Info on Intel's AMT with an open source client.

Found this blog entry,  "Everything you need to know about Intel AMT and the Intel NUC with Ubuntu" on Dustin Kirkland's blog. AMT is vaguely related to IPMI, but is somewhat Intel proprietary. The key bit of info is there is a package available for Ubuntu, amtterm, that has a command, amttool that can be used for remote management of systems with AMT built-in (Intel VPro) and enabled.

Automate Cygwin package installation, search for packages from the command line, grep the list of installed packges.

Stumbled across two things for improving life when dealing with Cygwin.  (Cygwin is a port of Unix-like GNU tools for Windows.)

First, the standard Cygwin-setup utility takes command line arguments that will avoid all of the prompts, so you can have a single command to update a system without having to do a lot of clicking.   See this blog post from Cody Dunne.

Put this in a batch file, run it as administrator:

cd C:\cygwin
wget -N http://cygwin.com/setup-x86.exe
setup-x86.exe --no-desktop --no-shortcuts --no-startmenu --quiet-mode

Or if you are typing it by hand:

setup-x86 -nNdq

Second, there is a nice command link apt-get like utility, called apt-cyg. It's a neat, simple bash script. Nothing to really install. Provides command like search, and text access to the list of installed packages. apt-cyg is in Stephen Jungel's github repo.

Note: the key data is in the setup INI files stored in cygwin-pkgs/mirror-name/x86/setup.ini.

Hope this helps,
--Rob

Linux Trivia: Grub Legacy 128 byte inode dependency

Documenting something that I tripped over while trying to fix a very old Linux system. 

Grub Legacy (0.97) is dependent on 128 byte inode sizes.  Newer systems use 256 byte inodes to store extended attributes.  This confuses grub causing it not to be able to boot system as well as cause boot loader installation to fail with odd error messages like can find /boot/grub/stage1.

Fortunately googling found that Kristian Reese had documented this in his own "knowledge base", somewhat like I'm doing here in a less organized fashion.

The file /boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly kristianreese.com knowledge base

The solution is to use mke2fs ... -I 128 ...to force a 128 byte inode size when re-making the "legacy" root file system that will be booted by grub "legacy".

Use tune2fs -l /dev/foo to see the current file system parameters.  Tip: Save tune2fs dump info someplace for import (root) file systems someplace off the system.