Category: tuts

Categories
tuts Windows

Windows 10 User Experience & Telemetry service

Windows 10 was released long ago in internet time, but I get asked questions about it randomly by various users, friends and clients. One of the most asked ones is about “spying” that windows 10 may be doing on the user. Initially a server called DiagTrack was present in windows that provided these “spying capabilities”. Since end of 2015 they have renamed the service to “Connect User Experience and Telemetry service”. I am not sure why they changed the name, maybe the word tracking was bothering some people and MS made it… “different”.

diagtrack-vs-telemetry

Connect User Experience and Telemetry service

Microsoft says Telemetry is system data that is uploaded by the Connected User Experience and Telemetry component. The telemetry data is used to keep Windows devices secure, and to help Microsoft improve the quality of Windows and Microsoft services. It is used to provide a service to the user as part of Windows.

Whats that mean? Only MS really knows what it means truly and if you care you should ask someone from MS for a real answer. I am simply here to tell you how to disable this IF you want to do so.

  1. Hold down the Windows key and tap the R key
  2. In the box that opens type services.msc and press the Enter key or click the OK button
  3. In the ‘Services (Local)’ section find the line with the name ‘Connected User Experiences and Telemetry’ and double-click it
  4. In the ‘Service status’ section click ‘Stop’ (highlighted blue in the screenshot below)
  5. Under the ‘Startup type’ drop down menu select ‘Disabled’ and then confirm this and close the window by clicking ‘OK’ (highlighted yellow in the screenshot below)

Connected User Experiences and Telemetry service

 

This should disable the service and the tracking for this install. Now we know microsoft has enabled this service under a different name once, will they do it again? who knows, maybe check on this periodically to see what state its in. Working in an enterprise environment and want to know how to control the telemetry service? find out from a technet article written by MS themselves by clicking here.

Categories
Linux tuts

Debian package management speed ups

debian logo
Debian is a Linux distro that’s used by millions of machines all over the planet.

No one likes to sit around waiting for slow mirrors while updating multiple packages but its a fact of life usually. In debian it means typing apt-get update and sitting around for a while, then doing the actual install or upgrade and getting some coffee. what if you could speed the process along somewhat? well now just like we showed you how to speed up apt downloads for ubuntu you can speed up the apt speeds for Debian! This way you can focus more on clashing some clans or something…. whatever you do in your free time that is.

Httpredir

In comes httpredir, “It uses the geographic and network location of the user and the mirrors, the architecture of the requested files, IP address family, the availability and freshness of the mirrors, and a few other things” to find the closest and fastest mirror of data for you. This gives you the quickest way to get your files without resorting to new tools or alternate package managers. This is already there for Jessie ( debian 8 ) so no need to edit that, but for everyone else on older releases this will bring wonderful speedups.

setting up httpredir is simple :

edit your /etc/apt/soucres.list

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian sid main
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian sid main

replace with

deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian sid main
deb-src http://httpredir.debian.org/debian sid main
Categories
Linux shell tuts

Find out whats taking up all the hdd space

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Running out of hdd space is pretty annoying. So if you are running out of space and need to find out whats taking up all that space type the following command to find out more :

du -h  |grep '[0-9]G'

 

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Categories
Linux shell tuts

Remove all old installed but unused kernels

unused kernels

I just noticed I had 8 kernels installed on a machine. dont need but one…. so I rebooted to make sure I was using the newest, and removed all the old ones via these simple commands :

 

Ubuntu / Debian / dpkg / Apt:

dpkg -l 'linux-*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/;/[0-9]/!d' | xargs sudo apt-get -y purge

Thats a one liner, so just copy paste the whole thing.

Centos / RHEL / Yum / RPM:

uname -r

See which kernel is being used.

rpm -q kernel

get a list of installed kernels

yum install yum-utils

make sure yum-utils is installed

package-cleanup --oldkernels --count=1

Cleanup old packages, the count can be any number and it will keep that number of the latest packages. count 2 will keep the current newest and one more, 3 will keep the current newest and 2 more and so on.

nano yum.conf

edit /etc/yum.conf and look for installonly_limit and change it to any number, this was the kernels will be cleaned up automatically. I have mine set to 3.

installonly_limit=3