Saturday, February 26, 2022

upgrade path for old laptops

Edited excerpts from my reply to some queries about upgrades for old laptops - 

 So as I understand, your two questions are:
1. Can the hardware upgrade (to SSD + more RAM) be avoided by reinstalling the OS / drivers
2. Can the SSDs be installed along with the HDDs.

1. Reinstalling the OS will definitely speed up the machines. But with 4 GB RAM, judicious use would be needed to avoid the machines "going slow". The following can help - 
(a) use Linux instead of Windows - here is a comparison for a fresh installation on an old Lenovo laptop in my room - 
Time taken for Windows 7 to boot, open firefox and open youtube.com - 3:30 minutes.
Time taken for Linux to boot, open firefox and open youtube.com - 1:15 minutes.
Similarly, Windows takes 40 seconds to shut down, while Linux shuts down in less than ten seconds.
(b) open only a couple of browser tabs or windows, and not too many of them 
(c) open only one application at a time, and be prepared to wait for 30 seconds or so for things like MS Word to load.

Reinstalling the OS would almost certainly help to some extent, but to avoid the limitations above, adding RAM and switching over to SSD would be needed. Windows 10 also has something called "Fast startup", which would make boot up times faster than with Win8. Maybe boot times can go from 3 minutes to 2 minutes with an OS reinstall. But it would certainly become much much faster with an SSD and with 8 GB of RAM - most probably it would boot in 45-60 seconds and open apps like Word in under 10 seconds. 

Replacing RAM alone can avoid "slow" behaviour once the machine has finished booting and loading the required apps. Booting up would still be slow. RAM could possibly be scrounged from one laptop and put into another, but this would need the RAM which is already installed to be a single 4GB stick. Those laptops have 2 slots. So, if you want to put in 8 GB, you would need 2 sticks of 4 GB each. You can't do that if your existing laptop RAM consists of two 2 GB sticks.

So, in summary, if you want the laptops to become optimally fast, you would need to spend the quoted amount and do an OS reinstall. If you wish, you could ask the tech to do the upgrade on one piece and see the results for yourself, and then decide if it would be worthwhile to do for the other laptops. 

2. In order to install the SSD along with the HDD (as against instead of the HDD), the laptop must have two hard disk bays. Usually the old laptops don't. Or you can remove the DVD drive and put the SSD in that space instead. But for that, you would need a caddy or holder which would cost around Rs. 250 - https://www.amazon.in/Digital-Device-2nd-Enclosures-Compatible/dp/B09MFNK4PG/

block does not exist error

Excerpts from a reply about a Moodle issue. The issue faced was, an admin block was seen (mistakenly added?) on the RHS of Brickfield registration (admin) page. When trying to delete this block, a 'block does not exist' error was seen.

People have faced this problem, and there seems to be no clear-cut solution - 

Since this discussion says that the Theme may be responsible,
I tried changing the theme from Moove to Adaptable, and found that the Admin block appears on all pages with that theme.

I also found that the Admin block is unlocked in this page,
https://our.test.server.org/admin/blocks.php

So, I think it may be safer to not try to delete it via the database back-end, or else it may interfere with accessing the admin console.

Sunday, February 20, 2022

importing data from pdf to google sheet

This page has lots of methods listed for importing tables from pdf documents to google sheets. To summarize:

  1. First use Google Docs to open the PDF, then copy-paste if data is seen to be in a table.
  2. If data is seen as delimited text in the Google Doc, save as text, find/replace the delimiter if needed, save as CSV and then upload to Google drive and open with Google sheets. 
  3. Using third-party tool PDF table extractor - in Google Drive, choose open with -> Connect more apps -> search for PDF table extractor
  4. Using online service online2pdf.com - using convert to Excel
  5. Other online services - pdfchef.com/pdf-to-excel.html , altoconvertpdftoexcel.com

Tuesday, February 15, 2022

moving a domain from legacy free GSuite to another Google Workspace edition - various options

Google has announced that their "GSuite Legacy free editon" will no longer be available from May 1, 2022.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/2855120

Accordingly, we had to plan to shift some of our domains which used the Legacy free edition. For those with deep pockets or for those whose revenues justified it, the easiest option would have been to shift to a paid plan. But since we already had the non-profit free edition for other domains, we wanted to shift the "Legacy free" domains there instead.

Some other options would have been 

For one of our domains, x.tld, there was only one mail box, which was moved to our domain registrar's free mailbox plan - they offer two free mailboxes. (Edit April 2022 - now moved to using improvMX.) Then we used x.tld as a test run for the migration of our more important a.tld domain by moving it to our free.tld non-profit account as an additional domain - 
https://support.google.com/a/answer/7502379

Google doesn't seem to offer any seamless "move domain from one account to another" option. We have to delete the domain from the source account and add to the destination account. If we just delete x.tld from the source account by deleting the google account itself, the blogger and youtube accounts associated with that google account would get deleted as well. Luckily, we had another domain y.tld which was not being used for emails. We added y.tld as a secondary domain in the source account.

For adding y.tld as a secondary domain and not an alias, first we had to upgrade to Google Workspace Business Starter - otherwise it allows only the addition of alias domains. After y.tld was added as a secondary domain, we made y.tld the primary domain, then removed the x.tld email alias which is automatically created for each of the users in x.tld which has now been transformed into y.tld due to the change in the primary domain. So, now the blogger and youtube channels can be accessed using user@y.tld, and x.tld was available to be migrated to the free.tld account within half an hour or so

In the case of x.tld, which had only one user, there was an option where the user could submit a form to google for consideration for a different migration path if the domain was being used for an Individual instead of a Business. But I didn't take it, as anyway such an option would not be appropriate for us. Additionally, in the case of x.tld, an email had been received saying that if we opt to upgrade by ourselves, we would not be charged till July during the upgrade process. But in the case of a.tld, that email was not received, hence charges were a possibility.  But as mentioned in the support page, admins who opt to upgrade before the deadline will not be charged till July 1 2022. So for the a.tld migration as well, we could migrate without incurring charges. This information is seen only after going through the "Switch" button and confirming that we wish to set up billing etc. 


Here are excerpts from a migration email sent to our users of a.tld:

  • Before the migration, it is strongly recommended that you take a backup of all your old data. You can do this by logging in to your a.tld account and going to https://takeout.google.com/
  • After the migration, the following would happen:
  • Old emails will be migrated from the old inbox to the new inbox over the course of 2-3 days, depending on the number of emails.
  • During this time, the old emails would also be available in the old inbox by logging in to an alternate email id, which would have b.tld instead of a.tld - for example, 
  • f@a.tld would be able to log in as f@b.tld and see the old emails.
  • Calendar data would need to be exported from the old account and imported into the new account. - https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37111
  • Similarly, google drive content would need to be imported separately into the new account. The backup of your data taken using takeout.google.com would contain all this by default. 
  • Contacts can also be exported from the old account - https://support.google.com/contacts/answer/7199294
    and imported into the new account - https://support.google.com/contacts/answer/1069522
  • In case contacts were not created manually but just appear automatically based on old emails, such contacts will again start to appear automatically in the new account after the email migration is complete, in 2-3 days.
  • In case you use secondary google products like blogger, youtube, etc, you will need to login with   @b.tld  (for example f@b.tld) to access the older content after the migration. 

Before the migration, I tried out using the email migration service to move emails from a test account - https://support.google.com/a/answer/9216781 - the email data migration tool went quite slowly, around 10 minutes for 60 MB of emails, and then remaining at 99% for quite a while. During the actual migration, which started on Sunday morning, the migration progress (of emails being taken via imap) on Tuesday morning after around 45 hours of migration is shown in the cropped image below, where the mailboxes with the largest number of emails and nearly 15 GB of content remaining half-done. Google takeout after excluding emails went quite quickly when the "add to Drive" option was chosen, less than five minutes each, with only one user having more than 2 GB of takeout data after excluding emails. The "Start time" shown as a date in 2001 is what I had chosen to include all emails, since we need to set a start date for the email migration.  


One issue faced during the migration was: the admin email id in a.tld which was used to send out alerts to users about the migration turned out to be caught by spam filters. So, almost none of our users were alerted about the move, and some of them were upset about this. Probably maintaining updated phone numbers and alerting via SMS or Whatsapp might be a better way to go. Or use another email id  which is known to work, and use read receipts

Edit: It looks like read receipts is not available for our non-profit Google workspace - even 48 hours after enabling read receipts, the option to request read receipts doesn't appear in the compose window's "More options" "three dots". So would need to go by phone calls / Whatsapp / SMS, since people don't reply to emails. 

And after all the migration ends, we shouldn't forget to cancel the google workspace subscription for b.tld before May to prevent charges on my credit card!

Edit (May 2022):  Read receipts option started appearing after a week or so after enabling it :). 
Migrating another set of domains to another non-profit account ran into IMAP authentication issues for all those users who had recovery email / recovery phone number / disabled IMAP manually. The relevant team had to manually log in to each account, change recovery phone number to their number (or ask the concerned person to tell them the OTP), enable IMAP and "allow less secure apps".  




Sunday, February 06, 2022

breaking a moodle installation by adding an html block

Our moodle development instance seemed to be broken - none of the javascript, like the drop-down to log in or the gear icons to edit blocks, seemed to work. The issue seemed to be an HTML block added for testing. Clearing the cache alone did not help, since the broken HTML was still present, and was blocking all javascript execution. And the broken HTML could not be cleared from the UI, since the gear icon's javascript was not working, so the edit page was not coming up. 

From the Moodle in English forums, found the location of html blocks to be "serialized, then base64encoded and stored inside the configdata field of the mdl_block_instance table." In our case, the mdl_ was replaced by our prefix, of course. So I dug out DBeaver, and blanked out the last three rows from the prefix_block_instance table. Problem solved for now. 

Thursday, February 03, 2022

Windows Server Storage getting filled within minutes

Copy-pasting from an email conversation:

As you can see in the debugging, your code is writing some temp files which are not getting deleted, hence the filling up of space.

As mentioned in this link below, this temp folder
C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\AppData\Local\Temp

can be used as a temp dir by .NET applications,
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5420898/find-temp-folder-for-user-network-service

So even though you might not have written any "save this to file" code, there might be some persistence code which has been written, which is causing this issue. You could try disabling various versions of the code (like disable the dev version or disable the uat version etc) to check which version causes this. Then you could try commenting out recent changes to pinpoint the section of code which causes this.

There are of course other ways like running a bat file to clear up the temp folder as in
https://www.easeus.com/data-recovery-solution/automatically-delete-temp-files.html#part2
but that will not solve the underlying problem.

Wednesday, February 02, 2022

Toshiba AC-100 network manager removed by mistake

V had removed the Toshiba AC-100's network manager by mistake, and it was not able to connect to any network in order to restore the network. Copy-pasting from my email - 

When you removed the network manager, it looks like the device is unable to connect to any network. In any manner. If it had been able to connect to the network and if it was a current Linux distro, the way to make it work might have been
apt install network-manager-gnome

But even if it can connect to the network, I don't think Lubuntu 14 ARM distro files are available any more on the Ubuntu packages site. I see that on the AC100, /etc/apt/sources.list.d is empty. Did some searches, did not find any Lubuntu / Ubuntu 14.04 ARM repos. ARM files are not in https://releases.ubuntu.com/trusty/

So, the easier option might be to reinstall the entire OS. 

Or if you know some place where you can download network-manager-gnome.deb for 14.04 ARM package, you can install it with GDebi package manager by right-clicking
 
For eg:

But this particular link kept complaining about missing dependencies. You would then need to download each dependency, install it, and if it complains that a newer version is already installed, remove the older version like
sudo apt remove libnm-gtk0
etc.

I'm not sure which process you followed to get Lubuntu 14 on it - the Ubuntu site mentions only how to get Lubuntu 12 on it - and also how to go back to the default Android.

I also see that Android 4 has been ported to it,
https://answers.launchpad.net/ac100/+question/221095