Computer Tips -Tech Info

Just a quick note for what is really a simple fix. I have been using rsnapshot to back up several machines lately. If you haven’t taken a look at rsnapshot on linux for managing snapshot backups (where only the changes get backed up after the initial run….) it’s definitely worth a look. Anyway, I had […]

We’re back up after a very strange outage. The 500 internal server error was because our .htaccess file was sideways. What I mean by sideways is that part of a line had been truncated which led to an incorrect htaccess rule and all sorts of error pages thrown up. Interestingly the only thing happening prior […]

So, the adobe reader version 8.1 should be a straightforward install. On one particular XP system it wasn’t and from what I can tell, there are several that have run into the same problem. The installer seems to work well enough, but when I try to launch the application I just see the windows error […]

Windows users know chkdsk, linux users know fsck… users of each MIGHT have heard of SMART. These are different ways of TESTING hard drives. Well, there’s also a utility called TestDisk that looks promising for recovering data… Here’s the clip from their site. “free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost […]

At least that’s the theory…. someone has done a google sponsored search with a black background thinking they’ll save 750 megawatt hours a year. Blackle.com is the site. Of course, I don’t know if there REALLY would be that significant a difference in consumption (margin of error in observation equipment?) I REALLY would like to […]

I’ve had a fun time this week dealing with a STRANGE Vista problem on an HP computer (I doubt it’s HP specific, but don’t know for certain.) The error goes like this… “A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.” “CLFS.sys” “Page_Fault_in_nonpaged_area” “If this is the […]

and you can’t turn it on without an error… Oh boy… last week I first saw this system and it was running less than the minimum amount of memory, so I thought that could be part of the issue. (It certainly made it slightly less than tolerable to work on.) So, now, with new memory […]

As I’ve mentioned, there are a few older Mandrake (now Mandriva) systems that I maintain and one of the packages that I’m frequently rebuilding for those systems is clamantivirus. Well, 0.90 came out recently and on an attempted rebuild from the src. rpm that I acquired from ftp.neocat.org, I got this error message libtool: unrecognized […]

Openvpn has been one of the tools of choice this week, so as I was tinkering on my ubuntu boxen…. I thought why don’t I install openvpn there as well for a little broader testing. So, I did, but was a bit disappointed to see that the version was not the most current. (Yes, they […]

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 […]