I scan all my incoming mail into Paperless-ngx. Nothing fancy, just regular letters and correspondence, duplex, 300 dpi, color. The volume isn’t huge, but it annoyed me every single time: a duplex page took 45 seconds to go through the ADF of my Epson WorkForce Pro WF-C5890. That’s a long time to stare at a scanner for a single sheet of paper, and it was bugging me enough to actually chase it down.

When we moved into our new house five years ago, the electrical installation came with a full KNX bus: lights, blinds, heating actuators, the garage door, a weather station, all wired up and configured through ETS by the electrician. On top of that we had a handful of separate smart-home ecosystems that had nothing to do with KNX: a Reolink camera setup, a Zehnder ComfoAirQ ventilation system, a Kostal Plenticore inverter for the PV system, some Woox smart plugs, and a couple of Wi-Fi devices sitting in the Smart Life / Tuya app. KNX itself was visualized through the manufacturer’s native app, AmbiHome.

Every time I tried to clone or pull from a remote Git repository over SSH on Windows, I got hit with this:

PS C:\Development\Forgejo> git clone ssh://git@forgejo.blazilla.de/patrick/Dotfiles.git Dotfiles
Cloning into 'Dotfiles'...
git@forgejo.blazilla.de: Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.
Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.

The obvious suspects were all clear: The SSH key was registered in both Codeberg and my self-hosted Forgejo instance. The key was loaded in the SSH agent, confirmed via:

I’ve been a Windows user for over 30 years. With a brief detour to Linux on the desktop in the early 2000s, every machine I owned was running Windows, both private and professional. I always had a soft spot for macOS, but something always got in the way. The price premium, the butterfly keyboard disaster, the missing ports, the Touch Bar, or simply software I relied on that wasn’t available on macOS. So I stayed on Windows.

One of my customers is running a five node Nutanix cluster, which is configured for FT2 (2N/2D). This means, that if the storage containers are configured with RF3, two of the five nodes can fail. Now I stumbled over the “Cluster Resiliency / Fault Tolerance Status” widget on the dashboard, which clearly showed that only a single node failure would be tolerated. This was a bit confusing, because the cluster is configured for FT2, which should allow two node failures (in case of RF3 for the storage containers).

This really annoying issue was hunting me for several weeks until I discovered the root cause. One of my customers is running VMware ESXi on top of HPE ProLiant DX hardware, the customized Hardware from HPE for Nutanix. It’s simply a ProLiant DL with a specific set of available components, firmware, drivers and branding. Instead of running AHV, this customer chose to run VMware ESXi as hypervisor. Everything was running fine until the customer reported reocurring fails of a specific Nutanix Cluster Check, in this case the ‘host_disk_usage_check’. While investiagting the issue, I noticed that the root filesystem on all nodes of the clsuter was full.

I’m a loyal Apple iPhone and T-Mobile customer for many years. Recently, it came to my attention, that there is a voicemail service active on my personal mobile number. This is pretty annoying, as I never use voicemail on my private mobile number. Okay, maybe due to an update or something. I quickly found the standard mobile code to disable any forwardings: ##002# is a standard mobile code that cancels all call forwarding on your phone, including when the line is busy, unreachable, or when there is no answer. Surprisingly, this didn’t worked… There was still am active forwarding to a voicemail service, even if I didn’t got any notiofication when someone left me a message on the voicebox. I continued my research and stumbled upon a forum post that mentioned the iOS live voicemail feature. After disabling this feature, there was no further forwarding to voicemail. You can disable this feature under Settings -> Apps -> Phone -> Live-Voicemail -> Disable.

The HPE iLO Amplifier Integration into the vSphere Lifecycle Manager is an easy way to update your ESXi hosts not only with updates, but also with the latest firmware. Despite the fact that HPE has discontinued HPE ILO Amplifier, the product is widly used. The final version is 2.22, the final version for the HPE iLO Amplifier HSM Provider for VMware vSphere is version 1.5.0.

A recurring problem is an error message during the compliance scan:

Sometimes you need to decomission services, and move them to new servers. Sometimes this requires the change of the IP address. This is no big deal as long as accessing clients use DNS, or until you can change the IP address to connect to the services using a central mechanism. DNS and LDAP are two of these services. They come often as part of Microsoft Active Directory Domain Controllers. Sometimes customers use the IP address of a DC and put this IP address hard coded into other IT systems or config files. This makes it nearly impossible to track what clients and sub systems access these services.

We all know the e-mail disclamer and “EXTERNAL” tags in subject lines that should make clear, that a specific e-mail is coming from external sender. Mostly this is done to make sure nobody clicks on links in external e-mails that might look like an external e-mail.

This can easily be done by creating a transport rule in Exchange or Exchange Online that matches senders outside the organization. This rule adds something to the beginning of the subject line, and usually a preamble is added to the mail body.