Thursday 25 October 2018

Move Windows 10 notifications to top of screen

Chrome seems to alert on everything it has now and the notifications\toasts were covering access to items in the system tray that I sometimes needed to exit on login to Windows.

Creating the following registry with a value of 0 will move the toasts to the top of the screen instead:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
    DWORD DisplayToastAtBottom 0x000000000 (0)

Thanks to Winaero:
https://winaero.com/blog/move-notification-toasts-to-top-or-bottom-of-the-screen-in-windows-10/

Monday 15 October 2018

Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver ntp inactive dead


Having installed ntp services on Ubuntu 18.04, we had to manually start manually on any reboot  using:
               sudo service start ntp


It turns out that in Ubuntu 18.04, systemd has an in-built timesync service that fires on boot called systemd-timesyncd. I believe this service was clashing with ntp and causing ntp to fail to start.


I’ve carried out the following to disable systemd-timesyncd on all three time servers, and to replace it with ntp:
sudo systemctl stop systemd-timesyncd
sudo systemctl disable systemd-timesyncd
sudo systemctl status systemd-timesyncd
sudo systemctl enable ntp
suso systemctl start ntp
sudo systemctl status ntp

All timeservers now appear to start ntp correctly.

Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver as Virtualbox Guest

Virtualbox guest utilities are available in the 'Multiverse' repo.
Testing on server gives the following in /etc/apt/sources.list after initial install:

  • deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic main
  • deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-security main
  • deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates main


You may be using a different ftp/http location, but just adding 'multiverse' to each line should achieve the same result. I ended up with:

  • deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic main multiverse
  • deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-security main multiverse
  • deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates main multiverse


I then ran the following commands to update and install the required modules:
  • sudo apt update
  • sudo apt install virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-dkms dkms linux-headers-generic build essential