Category: Uncategorised

Ontario and Quebec Road Trip

Carol’s nephew and niece is visiting us from China. We thought it would be good to take them on a road trip across the HWY 401 stretch and a bit of Quebec.

Attached is our final itinerary, and a video to summarize each day’s events. To play the video, just click on the video link in the Day title. For example:

Click the video tag in the PDF document to play each day’s video.
Ontario_Quebec_2025Download

Ontario Services – Complicated

Approximately three years ago we created a holding a company in Ontario, Canada for the purpose of managing certain real estate investments. After some considerations, we have determined that this holding company is no longer required, so about a month ago, we decided to dissolve this company.

When we sent out an email requesting the dissolution of the company, we received the following response:

The above is the email response from Ontario.ca

On the surface we thought this is excellent news, because we will be able to do this all online. However upon visiting Ontario.ca/BusinessRegistry we were immediately lost after the initial login.

It took many tries to discovered this successful navigation path, so I wanted to document this for other users and for myself in the future.

The menu options on the left is not very helpful (see below). The obvious one is Ontario business registry under Account help, but this only provides a false, old guide to a PDF form that you can download and fill-out but is discouraged and rarely used now. The correct selection is the mysterious Add a service item.

Once you are in the Add a service page, you can then select the Start now of the Ontario business registry process.

This will bring you to a different site, which you can use to select Make Changes, and then further down File Articles of Dissolution.

The entire experience feels like the website was put together by multiple contractors, and totally user unfriendly. Yet another government service experience.

Sunroom Breaking Ground

Last year we engaged with Four Seasons Sunrooms to add a sunroom at the back of our house. It took about a year for us to finalize the engineering drawings, pass the Community of Adjust process with the city of Richmond Hill, and finally obtaining the permit.

Today we finally broke ground!

Below is a short video to remember this event.

Our backyard security video captured the event nicely.

Zhou Shen 周深 Concert

On Friday, Carol and I, along with our neighbours, attended the Zhou Shen concert at the Coca Cola Coliseum in downtown Toronto inside the Exhibition Place.

It was really exciting to see Zhou Shen in person. We all enjoyed his heavenly vocals. The three-hour concerts started at 8 pm without any intermissions. Time flew by really fast.

Below is a video of our experience.

Click on image to play the video

I would go to another Zhou Zhen concert again.

Linux Boot with No Networking

GLOTRENDS PA09-HS M.2 NVMe to PCIe 4.0 X4 Adapter

I recently wanted to install an M.2 NVMe to PCIe 4.0 X4 Adapter on an existing server. The idea was to install a new NVMe SSD drive, and the motherboard had no more M.2 sockets available.

The server is running Proxmox with Linux Kernel 6.8.12. I thought this should be a 15-minute exercise. How wrong I was. After installing all the hardware, the system booted up but there was no networking access. This was especially painful because I could no longer remote into the server. I had to go pull out an old monitor and keyboard and perform diagnostics.

I used the journalctl command to diagnose the issue, and found the following entry:

Feb 01 13:36:21 pvproxmox networking[1338]: error: vmbr0: bridge port enp6s0 does not exist
Feb 01 13:36:21 pvproxmox networking[1338]: warning: vmbr0: apply bridge ports settings: bridge configuration failed (missing ports)
Feb 01 13:36:21 pvproxmox /usr/sbin/ifup[1338]: error: vmbr0: bridge port enp6s0 does not exist
Feb 01 13:36:21 pvproxmox /usr/sbin/ifup[1338]: warning: vmbr0: apply bridge ports settings: bridge configuration failed (missing ports)

The above error message indicates that enp6s0 no longer exists. When I looked at earlier messages, I noticed this one:

Feb 01 13:36:15 pvproxmox kernel: r8169 0000:07:00.0 enp7s0: renamed from eth0

It looks like the interface name has been changed from enp6s0 to enp7s0. Therefore the correct remedy is to edit the /etc/network/interfaces to reflect the name change. Below is the new content of the file.

# cat /etc/network/interfaces
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

iface enp7s0 inet manual

auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet static
        address 192.168.188.2/24
        gateway 192.168.188.1
        bridge-ports enp7s0
        bridge-stp off
        bridge-fd 0

iface wlp5s0 inet manual

This would be very annoying if the old interface name was used in many other configuration files. There is one other reference that I found on the Internet (https://www.baeldung.com/linux/rename-network-interface) detailing a way to change the network interface name using the udev rules. I did not try this, but something to keep in mind in the future.

In a previous post and on another home server, I did fix the name using netplan, but Proxmox is not using it.