Recently, I purchased a new Dell Inspiron 15 (3537) - however one of the worst things about this laptop was the fact it only had a 2.4GHz wireless card. While my first change to this system was to replace the 750Gb hard drive with a 256Gb SSD - to get a massive performance boost, the slow wireless was a killer. To make matters worse, the wireless card was also tied into the bluetooth adapter.

After a bit of hunting around, I found that the Intel AC-7260 was a PCIe Half Mini Card with bluetooth onboard. This would make it a drop in replacement for the card that Dell shipped with the laptop. It would also allow me to connect at the full 300Mbit speeds of my WD MyNet N750.

I ordered the card and it arrived quickly, but I soon started to find issues with this card. The main one being that randomly fails to work properly when the laptop resumes from sleep.

When I did some searching about this problem, I was very surprised to find that this and many other problems seem to plague this range of card from Intel. There are threads on whirlpool, and multiple threads on the Intel Communities support site.

This seems to be either a hardware problem that Intel refuse to admit (as they’d have to replace all these cards with OEMs), or a driver problem - either way, it seems to have been ongoing for over a year.

I specifically bought an Intel wifi card thinking that a big name like Intel would make a decent wireless card - but it seems that I was mistaken :(

I’m going to make this brief.

Rest in peace you wonderful man.

For a while now, I’ve been slowly migrating my private data away from Google to a few self-hosted options. For file sync, I’ve used ownCloud - which comes with built in contact (CardDAV) and calendar (CalDAV) support.

On Android, I used DavDroid to sync my contacts to ownCloud. One thing that I missed the most moving from Google Contacts was that I could no longer create contact groups. It seems that the Almighty Goog in its ‘wisdom’ restricted the creation of groups ONLY to Google Accounts. This is one feature that I used heavily, and seems hotly requested for support in DavDroid. The problem was, Groups was a Google only thing. DavDroid recently supported groups, but you would get thwarted by Android.

I was discussing this with pulser on the #omnirom irc channel on FreeNode, and pointed this issue out - and that the DavDroid author thought it should be a simple fix within Android to make groups work on all account types. Less than an hour later, the patch was born AND tested. Less than 12 hours later, the patch was included in all currently shipping OmniROM nightlies.

Now, groups sync correctly - and can be edited from any source - the ownCloud web interface, Thunderbird or OmniROM - and sync perfectly between devices. All without giving your data to Google.

THAT is the power of open source software.

I’ve been looking at the latest release of RedHat Enterprise 7 and its ‘clone’ CentOS 7 recently.

Sum it up in a single word? DAFUQ? (is that technically one word?).

If you currently run EL6, for $diety’s sake, stay on it. There are so many problems at the moment that you are much better to stay well clear until the dust settles.

List of current issues:

1. rsyslog - no longer works. Everything is now in a 'journal'
2. logwatch - no longer works. Does not support journal logs
3. gnome3 - If you use a desktop, you're pretty much forced to use Gnome 3
4. systemd - requires all kinds of hacks and workarounds to get anything more than basic functionality
5. systemd - Service files missing from a lot of tasks (eg: BZ 1060347)
6. up to 50% speed reduction in virtual machines - BZ1104748
7. No thunderbird packages available as yet.
8. No Xen Dom0 support in EL7 - despite the upstream kernel version supporting it
9. Wholesale shipping of packages out to EPEL to avoid support requirements

This is just scratching the surface at the moment… There are many more gotchas just waiting to bite.

Recently, I’ve been looking at backup solutions to replace TSM. In my opinion, TSM is great for VERY large organisations, but versions beyond TSMv5 seem to be much more bloated than useful in smaller installs. There are a number of backup ‘solutions’ for Linux, however none seem to have a permanent and consistent state without doing various bits of magic.

I’ve moved all of this onto its own page so I can update things easier as the scripts evolve with feedback / ideas.