Sunday, July 17, 2016

Income tax e-filing with e-verification

In earlier posts, I had detailed the process for e-filing Income tax returns in India. This year, from Assessment Year 2016-17, the verification can also be done online, by logging onto Netbanking portal of a bank where my PAN number is associated with my account. So, no need to print and post the ITR-V form.


In HDFC bank's netbanking portal, the e-verification is currently available under Requests - Income Tax E-filing on the left-hand side.

Around a month after I submitted the return in June, my tax refund has been credited, too.

Sunday, July 10, 2016

checking for bad blocks on hard disk

The IBM ThinkCentre given by K for use by Ke's son had some disk issues - the hard disk was my former 160 GB laptop hard disk. Probably bad sectors and so on, so I had to do the Linux equivalent of running scandisk. Ubuntu 16.04 apparently doesn't support shutdown -Fr now for scanning on reboot - maybe due to systemd?

So, booted using USB flash drive and ran
sudo umount /dev/sda1
sudo e2fsck -c /dev/sda1

Apparently e2fsck with the -c option marks bad blocks using the badblocks program. 160 GB drive took 1 hour 30 minutes to scan - would have taken around 45 minutes if not for the 97 errors.

Output of badblocks 97/0/0 apparently means  read/write/corruption errors. Since I'm doing a read-only test, only the read errors show up.

Sunday, July 03, 2016

browsing Windows shares with Master Browser down

The Studio network's master browser was set as the local server, which now has smbd service stopped. So, smb4k, konqueror etc were not displaying shares when queried with smb hostnames like smb://hostname
- ip addresses were required.

In order to query the ip addresses, google led to this post, so a listing, albeit clunky, is obtained with
nmblookup -S WORKGROUP
where WORKGROUP should be replaced with the name of the workgroup in the network. smb4k lists the workgroup names, so that can be a first step.

Edit: PB adds a better way:
nbtscan -qe 192.168.127.0/24