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Installing Elementary OS on a discarded MacBook Air
So, for various reasons I wanted to install the wonderfull Elementary OS on an old MacBook Air (13″ ultimo 2010, 2.13 GHz Intel Core 2Duo) I had lying around. Mostly because, why not? but also because I really like Elementary OS. Quickly I ran into what must be a very common problem, namely that after succesful installation, one is rewarded with a completely black screen. No signs of life, not even during booting. However, my MacBook Air did in fact boot and did even sign onto my wifi – my router’s web interface revealed the IP address the MacBook had been assigned, and I could ping that address. So the issue was clearly related to the video driver, but also hard to fix, since, well – no screen. This is probably keeping some from repurposing old Macs, which I think is a great thing to do.
On the trail of the SuperMicro BMC hack
By now most people in the infrastructure business will know about Bloomberg’s story about the alleged hacking of Super Micro hardware by the Chinese.
But what’s really going on here? As this story unfolds, what do we know so far?
First of all let’s assume we know that the Chinese / PLA is involved in hardware hacking for purposes of espionage. China produces a very large part of the computer hardware that is currently running in the data centers of the world. A large chunk is still manufactured in Taiwan (another good reason for China to invade, I guess) and elsewhere, but still. Hardware hacking has always been a part and parcel of the spook agencies’ toolbox, there is no reason to assume the Chinese would not try to leverage the incredible advantage they have here. Assuming the opposite, that PLA is not involved in hardware hacking for intelligence purposes, would not be credible IMHO.
Running your own non-bouncing Zimbra server
Despite having configured SPF, DKIM and DMARC for my email domain, I recently noticed that the mail queue of my Zimbra server was going through the roof with thousands of undelivered and postponed email messages, mostly with sender “mailer-daemon” and some recipient I did not know. If you run a Zimbra server and have this problem or perhaps even better; if you don’t have it yet and don’t want to have it, read on.
