How to fix slow and unresponsive Steam on Mac
by lunarg on December 22nd 2022, at 15:26
A slow and unresponsive Steam app on Mac is a rather common issue. Symptoms are intermittent display freezing of the app, sluggish and delayed reaction to user input (i.e. clicking on items) and slow animations in the various screens. The issues may not appear straight away after starting Steam but may build up over time, causing Steam to run increasingly slower. However, the problems are only related to the Steam app, as games themselves run normally.

This is a known (but undocumented) issue with GPU acceleration, which luckily can be turned off rather easily:

With the Steam app active, in the main menu, click Steam → Preferences.

On the left, click Interface.

Look for Enable GPU a  ...
 
Script to remove local cache for Remote Desktop Manager Mac
by lunarg on December 19th 2022, at 11:05

Remote Desktop Manager Mac sometimes has issues with stale cache, especially after an update. Below is a simple one-liner/script I like to use for deleting all the cache files in a Remote Desktop Manager Mac installation.

#!/bin/bash
find "$HOME/Library/Application Support/com.devolutions.remotedesktopmanager" -iname "*.mcdf2" -type f -delete
 
Aardvark Blues FM direct streaming link
by lunarg on December 1st 2022, at 12:29

Here's the direct streaming link for Aardvark Blues FM. You can use this link in your favourite streaming app (VLC, Apple Music, etc.):

https://streaming.live365.com/b77280_128mp3

A while back, most of the references on streaming sites such as Icecast were removed, leaving only the webplayer available. As I found this not to be very handy, I started looking to find the original streaming link used in the webplayer.

 
Use PowerCLI to connect the PVSCSI floppy drive to a VM
edited by lunarg on October 14th 2022, at 14:41
In order to install a fresh copy of Windows Server on a VM with the VMWare Paravirtual SCSI controller, as the driver for the PVSCSI adapter is not included in the default Windows Server ISO, you would use the built-in floppy images to make the PVSCSI driver available during the installation, avoiding the need to install using a different SCSI controller and then swap the controller after the installation of the guest OS and VMWare Tools.

To facilitate this, you would add a virtual floppy drive, connect the correct floppy image containing the PVSCSI driver, and then load the driver during the disk selection portion of the installation wizard. Unfortunately, since the deprecation of the Flas  ...
 
Completely hide Quick Access in File Explorer
by lunarg on October 12th 2022, at 09:59

Completely hiding Quick Access from the navigation tree in File Explorer can be achieved via the registry:

  1. In the registry, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
  2. Create a DWORD 32-bit value named HubMode and set its value to 1.

You may need to re-logon for the changes to take effect. You can also use group policies to apply this setting in a domain.

 
Configuring RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) on Dell OS10 switches
by lunarg on October 3rd 2022, at 09:15
Dell OS10 (used on PowerSwitch S-series) supports RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE). The SmartFabric manual has some good examples on how to configure it but here's the summary.

A few remarks first: you can choose which queue to place traffic in. The manual states Q3 which is the required queue if you also use iSCSI (which is by default placed in Q4), but if you don't use iSCSI, you can opt to place the traffic in Q4 instead of Q3.

Also, when entering the commands, be sure to check whether you're in the proper context in CONFIG mode. I did not add the necessary "exit" commands so don't blindly copy/paste this.

First, enable DCB(X), which is required for RoCE (PFC and ETS):

dc  ...
 
Bring up a network interface without an IP address in Debian
by lunarg on September 13th 2022, at 12:26
It is possible to automatically bring up a network interface without any IP address configuration in Debian. This can be useful for e.g. traffic flow monitoring where the interface is subsequently placed in promiscuous mode by software such as tcpdump.

Like always, all network interface configuration is stored in the file /etc/network/interfaces. For the interface you want to bring up without an IP address, add these lines:

iface eth0 inet manualpre-up ifconfig $IFACE uppost-down ifconfig $IFACE down

If the interface is a VLAN interface, the up/down commands must be executed after/before the VLAN hooks, so it should then read:

iface eth0.2 inet manualpost-up ifconfig $IFACE uppre-down if  ...
 
Direct links to macOS installers
edited by lunarg on September 1st 2022, at 10:01

Here's a list of direct download links to the latest macOS installers. They are all links to Apple's servers, either direct links to the App Store, or, in case of older versions, links to Apple's CDN.

Direct links to App Store:

Older versions are only available as DMG files from Apple's CDN:

 
 
 
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