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Ensuring the EFI partition is mirrored on an Ubuntu install with root on software RAID 1

I found a working procedure here:

- Make sure both EFI partitions are mounted from /etc/fstab, eg. using /boot/eficopy in addition to /boot/efi. (Both partitions need to have the proper partition type GUID, i.e. C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B or "EFI System".)

- Run dpkg-reconfigure grub-efi-amd64 and include both partitions when prompted.


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libheif1 >= 1.18 on debian 12 bookworm (installing packages from backport in debian stable)

Add this line to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-backports main
Run:
# apt-get update
# apt install -t bookworm-backports libheif1

This solves the issues encountered when decoding HEIF (.heic) files produced by iPhone / iOS 18, causing for instance rendering in Nextcloud to fail.

This page has more details on using Backports.


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BackupPC - binary garbage in XferLog.z / XferLog.z getting huge

I run a BackupPC instance that is still on Debian 10 / buster. The latest rsync package for Debian 10 has version number 3.1.3-6.

I recently noticed infrequent issues when backing up hosts that are either on Debian 11 / bullseye, or on Ubuntu 22.04 (which both ship rsync 3.2.3). The symptoms are as follows:

- backups take much longer than usual
- XferLog.z starts "normally", but after a certain point contains a lot of binary garbage, and gets much bigger than usual (hundreds of MB, or even in one case up to 12 GB)

After investigating and looking for information online, I came across these bug reports, which contain the explanation as well as a workaround: Debian Bug report #969463 and BackupPC issue #369.

=> The issue is caused by a combination of a change of default behaviour introduced with rsync 3.2.3, and a bug in File::RsyncP.

The solution that works for me (pending an update to Debian 11 and BackupPC 4) is to add the following line in the individual server config for each of the affected hosts:
$Conf{RsyncArgsExtra} = ['--no-msgs2stderr'];


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Find large files in a BackupPC transfer log (sort files in XferLOG by size)

When your backups suddenly takes much longer to complete, it could be because large files that were previously excluded from the backup were renamed or relocated elsewhere. In order to identify those files, or just to sort the list of files by size, I use the following code (bash):
cd /tmp/
BackupPC_zcat /var/lib/backuppc/pc/mypc/XferLOG.99.z > xlog
for S in `cat xlog | sed -e 's/^[^/]*\/[0-9]*[ ]*//' | cut -f1 -d\ | egrep '^[0-9]+$' | egrep '[0-9]{9,}' | sort -n | uniq ` ; do fgrep " $S " xlog ; done
This will show the list of files bigger than 99999999 bytes (100 MB). Remove "| egrep '[0-9]{9,}'" to just list all instead.

Note: on Debian, BackupPC_zcat is in /usr/share/backuppc/bin/. I've added a symlink in /usr/local/bin/ so that I don't need to look for it every time.


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Add HEIF support to Ubuntu Linux 18.04 (thumbnails / gimp) - preview and open HEIC files from iPhone directly in Ubuntu

Since Apple moved from JPEG to HEIF as default format about two years ago, there has been a lot of progress.

There is a very straightforward way to add minimal HEIC/HEIF support to Ubuntu:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:strukturag/libheif
sudo apt-get install heif-gdk-pixbuf heif-gimp-plugin heif-thumbnailer

That's it! You don't even need to logout or restart, the new functionality is available immediately.

More details here and here.

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