Joseph Zikusooka ~ Zik

A Linux software engineer specializing in open source technologies | Very experienced in building and configuring UNIX/Linux systems and servers. Passionate about developing software applications and hardware for the smart home | Currently serving as the CEO of Jambula Labs and the project leader at JambulaTV, a smart home automation and entertainment platform - https://jambulatv.com | This blog focuses on the following areas: Linux How-Tos and Tutorials ::: IT Security News ::: Free and Libre Open Source Software ::: Smart Home Software ::: Digital Innovations in East Africa https://mastodon.social/@jzik | https://github.com/zikusooka

Author : Joseph Zikusooka

I am a software engineer and developer specializing in open source software. I have a solid experience building and configuring UNIX/Linux systems and servers. I am passionate about developing software applications and hardware for the smart home I am currently serving as the CEO of Jambula Labs and the project leader at JambulaTV, a smart home automation

USB ports and Virtualization

If you have not yet heard, virtualization is a technology that allows you to run multiple operating systems on a single computer including Windows, Linux, BSD and more.

Assuming your company or organization runs five (5) physical servers today, With Virtulization, only one (1) physical server is needed. The cost savings are tremendous. Virtualization dramatically improves the efficiency and availability of IT resources and applications in your organization.

Lately, I have been using FreeBSD guests under VirtualBox 2.2.2. You can read about Sun VirtualBox (Now under Oracle) at: http://www.virtualbox.org.

One thing that does not work out of the box is USB on Linux hosts especially Red-Hat derivatives such as Fedora. I know several people out there who are having difficulties connecting USB devices such as flash disks, USB printers, cameras etc to VirtualBox

I have posted a FREE bash script to help you resolve it. After running this script, your USB devices attached to your VirtualBox host machine will be visible to guests. Cool! You can download script at:

My VBox USB Script

One of dem days …

Looks like Uganda Telecom (UTL) mobile phone subscribers are experiencing difficulties today. My UTL connection has been on and off all day … actually there was a complete outage from yesterday till mid day – my goodness I can’t stand it! Just curious, I thought I outta check out the company’s website for any mention of it, but then again what am I thinking – this is Uganda. So we get disconnected and no one takes accountability. Unbelievable!

Back from Home

Am back after a long week traveling. I spent much of last week in my home town of Soroti. It was a welcome change from the busy and hectic schedule.

I drove east-ward on Tuesday. My observations:

The state of the roads have somewhat improved. For those who remember, the Jinja to Bugiri road two years ago was a real nightmare. Well after all those years of waiting and waiting , it seems the road is almost complete and only took me 30 minutes to get from Jinja to Iganga versus the previous 70 minutes. Not bad. Well not bad, until I heard a couple of day’s ago that a bus accident killed 12 people due to over-speeding. The accident occured between Iganga and Jinja on the Tirinyi road. My condolences to all those affected by this loss

Am now back. Spent much of this week doing some post upgrade cleanups for AEx hosting. Till next time …

Happy May day!

Like most parts of the world, It’s a public holiday here in Uganda.

The whole of my neighbourhood lost power today morning at 3am. Restored at 8am, however my house was still off. Turns out there was a fault at the transformer. After several futile calls to the power company’s call centre, I decided to call the local guys. Thanks to Joseph at UMEME in Entebbe, power at my house was reconnected at 1pm.

Other than getting a day off (plus a long weekend) I suspect for most of us, Labour day is no longer significant. By the way, when I lived in the US, I always wondered what it would have been like to have this day off. One thing, today’s national celebrations were held in my home town of Soroti (http://www.soroti.org)

Happy May day everyone.

What a week!

This week my web hosting company, AEx (http://www.aexhosting.com) completed its three month migration process to the new servers.

Its been quite a challenging week, not only because we had to migrate servers that were installed almost six years ago, but our local ISPs were also having problems of their own.

This blog is somewhat of a nice outcome of all of this.  I hope I can now keep everyone updated on this site.

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