Category: System Engineering

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ASRock E3C226D2I Mini ITX motherboard and “Host is powered OFF or is in Sleep Mode.”

The ASRock E3C226D2I motherboard has great features for a nice Mini ITX SOHO server or NAS (more details to follow in a later post), but it also has its quirks when it comes to the two RAM slots.

So, if you encounter the following error message when accessing the remote console (using the Java applet):

Host is powered OFF or is in Sleep Mode.

Or if you see no output (a blank screen) at boot-time on a display connected to the VGA port, check that the RAM DIMMs are sitting correctly in the RAM slots. This is a bit tricky as first, there’s usually not a lot of maneuvering space in a Mini ITX case,  so applying pressure is difficult, second this motherboard’s RAM slots are particularly tricky to handle.

My advice is to unplug the device, unlock a RAM slot, then try inserting the DIMM (in correct orientation, check the notch!) smoothly with low and equal pressure on both sides. Once it’s more or less equally placed in the slot, apply firm pressure on the top of the DIMM at the side opposite of the slot’s open lock until you hear a click sound of the DIMM snapping in. Then apply firm pressure on the other side of the DIMM till that part snaps in with an audible click too (the lock will close).

Sounds pretty standard? It actually is, with the exception that this board’s RAM slots require a lot more pressure for the DIMMs to snap in than with most other motherboards out there.

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Homebrew package for t-prot: TOFU protection for e-mail

In a current LUGS mailing list thread, mowgli pointed to the t-prot script as a nice tool to “fix” the so-called (and very common) TOFU style message quoting and some other annoyances (like commercial webmail provider signatures, overly excited !!!! statements, etc.) in e-mail messages. t-prot was originally developed for mutt, but can also be used with other mail clients.

As there wasn’t any t-prot package for my favourite Mac OS X package manager Homebrew yet (apparently only for MacPorts), I quickly created one myself [Edited on Feb 24, 2015: Updated for t-prot version 3.3]:

  1. Create the file /usr/local/Library/Formula/t-prot.rb and add the following (fantastically trivial) content: 
    require "formula"

class TProt < Formula
  homepage "http://www.escape.de/~tolot/mutt/"
  url "http://www.escape.de/~tolot/mutt/t-prot/downloads/t-prot-3.3.tar.gz"
  sha1 "9be24629abc598b24e887f47e9a62feddc3ed4ad"

  def install
    bin.install 't-prot'
    man1.install 't-prot.1'
  end

end
  2. Install t-prot (run the following Homebrew command in a terminal window): 
    brew install t-prot
  3. Add the following line to your .muttrc (or check ‘man t-prot’ or the t-prot web page for options and examples): 
    set display_filter="t-prot -cemt -M=mutt"
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macvim – Vim for the Mac

When using Mac OS X, I used to use the CLI vim by the excellent Homebrew package manager.

Now I’ve just stumbled over macvim, which is kind of a “deluxe vim” for Mac OS X, including adjusted key bindings for the Mac and a GUI menu, supporting Cocoa file dialogs, among others.

It’s highly recommended if you want to have the best of both the CLI and GUI editor worlds.

Download

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System information on Mac OS X

Mac OS X comes with a pretty useful tool to list all the details about your system:

# system_profiler

E.g. to find out whether your RAM supports ECC:

# system_profiler|grep ECC
          ECC: Disabled

Or wether your SSD supports TRIM:

# system_profiler|grep TRIM
          TRIM Support: Yes
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Some helpful Git resources

A friend recently told the following joke:

“The idea that git can be used offline is an illusion – you still need connectivity for googling which arguments to pass to what command.”

That’s an exaggeration, of course, but as always, there’s a grain of truth in it. So here we go: