Friday, December 22, 2023

New Outlook does not work with Basic Microsoft 365 Business plan due to licensing restrictions

 I ran into a really odd error on a PC today. Basically you get an error from Outlook:

This account is not supported in Outlook for Windows due to the license provided by your work or school

when trying to set up an email hosted by Microsoft (custom domain).

As it turns out, the issue is that new Outlook does not allow Basic Microsoft 365 Business plan accounts to be added, due to licensing restrictions! So when I disabled the "New Look" and went back to the "old" version of Outlook, it worked just fine.

A nice summary of the issue is found here, by a detailed user feedback to Microsoft:

https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/2f7925cb-3a80-ee11-a81c-000d3ae46fcb

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

Disable IPv6 on Debian

Append the following in the /etc/sysctl.conf file:


net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1

net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.tun0.disable_ipv6 = 1

and run:

sudo sysctl -p

and reboot

Saturday, October 14, 2023

Remove rate limit on pi-hole

Edit /etc/pihole/pihole-FTL.conf

Change RATE_LIMIT line to:

RATE_LIMIT=0/0

then restart pi-hole:

sudo service pihole-FTL restart

You won't see random DNS resolution issues again!


Thursday, October 5, 2023

Resizing video using FFMPEG and Nvidia GPU

Recently I had to resize a rather large 4k H.265 video file to 1080p H.265 file. This is what I used. SO much faster than using the CPU for decoding!

ffmpeg.exe -vsync 0 -hwaccel cuda -hwaccel_output_format cuda -i <input file> -resize 1920x1080 -c:v hevc_nvenc -preset fast -rc vbr -acodec copy <output file>

Tuesday, September 19, 2023

Enable direct P2P ethernet connection between 2 computers (Windows)

I recently had to add a secondary ethernet connection between two PCs, in order to quickly transfer lots of data between them. I ended up using two USB 2.5Gbps network adapters; those computers were already on a Gigabit LAN.

 In order to prioritize the transfer over the 2.5Gbps connection, I had to make a manual entry in each computer's routing table. Let's assume the static IP address of each machine are 192.168.200.1 and 192.168.200.2.

Step 1: You need to run ROUTE PRINT and find the network interface (IF) number of the device. e.g. 49 for our example below

Step 2: Then in an elevated Command prompt, execute the following:

route -p add <destination network> MASK <net mask> <gateway> METRIC <interface metric> IF <interface number>

e.g. On 192.168.200.1 computer: route -p add 192.168.200.0 MASK 255.255.255.0 192.168.200.2 METRIC 1 IF 49

e.g. On 192.168.200.2 computer: route -p add 192.168.200.0 MASK 255.255.255.0 192.168.200.1 METRIC 1 IF 49

Now whenever you initiate network traffic between the two, it will use the direct connection (192.168.200.0 network) you setup, instead of their usual LAN (say 192.168.x.0).

Sunday, September 17, 2023

Chia 2.0 GPU plotting performance compilation

Compiled summary of different Nvidia GPU plotting performance from folks on the web, using Chia 2.0.0+ bladebit.

These are across various CPU models and configurations, so use it as a rough guideline to spec your plotter hardware.

In general, 

I will update as I discover more.


GPU System RAM (GB) Time (s)
Tesla P4 256 485
GTX 1070 128 286
Tesla P40 256 242
RTX 3050 256 230
RTX 3060 Ti 128 187
RTX 3070 128 167
RTX 4060 Ti 128 162
RTX A4000 256 122
RTX 3070 256 97
RTX A5000 128 90
RTX 3090 256 77
RTX 4090 256 75