Seagate has recently updated their 2.5″ Backup Plus Portable line, redesigning the hard drive’s enclosure. The previous version was somewhat popular for drive shucking due to price, capacity, and ease of shucking. This new model, the STHP5000400, contains a 5TB 5400RPM hard drive in the 15mm tall 2.5″ form-factor. For those looking to inexpensively fill 2.5″ drive bays in a storage server/NAS, this seems to be the only choice.
Continue readingFix Missing Network Controllers on Windows 10 Build 18362 (19H1)
After being graced with the latest Windows 10 feature update, Build 18362, both network adapters on my ASRock X370 Taichi motherboard went missing. This was not a simple case of the drivers for the network cards, the Intel Wireless-AC 9260 and Intel I211, not being installed, device manager did not even have a “unknown device” placeholder for either NIC.
Luckily, this was not a hardware issue (failure). Both devices worked once again after rolling back the build 18362 update. However, this is not a long-term solution as Windows 10 is very persistent on nagging users to install feature updates.
As the hardware had not failed, it was on to looking for something missing in the PCIe tree. Unfortunately, Windows 10 does not ship something like lspci as most Linux distributions do. However, there is the Device Management PowerShell utility. With it installed, the following command can be used to collect the PCI tree:
Get-device | where {$_.LocationInfo -like 'PCI bus*'} | select Name, LocationInfo, UINumber > pci_tree.txt
Comparing the PCI tree from before and after the build 18362 update revealed that the “PCI Downstream Switch Ports” on PCI bus 38 and the “PCI Upstream Switch” port on PCI bus 13 were missing (along with the two Intel NICs). On the ASRock X370 Taichi, only the CPU and the chipset contain PCIe switches. Given that NICs are traditionally attached to the chipset, it was time to look at the chipset driver.
Attempting to re-install the latest AMD X370 chipset driver revealed that Windows had downgraded the driver in the feature update—breaking the PCI bus in the process. Fixing the issue was as simple as re-installing the AMD 19.10.0429 chipset driver. After a reboot, both NICs were working one again.
Breadcrumb NavXT 6.3.0
Holy Gutenberg breadcrumb trail block Batman! Originally scheduled for inclusion in Breadcrumb NavXT 6.2, the Breadcrumb Trail Gutenberg Block finally makes an appearance in 6.3. Additionally, changes were made to improve accessibility standards support (both in the settings page and in the breadcrumb trail). Lastly, a bug that caused a PHP error in bcn_breadcrumb_trail::fill() has been fixed.
bcn_display_attribute_array Filter
Back in 6.0, the bcn_display_attributes filter was added to replace the old bcn_li_attributes filter. This was little more than a name change for the filter. Unfortunately, neither filter is easy to use—both require string processing. As an alternative, easier to use filter, bcn_display_attribute_array was added to Breadcrumb NavXT 6.3. This filter works against a key-value pair array of the attributes.
bcn-aria-current Template Tag
To facilitate WAI-ARIA Breadcrumb support, a new template tag was added in 6.3. Unlike the other template tags that start and end with %, this template tag is simply bcn-aria-current. This tag is replaced with aria-current="page" when the breadcrumb represents the current page, otherwise it is replaced with an empty string.
As always, you can grab the latest version of Breadcrumb NavXT from the Breadcrumb NavXT page. If you experience any issues with this version of Breadcrumb NavXT, please leave a comment on this post detailing the issue.
Breadcrumb NavXT Schema 1.0.0
Introducing Breadcrumb NavXT Schema. This plugin adds support for Yoast SEO 11.0’s Schema API, injecting the proper JSON-LD formatted Schema.org BreadcrumbList into the schema block. With this extensions, the schema BreadcrumbList will match the Breadcrumb NavXT generated breadcrumb trail displayed on the page.
U2F and Firefox on Funtoo
U2F is pretty neat. It can be used locally on a machine for authentication and for two factor authentication on websites. There are even plugins for using it on WordPress powered websites. At the time this article was written, Firefox does not enable U2F by default. Though, that looks to be changing with Firefox 68.
Enable U2F in Firefox
Enabling U2F in Firefox is fairly straightforward. In the URL bar enter: about:config. Then search for u2f. There should be an entry: security.webauth.u2f, set it to true.
Install pam_u2f
However, simply enabling U2F in Firefox is not enough for a U2F device to work. To get everything working, pam_u2f needs to be installed. On Funtoo, this is quite simple:
emerge -av pam_u2f
After installing pam_u2f, Firefox should now be able to query your U2F key.