Computer Tips -Tech Info

Yikes, what an evening….. it started innocently enough in the afternoon. I have an old Mandrake 10.0 server that I was upgrading clamav on (recent security update). While I was at it, I was reviewing the anti-spam setup to see if I could get any better success with filtering junk mail. spamassassin has had an […]

I’ve been using vmware server quite a bit of course, I’ve mentioned it before. I had never played around with accessing a usb device in the guest environment though. When I tried (host operating system is Mandriva 2006)…. nothing was listed, in spite of several devices being plugged in (and unmounted from the host.) So, […]

I saw this great article from enterprise.linux.com giving some good ideas on some of the interesting things that can be done with curl. (Curl is a command line application for accessing URL’s (web/ftp/etc.))    Send article as PDF   

As I mentioned earlier, Bellsouth seemed to be in the midst of a big DNS meltdown when I got up this morning. I spent some time getting various bellsouth customers “worked around” the issue by setting up an alternate DNS server for them. For starters…. DNS translates addresses like google.com into numbers (like 72.14.207.99) Think […]

This morning, I’m noticing some of the machines I monitor having big DNS problems. It seems to be Bellsouth.net’s dns servers gone sideways – none seem to respond. On one network in particular we’re having trouble getting a secondary (outside network) dns server to respond. From outside the bellsouth network things seem fine though. As […]

The first thing I should mention is that this months update from Microsoft is the last for XP SP1 users should plan a migration path to SP2 to keep getting updates to XP. Multiple vulnerabilities this month have been patched in Office There are 4 advisories, but a total of 15 issues covered by those […]

The other day I was trying to partition a drive hooked up via usb. (So it get’s /dev/sda as it’s device in linux)… I tried a few utilities to access the partition table and all failed, finally, I resorted to fdisk /dev/sda and was told “unable to read /dev/sda” which I thought was peculiar. The […]

First, I should disclaim that this is going to be a brain dump of the resources and experience of a quick setup of Ubuntu 6.06 on a software raid based storage system. This may be less than ideal, but is doable and seems relatively solid as a system. First off, what is RAID (redundant array […]

One of the “project machines” I’ve had that’s been retired from other service was to become a “storage server” this week. The twin 250GB drives had arrived and I was ready to setup a RAID1 array (mirroring essentially…) in software and use Ubuntu 6.06 as the base operating system. I had already wiped the other […]

Vmware has launched a tool (windows only it seems) aimed to convert a REAL running system into a virtual machine. (For use with VMWare’s virtualization products. The converter also can convert images from competing virtual machine “platforms”(?) (Microsoft Virtual PC, Microsoft Virtual Server, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (formerly LiveState Recovery) and Norton Ghost9 (or […]