Posts

Showing posts from January, 2017

New Nintendo 3DS XL motherboard swap

Image
The Super Famicom is a contender for my favorite game console of all time.  I loved the North American redesign as the Super NES, but the Super Famicom was what I fixated on for years leading up to its release.  Everything from the contours of the console to the colors of the buttons on the controller seemed so lovingly and carefully designed.  Nothing before or since has really come close. So when Nintendo announced in early 2016 that there would be a limited edition New Nintendo 3DS LL (that's what the XL is called in Japan) to celebrate the anniversary of the Super Famicom, I immediately pre-ordered it from National Console Support, then dutifully waited 8 months until it arrived.  Whenever a new 3DS special edition is announced in Japan, there's usually a bit of uncertainty about whether it will also come out in the U.S., but this one was clearly not going to be brought here.  It's doubtful most Americans would even recognize what it was supposed to be. When it arrived,

Online Resizing of a Boot Partition on RHEL 6 or 7 with parted.

The Problem: I've been getting away with using a 200MB boot partition for over a decade, but RHEL 7 has started pushing the limits of that scheme.  Between GRUB2 and the automatic creation of a rescue kernel and initramfs that's twice the size as a normal initramfs, that 200MB gets consumed much more quickly.  I can only make it through about two update cycles before having to uninstall the old kernels to avoid upgrade failures. This is a handy command for removing all of the old kernels by the way: yum erase $(rpm -qa kernel* | egrep -v $(uname -r)) I've updated my provisioning tools to make the boot partition larger, but obviously I still have to do something about the pre-existing systems. All of my VMs are built with provisioning templates that create a boot partition on the first disk, then format the remainder of the first disk for LVM.  In order to expand the boot partition, it's boundary needs to be moved into space occupied by the OS itself.  Fortunately LVM is