Note: this guide is for Windows, you may use it for getting an idea of what the requirements are for a successful firmware but don’t expect a guide for any other OS to be made. If you find this guide saving you time and hassle you can thank me here.

Prepare your USB stick

You will need to property format and partition your USB in order for the monitor to detect the files. Let’s wipe all the data in a USB stick below.

• Open a Command Window (cmd)
• Enter diskpart
• Enter list disk (it is important you KNOW which disk is the USB key you are formatting)
• Enter select disk x where x is your USB key
• Enter clean
• Enter convert MBR
• Enter create part primary
• Enter select part 1
• Enter active
• Enter format fs=fat32 label=”firmware” (Label is optional – ensures USB key is labelled as ”firmware” in Explorer etc)

Download firmware and copy to USB

Visit samsung.com support page for the G9 monitor, grab the .zip file containing the update. It should look like something like “M-T9549GGAA-1016.0[1109]” (1016.0 is the current version as of this posting).

1. Download .zip file from samsung.
2. Unpack .zip
3. Grab the single file “M-T9549GGAA-1016.0[1109]” and put it on the USB stick on the parent (never put inside a folder inside usb stick).
4. Connect USB to back of monitor; ensure all other USB plugs are unplugged and only the USB stick is connected.
5. Turn on monitor (if not already on), go to MENU > Support > Software Update and hit enter.
6. Monitor should detect the update file/usb stick and apply the newest firmware.

Validate a successful update

Before and after a firmware update do these steps to check your firmware version on the monitor.

1. Turn on monitor (if not already on).
2. Go to MENU > Support > Information
3. Your Model, Serial Number, Software version is displayed. Take note of it.

If samsung.com says your current version is equal or higher than their download then your firmware does not need to be updated.

Important notes (read this!)

• DO NOT RENAME the .img files after unzipping. Just copy them to USB as it is named.
• SAMSUNG ARE IDIOTS. Upgrading a very old firmware to latest version may not be detected as an update; regardless of the proper naming and format in the USB stick. If you face errors of ‘no update files detected’ then find the next firmware release after your current running firmware. I was forced to upgrade from 1008 firmware to M-T9549GGAA-1012.1[984C].img before I was able to flash the latest version downloaded from samsung’s website.

If this guide / tips / how-to saved you time consider thanking me here.

I strongly advise against placing any production or critical workflows on any of these; use for testing or fun.

A note on production workflows

Anything that you depend on being reliable should always be hosted at a reputable hosting provider. Most of the dirt cheap providers you will find in any of the resources or websites I am sharing with you may most likely not stay in business for long.

For business or critical use VPS you can choose any of the big dogs: Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud (GCP). They all have its positives and negatives. This article does not focus on these.

Aggregators / Deals lists websites

The following websites seem to aggregate deals found in multiple web forums. You should start here to see the average prices for specific features (RAM, disk space, bandwidth, IPv4 allocation, etc). Note that most aggregators make a commission on your purchases (I do not but you can buy me a beer)

Forums

These are some online communities dedicated to dirt-cheap VPS and hosting. Good for limited time / quantity deals, and researching providers reviews.

I have a pair of Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSDs that I wanted to use for my new homelab that I am currently building (moving from vmware to proxmox). You may be wondering why I want to install the operating system on a partition instead of an entire disk. Several reasons:

1. Proxmox (ZFS-on-Linux) does not yet support SSD TRIM, FreeBSD does support it so migrating from FreeNAS into Proxmox I should be aware of it.
2. Data redundancy for the root filesystem does not need to be large. Even if I do RAID1 with my two SSDs I won’t be storing my critical data or VMs in the rpool – I want a smaller sized root pool that has fault-tolerance (RAID1). A partition of 60GB mirrored in two SSDs should fit the bill here.
3. ZIL Intent Log experimentation, I also want to experiment by using the same two SSDs to speed up my ZFS writes. I want a small partition in a stripe (RAID0) for performance, 45GB total (22.5gb per ssd) is plenty for this.
4. The left over unused space will be left untouched so that the SSD will have more available blocks during the controller’s built-in garbage collection (not the same as TRIM)

I don’t have enough time to go into a lot of details (it’s past 4am), so I will get to how to do it. If you are trying to follow my same steps, you will need at least 3 hard drives.

1. On a hard drive or device you don’t care to use in the final outcome, install Proxmox as you would normally. Wipe the entire partition table and let it install RAID0 on the whole disk.
2. Boot into your new installation, have the two new disks you want to keep attached to the system and ensure linux sees them fdisk should help with this.
3. You will now need to create the partitions on the new disks (not rpool):

You will need to know how to calculate hard disk sectors and multiply by your block size. I don’t have time to go over it but I will do a quick TL;DR example to give you an idea:

We want 25GB slice so that is around 25000000000 bytes / 512 (block size) = 48828125 total sectors to allocate this storage amount.

Take a look at the partition table to make sure you create something similar, fdisk -l /dev/sd$ (your rpool disk). We will leave 8MB disk at the end of the partition, Proxmox by default creates 3 partitions: GRUB_BOOT, ZFS data, Solaris 8MB.

This command creates the partitions for my new array, I’ve described them for you by the -c command. It should be self-explanatory.

# sgdisk -z /dev/sdb
# sgdisk -a1 -n1:34:2047 -t1:EF02 -c1:”BIOS boot” -n2:2048:156252048 -t2:BF01 -c2:”mirror” -n3:156252049:205080174 -t3:BF01 -c3:”stripe” -n4:205080175:205096559 -t4:BF0 /dev/sda

# sgdisk -a1 -n1:34:2047 -t1:EF02 -c1:”BIOS boot” -n2:2048:156252048 -t2:BF01 -c2:”mirror” -n3:156252049:205080174 -t3:BF01 -c3:”stripe” -n4:205080175:205096559 -t4:BF0 /dev/sdc
# zpool create -f stripe -o ashift=13 /dev/sda3 /dev/sdc3
# zpool create -f newroot -o ashift=13 mirror /dev/sda2 /dev/sdc2
# grub-install /dev/disk/by-id/ata-Samsung_SSD_840_PRO_Series_S1ATNSADB46090M
# grub-install /dev/disk/by-id/ata-Samsung_SSD_840_PRO_Series_S12RNEACC59063B

Backup & moving stuff.
# zfs snapshot -r rpool@fullbackup
# zfs list -t snapshot
# zfs send -R rpool@fullbackup | zfs recv -vFd newroot
root@pve:/# zpool get bootfs
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
newroot bootfs – default
rpool bootfs rpool/ROOT/pve-1 local
stripe bootfs – default
root@pve:/# zpool set bootfs=newroot/ROOT/pve-1 newroot
zpool export newroot
zpool import -o altroot=/mnt newroot
— rebooted with freenas live cd, enter shell, import newroot with new name rpool. rebooted
— boot into proxmox recovery — once it boots, do recovery
grub-install /dev/sdb
grub-install /dev/sda
update-grub2
update-initramfs -u

#zpool set bootfs=newroot rpool could also work without renaming via FreeNAS but didn’t try.

On servers with more than two network interfaces Debian/Proxmox renames all interfaces and does not properly detect eth0 as the on-board ethernet as many other linux flavors. This may cause a mild headache if you just installed Proxmox with static IP addresses using the installer and upon reboot you can’t access any network resources.

I already explained the cause and you could argue that on the Proxmox installer they could add a built-in network detection check to properly label eth0 as eth0 as the device is named in many other linux distros. That currently does not exist so I will walk you around the troubleshooting.

Upon reboot or first boot after the installation is complete:
# ip link

The bridge interface (vmbr0) should read “NO-CARRIER, MULTICAST, UP” as well as “state down” a few words further to the left of the results.

# dmesg | grep eth

Read the entries in the dmesg logs, it tells you the name of network interfaces on your system.

“NO-CARRIER” indicates it does not detect an uplink, the interface is configured but none of its bridge members have a network cable or connection being detected.

To fix this you will want to run the following commands:
# ifdown -a
# vi /etc/network/interfaces

By default the installer sets up “eth0” as your only bridge member since the network card numbering got setup differently, the logical name on proxmox for eth0 is actually eth2.

Edit the single instance of eth0 with eth2 – save the file and exit the editor.

# ifup -a
should try to bring back up your interfaces. Trying pinging your network gateway, it should be working now. Cheers.

I spent the past 48 hours researching and trying different things. I unpacked the official HP firmware and tried to find the binary/firmware dump from within the .scexe file provided by HP on their website to no avail.  I even contacted HP for help and they would not be willing to help if the drives were not connected to HP hardware.

After some research I discovered that the HP MB2000EAMZF 2TB drive I had was almost exactly the same (part number) as the official Seagate ST32000644NS  drive after failing to be able to flash HPs firmware using HP’s bootable Firmware Update 8.3 (injecting the .scexe files inside this live CD) – I decided I really had nothing to lose but try the method I will explain below.

The tale of two drives

*Seagate original* Constellation ES ST32000644NS has part number: 9JW168-039

*HP enterprise* MB2000EAMZF has part number: 9JW168-280

It is possible that these two drives have different PCB control boards (basically what controls the disk heads and communicates to the physical disk). If I load a firmware that is written for a different PCB – my drive will most likely be bricked.

The part numbers were too close to eachother, only the last three digits were different. I did not find any other information online from anyone trying what I was about to attempt. HP had issued a *Critical* firmware update for these drives and my only choice was to take the risk now or put this drive on my ZFS array and wait for it to fail short term.

Tools needed and where to get the firmware

1. I had another ST32000644NS drive around and used it’s serial number on seagate’s website. It provided me with firmware version SN12 (ConstellationES1-Muskie-StdOEM-SATA-SN12.zip). Download to your desktop, unpack the zip and look inside the firmware folder SN12.lod file.
2. Download and make a bootable CD of system-rescue live cd – or if you have a Dell iDRAC like me boot from the .iso remotely
3. Ensure that only the hard drive to be flashed is connected to the server/system.
4. Boot into the linux live CD, once in console check drive smart data to see the current model and version with smartct -x /dev/sda (or whatever the /dev/ name of your drive is)
5. Once you have verified the smart data of the drive you want to flash (it will have a name of /dev/sda or /dev/sdb or /dev/sd$)
6. Make sure to have a USB thumb drive with the SN12.lod file from step one – plug it in and mount the drive (if its linux formatted it will be as simple as mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/windows)
7. Now we have the files and we’re ready to flash. Make sure disk is idle (no smart tests running in background). Push the firmware with hdparm  –fwdownload SN12.lod –yes-i-know-what-i-am-doing –please-destroy-my-drive /dev/sdb
8. Reboot the server.

You can repeat steps 4 to 5 and check smart data report and you should see the drive running the firmware you just flashed. In my case here you can see my firmware changed to SN12 on my HP hard drive.

Good luck!

API

• Postman: allows to share, test, document & monitor APIs.

IDE

• Visual Studio: Windows software development IDE (C#/WPF)
• Jetbrains Webstorm: Javascript IDE that becomes powerful with plugins (I use it for writing Go code)

Text editors

• Sublime Text (commercial) but lightweight and powerful
• Atom 
• Brackets

Must have tools

• Git (or Github Desktop or Git for Windows)
• Linux terminal/bash (available on any Mac/Linux machine, for Windows download Git for Windows linked above)

In older versions of named/bind9 used by cPanel if you wanted to allow anyone (or if you wanted security you could have setup an ACL, let’s assume you want to allow all) you could simply edit the configuration file and change “recursion no;” to “recursion yes;” to allow anyone to make queries to your DNS server for those domains or records that are not kept in your local server (ie: resolve yahoo.com)
Newer versions of BIND9/named changed their past behavior and now require a more specific configuration, just add these under “options” section

options {
...
allow-recursion { any; };
allow-query { any; };
allow-query-cache { any; };
...
};

I found a detailed explanation on why bind/named dns server changed its behavior, on the next page  a copy of the support bulletin from July 2007:

I have run into a few issues on Google Compute Engine, it looks like every time the instance gets a DHCP offer the hostname of the machine will get reset to the internal hostname, overriding whatever setting you may have set… this is bad news for a server that needs to respond to DNS settings.

After a few hours of digging and testing out different approaches, including trying to setup a DHCP hook to run the “hostname” linux command I came across documentation from Google talking about “custom metadata”.

What is Google Compute Engine?

Google Compute Engine (or “GCE”) is Google’s answer to Amazon’s AWS, it basically offers you the ability to deploy Virtual Machines (VMs) at Google’s datacenters. In the most simplistics of setups you would use a single VM or “compute instance” and if you wanted to have a more complex setup you could deploy multiple instances in different geographic locations spread across different datacenters in the United States to achieve a more redundant setup or to provide you with better capacity for large traffic workflows.

It all depends on what your goals are, myself I am just starting out with a simple requirement. I would like to use a single compute instance running CentOS linux that runs cPanel DNSonly (proprietary control panel/dns clustering solution for cPanel servers).

The goal is not to host websites or any critical services on this instance, but rather only keep a copy of my DNS zones. If my experiment fails or my instance goes down or gets destroyed there won’t be any losses or damages for this experiment as my primary server is still running on Proxmox PVE.

The limitations of GCE… What I learned so far

GCE instances run behind Google’s firewalls and depending on the datacenter you decide to host your instance your VM will have an internal IP within that datacenters network scope/range (for example: us-central1 datacenter zone has a 10.128.0.0/20 range for all VMs).

This means that assigning a IPv4 public static IP, which is needed to allow anyone to query the DNS server we’ll be hosting inside this instance will actually have to forward packets to the instances internal network. Not really a big deal unless your application can’t be behind a NAT firewall like it is the case here.

For our intensive use and purposes it is fine. One important issue that I found is that doing any kind of e-mail server related activities on GCE is prohibited (source). You won’t be able to use SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) port 25, 465 or 587 to send or receive email.

Now for a DNS server that will not be a mailserver this is not a blocker, but it is really a pain in the ass. Why? because monitoring scripts running on the server need to email the administrator to notify me of issues or errors so they can be investigated.

Continued on the next page.

You’ll need to remap your keys to send the correct signal to your terminal. Change it from the default system function to “send string” and the following strings:

PageUp = 33[5~
PageDown = 33[6~

33 is a shortcut for the ESCAPE key (esc) since in some programs you can’t type in the actualy escape key.

Here are some other codes as well in case you need to remap keys.

Pause = 32
Macro = 03 # Break (Shift-Pause)
Home = 33[1~
Insert = 33[2~
Remove = 33[3~ # Delete
End = 33[4~

In SecureCRT the area to remap your keys is Tools -> Keymap Editor.

This is especially handy if you use command line IRC clients such as Irssi or BitchX.