Computer Tips -Tech Info

I haven’t been overwhelmed with VMware server’s web interface. You can start a virtual machine, or see statistics, but you can’t create virtual machines. Well, from the VMWare forums I did find a couple interesting “hidden” features. First, is a file manager at https://youriphere:8333/fm-properties and second is a GSX interface (which gives the ability to create a NEW virtual machine) at https://youriphere:8333/overview (the direct link to creating a new vm is https://yourip:8333/vmcfg-gsx )….

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One of the things I have a tendency to do is save licence key – web confirmation pages to a pdf by printing. It gives a good capture of the document and saves me from actually having another paper to find a place to file. But, ubuntu (dapper) doesn’t seem to be setup for pdf printing by default. Fortunately, it’s not too hard to set up…. install cups-pdf (apt-get install cups-pdf), navigate to System -> Administration -> Printing and doubleclick to add a new printer… no pdf printer is detected… there must be work to do (click cancel). As root (“sudo nautilus”) navigate to Filesystem, then /usr/lib/cups/backend – right click cups-pdf and select properties and check “set user id”. Now, try to add a printer again and you should see PDF Printer, add it with the Generic, Postscript Color Printer (Rev 3b) driver, name it PDF-printer or something like that and now you should have PDF’s dropped into a folder in your home directory named PDF.

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Here are a few other notes on linux software raid. I created a directory called raidinfo to keep information in to make it easy to maintain the raid array. First… from the software raid howto, I’ve done the following….

sfdisk -d /dev/hda > /raidinfo/partitions.hda
sfdisk -d /dev/hde > /raidinfo/partitions.hde

So…. I’ve now got a good snapshot of the partitioning data. When I hooked up an external usb drive to add to the array, all I needed to do is this…

sfdisk /dev/sda < /raidinfo/partitions.hda Read the rest of this entry »

I like nx server and client, it can really make good use of low bandwidth connections to get a gui link. But, by default it’s quick and easy to setup gnome and kde login sessions within nxclient, but if you’re using xubuntu then you will need to setup a “custom” session and the command is startxfce4 …. so, start up nxclient, click configure and on the General tab, halfway down it should say Desktop, leave Unix and change KDE to custom, then click settings and check “run the following command” now, type startxfce4 and you should be set.

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Not really, news, but I was reminded again this evening that mail is not available at the command line in recent default installs of Ubuntu (or kubuntu /xubuntu). If you’re like me and make use of this for scripting notifications…. you’ll need to sudo apt-get install mailx (and a MTA like postfix.) Mailx requires postfix/sendmail/qmail and that’s why it’s not installed by default so users don’t have an MTA sitting on their system for no good reason.

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ah… the joys of *nix utilities…. I’ve just successfully tested a “capture” of a live, running system into a virtual disk image. No, I don’t mean that I booted up with an imaging utility. I took a live, booted and logged in system and imaged the primary hard drive that it was living on, into a file on another machine. (Yeah, I know, there are probably a few people reading this and saying they’ve done that and most people that would need to do this already know how…. sorry I missed the memo.) Not too long ago, VMWare released a tool to do something like this (that tool is for windows…) This should work on any platform that supports dd and netcat (although I’m not sure if piping output from one program to another works with a dos command shell – maybe cygwin would be a good environment to accomplish this with.) Anyway… here are the details.

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I’ve had a machine for quite a while that I’ve been working on as a “backup server”. My goal with it is to have a RAID1 setup with two 250GB drives and I also wanted USB2/firewire functionality so that I could even add a USB drive to the array for the purpose of having a hot-swapped spare drive that could be taken offsite. Well, the biggest frustration I’ve had has not been with software raid, or any of the rest of the software setup, but that something about the firewire/usb card didn’t like the built in ethernet. I FINALLY got things working… let me document what I went through.

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Is it just me or does it seem like about half of google sign in pages are out of order. (GMail seems ok) Adwords, Analytics, and Adsense all refuse to bring up the login box. (Main page for adwords and analytics loads, but the iframe that houses the login doesn’t.) It’s about 11:20AM EST now and this has been the case for the last hour or two. I haven’t seen any mention yet on official google blogs. (Calendar seems unresponsive for me right now too.)

Ok – I think it may have been just me, maybe leaving firefox open for 5 days at a time with 29 tabs causes funky things like that to happen. *(Tested on the same machine with another browser and the login came up, si I killed and restarted firefox and all is well.)

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I’ve stayed away from politics on this site, the main reason is I figure the surest way to offend visitors is politically, these days so many people seem so starkly divided into one political camp or the other, that it seems very easy to step on peoples political sensibilities. I am, however going to talk about politics, but mainly in the general sense to illustrate something I’ve thought about for quite a while and something that is grossly absent in most news coverage of polls and elections. With all science there are assumptions, things that you “assume” to be true so you can proceed with evaluating everything. In the science of polling, the words Sampling and turnout are quite relevant. (What?) In regards to polls, sampling is deciding what the makeup of your poll sample is, (percentage makeup by party affiliation) and trying to match that to expected turnout. But how do you predict turnout? Let’s take the following example of cartoonia….

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As I’ve mentioned, in the last week, I’ve released a CD through lulu.com and I’ve also done a calendar, one of the frustrations I’ve had was the inability to do an ftpupload. My username and password were continually rejected. Well, after contacting support and being told someone would be back in touch with me in a few days, I just figured out the issue. I had a character in my password (#) that they didn’t like, I changed my password to something without the # sign and was immediately able to log in. So, IF you’re trying to ftp into ftpupload.lulu.com and are sure you have the login/password right, but still are being denied try changing to a password that JUST has a mix of numbers and letters (preferrably a good mix of upper/lower case as well.)

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