Entries by Stefan Helander

Mobile internet broadband in Latvia

When I travel abroad I need to stay connected to the Internet, not just for fun but I have to be connected for my work. Relying only on Wifi is not a solution as I recently discovered the hard way on a trip to France. The Hotel advertised "WiFi internet" but this however, turned out to be a connection […]

Copy large amounts of data between servers

There are several methods of moving data between servers in a UNIX/Linux/BSD environment, for example scp, ftp, SMB-shares, NFS-shares or rsync. My experience is that using netcat is one of the faster methods if you have large amount of data to copy. On the receiving server: cd /  (or the base directory under which you […]

Ubuntu boot hangs with black screen after GRUB

It might actually not be hanged, but instead but you might have been kicked into an initramfs shell but it is not displaying on the screen.  Try to boot in recovery mode or boot on a install CD or USB stick in rescue mode. Edit /etc/default/grub:  vi /etc/default/grub Set the following:  GRUB_TERMINAL=console GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=text  If the […]

Facebook has changed my e-mail address

Recently Facebook decided to hide all other e-mail addresses but your @facebook.com address on your Facebook profile. After all, Facebook is a free service, so you should consider yourself "the product" rather than "the customer". Facebook’s real customers are their advertisers and not you, so they can do more or less anything with your account and […]

Dovado routers with ZTE MF820D 4G modems (Telia)

To be able to use the ZTE MF820D 4G dongle from Telia with Dovado routers, both units need to have updated firmwares. Unfortunately even in stores, those units seems to have outdated firmwares. To upgrade the ZTE MF820D 4G dongle – follow this guide (Telia Sweden): http://www.telia.se/ To upgrade the Dovado router, visit Dovado’s homepage: http://www.dovado.com/firmware and […]

System Check virus – how to remove it

System Check is a virus/trojan pretending to be a system diagonstics tool displaying fake errors. To recover them the user will be fooled to pay for the software. Whatever you do – do not pay for it! When infected, all icons on the desktop will be hidden and the only program in the Start menu […]

Windows Vista hangs on Welcome screen

I had a HP desktop PC running Windows Vista that sometimes hanged on the Welcome screen (displayed after entering the password to login). The problem occured randomly but started to occur more and more often causing trouble for the user. Just waiting for the Welcome screen to dissappear (for hours) didn’t help. I applied different solutions […]