Computer Tips -Tech Info

I found this not too long ago at a techamok forum… copied here for convenience – not intended to slight the original author….

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As long as there have been wireless networks there have been people trying to squeeze out just a bit more range… there was the cantenna and now there are other variations on trying to collect and improve the amount of signal getting to wireless adapters… here is just a sampling of what I’ve looked at (and expiremented with) lately… instructables how-to using seive… and another page along the same lines and for wireless hardware that is a bit more powerful… Keenan Systems sells engenius/senao wireless products that tend to have higher sensitivity/power output than the average linksys/dlink.

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I like the PDF file format for so many reasons – free writer under linux is one of them, usually it’s just configured out of the box – openoffice does a nice export to PDF too. Of course, PDF is accessible on all platforms with free viewers…. there are some pdf writers for windows that are free, among them…. PDF Creator and cutepdf also distributes a free pdf writer. Printing to the virtual pdf printer makes archiving web pages fairly easily done as well.

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For years I’ve been using smartmontools on my linux-based machines. What I’ve absolutely LOVED about it is the advance notice I’ve had of hard drive failures. Two consecutive Decembers I received an email from my server claiming that a drive was dying and had time to replace them rescuing the data. (Although the first one was falling to pieces as I copied.) If I had not know until I NOTICED a problem I would have likely lost a good amount of data and had a long rebuild process from various backups.

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For a while dnsstuff.com has been my favorite dns tools web site, but there are others. Recently I was pointed to domaintools.com.

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A while ago I wrote about various ways to have an offline copy of the wikipedia. Yes, I know there are credibility issues with wikipedia, but taken with a few grains of salt and objective thinking it is one of the single most useful references online. (I don’t count search engines here – they link to other stuff – i.e. no – you can’t download google. ) So, why would anyone be interested in having it copied offline? Isn’t the great benefit that it’s constantly updated and “fresh”? Well…. if you assume that 24/7 highspeed internet access is a fixed constant… i.e. we’ll ALWAYS have an internet connection anytime anywhere, then… there would be no good reason… but..

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So, one of the things I’ve been doing is drive imaging. I’ve got 3 systems that are to be identical (based on, of all things Freedos…) So, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to dust off cloning/imaging software. So, I’ve been using the excellent g4l (ghost4linux) which is now up to v 0.22 (I make use of this for trying to rescue failing hard drives too as it includes dd_rescue). Anyway, the new machines have 80GB drives and the lzo compressed images are running ~450MB…. but one of my questions was making sure that it was as small an image as could be. I found that there are a few ways to squish the image file more and that it mostly revolves around filling the empty drive space with zeros.

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A few days ago I was researching possibilities for linux boot without rebooting to a cd. I found something interesting in instlux. Essentially, it’s a windows installer style download that can bootstrap and install a linux distribution (looks like Linkat, OpenSuse and Ubuntu are currently supported.) I’m curious to actually try this out in the near future as it looks inteesting (you can choose either cd or network based installs).

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So… it’s ~70 degrees out and springish I have network cables draped over my desk to support a couple systems that I’m imaging right now and am really not wanting to sit here, but… I do have a few things to “clean out”…

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One recent task was install opengroupware on a dapper drake 6.06 install in a virtual machine. I followed the instructions found here and ran into a slight problem. The default install from Ubuntu does not have apache in the enabled repositories. (Apache2)… following the intsructions given I first added opengroupware’s (debian sarge) repository Read the rest of this entry »