Well, it’s annoying to me when my own computer has issues that I can’t seem to track down and off and on for the last year I’ve had annoying seemingly random shut downs (I mean it’s as if someone pulled the power plug). It was an AMD XP 1800 system. The first I noticed the problem, I was trying to transcode video. A few minutes into the process – bang power off and it would be followed by a painfull 30 seconds of the system trying to post, shutting down, restarting, off, start, off, start with the floppy drive getting a seek every second or two as it seemed to try to muster the power to boot. For this reason, my first suspect was the power supply, 4 drives, hefty processor, hefty video card, (sound card, network, tv card, etc.etc.etc) maybe my generic 300 watt wasn’t steady enough?
Tag: hard drive
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Strange Novell Server error
I ran into strange problems accessing a shared Novell Netware (5.0) folder. Everytime the folder was attempted to be accessed from multiple machines the window would freeze and if you waited long enough, there would be an error message along the lines of “Netware Alert Message”… NIOS.NLM
Call to NIOS page unlock by module unknown failed Address 0x05650016, length 0x00700465 and then according to what I was told, ctrl-enter was instructed to clear the message and the machine rebooted.
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Check your hard drive’s temperature in Linux
I started using this program after frying a hard drive in 6 months. It was on the server and serving up Audio 24/7 and it was sandwiched between a cdrom drive and another hard drive. There was no air flow around the hard drive and subsequently it had a very short and very rough life. When it started failing at 6 months, I started investigating the possible cause and how to keep another for failing so quickly.
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Kdirstat to track space hogs
I’m putting this under the Windows tech support category because I’ve used this on a boot cd before to do the same for Windows as I’m about to describe for Linux. I need to clean up and organize my hard drive(s). But when it comes to actually deleting things you really do want to get the biggest bang for the buck and go after the biggest files first. I remember an old Windows 95 utility I think it was called space Hog or something like that (more space 95??) Anyway, it would scan the disc and show the files sorted by size. Under linux (KDE desktop), there’s a similar (in many ways better) utility called kdirstat.
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WMF Exploit — it’s worse…
This is going to be a rough start to the new year for IT staff and computer users….
There’s coverage at Incidents.org, the sunbeltblog and f-secure of the latest twist in what will likely be a BIG mess to clean up. It looks like there’s a someone spamming emails to tons of addresses with a specially crafted image (uses the WMF exploit.) It’s also a slightly different variant of the exploit.
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Cleaning up after the WMF exploit
OK, I mentioned that I infested a virtual machine with the current WMF 0-day exploit. First I should probably clarify. An exploit is a means of getting in to a system. The payload is the software that is installed. In the case of my experience there was a long list of pests installed. Given that the exploit enables any software to be installed, your experience may be different. That’s the first thing I want to make clear, depending on where and when you were affected you may see vastly different malware.
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A Tip for cleaning up an infected PC
There’s a joke that many people bring out when new Windows viruses hit big…. it goes along the lines of, “download a fix here” and the link points to a knoppix linux livecd download, or a Mandriva download disk, fedora/etc… Some say linux isn’t affected by as many viruses because it lacks market share, I would point out that server market share (take a look at how many linux web servers there are…) would seem to tip the scales a bit, but that’s not the point of this post. What is the point is this…. When you have a Windows pc that is infested what you should do is disconnect from the internet. The problem is, that typically prevents you from getting the tools you need to fix the machine.
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Bittorrent is amazing
As I type this, I’m downloading a compressed hard drive image from the freeoszoo download page. The download size is about 1.2GB and it’s been BLAZING fast. (286KBps is the top I’ve seen) it’s been going – maybe 20-30 minutes and is 70% through…
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Tools of the trade…. External USB drive adapter
This is the first of a few articles that will highlight some of the tools/gadgets/gizmos that I find useful. I’m starting off with one that’s almost essential. External USB hard drive adapter. Recently, I’ve been looking for something a bit leaner than your typical usb -> hard drive converter. Yes, I’ve carried something like this for large (3.5″) hard drives to appointments. The idea is if you need to transfer data from an old pc to a new one, put the old drive in an external adapter and copy away.
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Another entry on DBAN (boot disk to securely wipe a hard drive)
This kind of get’s glommed into hardware, software and security categories all…. I’ve mentioned DBAN a couple times already (Darik’s Boot and Nuke). I had a chance to sit down this afternoon to nuke a few disks I’ve collected over the last little while and thought I’d pass along some points on the DBAN for securely wiping the contents of hard drives. First, no matter what you do to a drive, there may be a data recovery center that can get something from it. I’m talking clean rooms, 1000’s of dollars and some good forensic recovery techniques. Why?