If you have a decent Logitech keyboard/mouse, chances are you might also have a Logitech Unifying Receiver, which is a small USB dongle that allows multiple Logitech devices to be connected to a single computer. This is useful if your institution disables the Bluetooth connectivity on the institution-managed Chromebook. However, if your institution also prevents you from installing Logitech Unifying for Chrome extension, how can you still get this to work on your Chromebook without thinking about quitting your job?
SOLUTION
The trick here is to use your Mac/Windows computer to get the devices added to the Logitech Unifying Receiver first before transferring the USB receiver to your Chromebook.
Attach the Logitech Unifying Receiver to your Mac/Windows computer. If your modern computer only has USB-C ports, use a “USB-C to USB” adapter.
From Logitech Options, add the keyboard/mouse as Unifying devices by clicking on the ADD UNIFYING DEVICE button.
Once added, attach the USB receiver to your Chromebook.
Note: If your keyboard/mouse has the multi-device switch, you can use the same set of devices on both Mac/Windows computer and Chromebook. In this case, you may configure Switch #1 using Bluetooth (for Mac/Windows computer) and Switch #2 using Logitech Unifying Receiver (for Chromebook).
To run Ansible playbook in multiple hosts via SSH.
SOLUTION
Configuring SSH environment
Ensure SSH keypair exists on the current machine (ex: ~/.ssh/id_rsa for private key and ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub for public key). If you do not have one, create one:
ssh-keygen
Copy the public key (ex: ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub) to each remote host’s ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. If this file doesn’t exist, create it.
Ensure the current machine’s .ssh/ directory and file have correct permission.
chmod 700 ~/.ssh
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
In the current machine’s /etc/hosts, add all remote hosts.
In each remote host, enable the remote login and grant yourself the access to this service.
Enabling Remote Login on Mac
Test SSH connection to remote host to ensure they work first before working on Ansible playbook.
ssh user@donkeykong
ssh user@supermario
Creating Ansible Playbook
Create ansible.cfg and define the location of inventory file.
[defaults]
inventory = inventory.yml
Create inventory.yml and define both localhost and remote hosts.
all:
hosts:
localhost:
ansible_connection: local
donkeykong:
ansible_user: user
ansible_ssh_private_key_file: ~/.ssh/id_rsa
supermario:
ansible_user: user
ansible_ssh_private_key_file: ~/.ssh/id_rsa
Run a test to ensure the connection to remote hosts are successful.
ansible all -i inventory.yml -m ping
If successful, the output looks something like this:
You have a shiny Mac laptop running macOS Big Sur. This laptop is connected to an old external monitor via HDMI. The screen quality looks pixelated and fuzzy.
Running font smoothing (as below) doesn’t fix the problem:
The usage of HDMI seems to fool macOS Big Sur, thinking your old monitor is a glorious new TV. This causes macOS to use YPbPr instead of RGB mode.
The fix is to perform Extended Display Identification Data (EDID) override to force macOS to use RGB mode.
Some instructions on the web are inaccurate. There’s no need to reboot into Recovery Mode to disable System Integrity Protection (SIP) via csrutil first.
