IT Issues

Setting a Blank DHCP Searchdomain on OpnSense

Super quick one because it took me way too long to google the answer…

How to tell Opnsense to not send through the searchdomain setting with DHCP – this stops it from interfering with domains that have no TLD (for people with funky LAN setups)

 

Problem: I use pihole for my network, I have my DHCP server telling the clients to use pihole for the DNS. But if I try to resolve something that has no TLD (eg. trying to resolve rin instead of rin.com) – it will instead try to resolve rin.localdomain.

If you suspect this is happening to you, on Windows or Mac, you can run the following:

nslookup
> set debug
> yourdomain

You’ll get a result like below, where it’s appending .localdomain or whatever domain your opnsense router has set in it.

If you look in the opnsense router settings under the DHCP server settings, you can either set it to blank, which will set it to the domain of the router, or you can enter a domain in there. You cannot enter “.” as a domain either.

Solution:

You have to set the DHCP server settings manually using their options, the options are

119 – Domain Search

15 – Domain

Set this under Additional Options as below:Hit Save and Reload the service, then renew your dhcp lease on the client.

Thanks to this Reddit post for the solution.

The real TLDR here though is don’t use TLD-less domain names, but I like them, so I will keep them. 😛

Posted by duck in Advanced, IT Issues, 0 comments

HP Chromebook 14 G5 Trackpad Failure

I have a fleet of about 200 HP Chromebook 14 G5’s that I manage at my job (among other models of machines) and I’ve been having this common fault with the trackpads where they will stop working or stutter around. I thought it was an interesting problem so I’ve decided to document it a bit more in detail here.

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Posted by duck, 5 comments

Dymo LabelWriter Region Locked Labels

I recently bought a Dymo LabelWriter 450 Twin Turbo and was having trouble using non-genuine labels with it.
Turns out: There’s a US and an international version of the Dymo LabelWriters, and the labels aren’t compatible across the two!

Read on to see about my adventure….

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Posted by duck in IT Issues, 2 comments

FreeBSD/FreeNAS arp multicast spam

So, my FreeNAS Server started randomly spewing my log file with this:

Dec 24 16:16:10 zoe kernel: arp: 43:05:43:05:00:00 is multicast
Dec 24 16:16:10 zoe kernel: arp: 43:05:43:05:00:00 is multicast
Dec 24 16:16:10 zoe kernel: arp: 43:05:43:05:00:00 is multicast

It was going at a rate of about 1 a second (in bursts of 5 every 10 seconds or so).
I fired up Wireshark to work out what it was, turns out it was my OpenMesh Wifi Access points sending these packets out.

Read more to see how I fixed it 🙂

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Posted by duck in How-To Guides, IT Issues, 3 comments

MacBook Pro Retina Going to Sleep on Battery in Mavericks

I recently got myself a MacBook Pro 15″ Retina and noticed that in Mavericks they have removed the option to have separate timers for display sleep and computer sleep.  You can turn off sleep mode  when you’re running on AC power, but not when you’re running on the battery.

The problem with this is that I want the display to turn off to save battery power, but I want all my background processes (eg. Adium/Colloquy) to continue running and for it to stay connected to wifi, but when the display goes blank, it goes straight to sleep and disconnects everything!

The fix for this is to manually set the options via pmset in the terminal. To do this, you’ll need to do the following:
1.    Open Terminal (it’s in the Utilities folder under Applications)
2.    Enter the command:  sudo pmset -b sleep 0
3.    Enter the command:  sudo pmset -b standby 0

You will need to enter your password after running these commands (if it asks for it).
For more information about what this command does, check here:  https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/pmset.1.html

Hope this helps someone 🙂

Ducky

Posted by duck in Home, How-To Guides, IT Issues, 7 comments

Headphones in Schools

We have many sets of headphones, one for every machine infact, that’s over 120 sets of headphones. Every day they cop a lot of abuse, from kids chewing the cables to the fluffy bits on the ears being destroyed.

When you’re looking for headphones to use in a school environment, there’s a lot of things you need to take into consideration, see below to find out what I’ve discovered from my investigations into headphones.

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Posted by duck in IT Issues, Reviews, School

Novell Deploy Error D018

Here is a quick guide to fixing the error that occurs when you’re trying to open a NAL Object via Novell, the Error ID is D018.

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Posted by duck in How-To Guides, IT Issues, School

The Mobile Phone Plan Comparison Spreadsheet

UPDATE: 29/1/17 – This article is way out of date. Phone companies here basically give you free calls and all that for <$30 a month.  Leaving the article here for posterity, but don’t trust it 😉

I’ve put together a quick little spreadsheet you can use for comparing different phone plans to eachother. One of the tricks the phone companies use is they say “You pay $49 and get $330 worth of credit!” to make it sound like their phone plan is much better. However to make up for this, the calling rates are higher.
With this spreadsheet it tells you exactly how many minutes of talk time you get on your phone, ontop of that, if you enter how long your average phone call is, it will work out how many minutes of talk time you get once flagfall is called into effect.
One other great thing it does is give each plan a point rating that factors in minutes, texting cost, flagfall as well as the data plan.
Instructions are in the spreadsheet as well as 2 sample plans from Optus and Telstra.

Click here to Download the Phone Plan Calculator (Excel Spreadsheet)

That’s all for today 🙂

Ducky

Posted by duck in How-To Guides, IT Issues