Some time ago I noticed that I could no longer boot a remote machine via Wake-on-LAN. This annoyed me quite a bit, as the machine was 2100km away and there was nobody at that location who could boot it for me. I really had no clue why it stopped working. So when I recently arrived at the location again, I started looking into it. Everything I had previously configured was still in place. The BIOS option Power On by PCIE devices was enabled, and I still had this in /etc/local.d/wol.start:

#!/bin/sh

ethtool -s eth0 wol g

echo "GBE" > /proc/acpi/wakeup

Yet, when I ran ethtool eth0, it showed that WOL was disabled:

While configuring my CalDAV accounts in Thunderbird on my new laptop, I ran into an issue. I have a few CalDAV accounts that are all on the same Zimbra server. Thunderbird only requested a login and password for the first account I added. It tried to open the next account I added with the credentials that were already stored for the first account, and that failed.

In a previous post I explained how to configure syslog-ng to accept logs from other hosts on the network. Back then I used a filter to only write logs from a specific host to a specific destination.

Many people I know use a laptop for almost anything, anywhere. When they arrive at the office, they hook it up to an external monitor, and use an external keyboard and mouse or trackpad. I prefer to have a proper workstation, with powerful CPU and GPU, lots of RAM and multiple large monitors. As it's rather difficult to take this setup with me to meetings, or when travelling, I still require a secondary device that I can take with me everywhere I go. Some people seem to be OK with a tablet for that purpose, but that just doesn't work for me.

As I already mentioned in my previous post about the XPS 13, I had issues with the touchpad: it freezes rather frequently, because it looses sync a lot. After losing sync for a few times, the psmouse driver issues a reconnect request. And when that happens, the touchpad freezes. It looks like this in the kernel log:

Jul 26 15:43:19 sylvester kernel: psmouse serio1: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 4
Jul 26 15:43:19 sylvester kernel: psmouse serio1: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Jul 26 15:43:19 sylvester kernel: psmouse serio1: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Jul 26 15:43:19 sylvester kernel: psmouse serio1: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Jul 26 15:43:19 sylvester kernel: psmouse serio1: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Jul 26 15:43:19 sylvester kernel: psmouse serio1: issuing reconnect request

Since I hate typing passwords all the time, I looked for a way to automatically unlock my SSH keys at login. This guide focuses on KDE Plasma 5 and SDDM, but it should be easy to implement it for KDE Plasma 4 and other display managers as well.

A few days ago, polkit version 0.113 was marked stable on Gentoo amd64. Since the update, I could no longer suspend my system without entering the root password. Quite annoying, especially for a laptop. When canceling the polkit dialog, this appeared in the journal (yes, I am using systemd):

sep 10 05:22:52 sylvester.nomad.adlevio.net polkitd[18113]: Operator of unix-session:3 FAILED to authenticate to gain authorization for action org.freedesktop.login1.suspend for system-bus-name::1.96 [kded5 [kdeinit5]] (owned by unix-user:stijn)