couple of hosting providers. If you’re looking to host a wordpress site then you generally have three options: Classic cPanel hosting – typical hosting with a cPanel management console running on a server, either shared, VPS or dedicated....
Fitting Anker GlassGuard screen protector to an iPhone: Installation Tips
Recently, I’ve fitted several Anker GlassGuard screen protectors to 4" & 4.7" iPhones. I’ve been impressed how closely they match the feel of the original screen, given the excellent protection they offer (Apple, take note!) I’ve found a few simple things make the fitting process a lot smoother. Hopefully these guidelines also help you get the job done right, first time. 😄 It’s helpful if the iPhone rests on a tactile surface during GlassGuard installation....
Virtual Machine Manager on Synology DS716+II
Synology has a beta Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) package that allows you to deploy VMs to your Synology NAS. We recently installed a DS716+II at a charity and when we ordered it we assumed it would support the VMM package as it has an Intel chip and supported several other newer packages (like Synology AD). Unfortunately, after buying it we realised was not on the supported list (we’re guessing because it only comes with 2GB of memory....
Is updating your Synology NAS closer to an art form than a science?
Recently we’ve been chewing over what a successful patch/upgrade cycle looks like for hardware appliances. We’re anchoring round Synology DSM here because it underpins stuff SMEs do on a daily basis, but the ideas are transferable to other platforms. Managed well, patching takes more TLC than many folks are able to give. Having discovered this, we’ve found that approaching updates as an ‘artform not a science’, helps us balance out the competing forces behind our patching strategy....
Recovering a Synology SHR-RAID 1 array with only one disk
We’ve been looking at an issue with a two-bay Synology NAS where the second drive has been fried and the first one seems to be on the blink. We’ve removed the first drive from the Synology and plugged it into a PC running an Ubuntu Live CD to try to recover the data. Synology utilises a combination of mdadm and LVM to create a create a flexible partition arrangement. Basically we want to get to the LVM Logical Volumes, and to do that we need to get to everything else!...
Docker and Ubuntu UFW
I was playing with Docker last week and wanted to add a firewall in front of it. This was to allow me to expose some docker containers so they could only be accessed from a restricted set of IP addresses. There are quite a few posts around that that outlines some of the deficiencies of Docker with UFW and make partial suggestions to work around this. The main issue is that by default Docker will add iptables rules to allow external access to any ports that are exposed on docker containers....