Tag: hard drive

  • Home Linux terrabyte backup system

    This is something I’ve wanted to build for some time. I hadn’t actually thought about a terrabyte of storage, but… linux journal has the article on making your own home network backup storage solution using an old pc, linux and relatively cheap discs. The concept of any backup system is redundancy so that a single failure doesn’t take out your data.

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  • Mandriva 2006 upgrade on Inspiron 8000 laptop saga Part II

    Well the saga continues. I suspect there will be a three as I get all software installed and mention tips and tweaks. III may not be named as such, I may just do a series of articles on little things that I’ve changed. At this hour I’ve got the KDE desktop for Mandriva 2006 up and running and am as I type letting more software install. I’ve had a few bumps along the way and let me tell you about them. First was the bad md5sum on the first disk image… my fault. I expected bittorrent to have checked it and made sure it was correct, but apparently that failed. Again, my fault.

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  • Ooops… hard drive maker ships trojan on storage media

    Oooops… According to the Sunbelt blog a Japanese storage maker (I-O Data Device) has offered to exchange drives that were discovered to have been shipped out with the Tompai-A, a worm which would give a cracker backdoor access to a machine. It affects portable hard drive’s in the companies HDP-U series.

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  • Mandriva 2006 upgrade on Inspiron 8000 laptop saga Part I

    I had a chance today to start the upgrade process for Mandriva 2006 on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 8000). Now, let’s see…. a bit of background. Mandriva (Mandrive/Mandrake) has been my favorite distro since converting to linux several years back (around Mandrake 8.1 or 8.2) I’ve had it running on the laptop since then and was up to 10.1 official (if I remember correctly). The last upgrade I did, I just setup the install sources in urpmi and did urpmi –auto-select –auto from the command line and off it went. In short order I had a fresh upgraded system. Today was not to be so smooth.

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  • Getting rid of an old PC – wipe the hard drive!!

    I’ve said it before and mentioned DBAN (Darik’s Boot and Nuke) as my favorite tool for this, but Sunbeltblog is mentioning this and it’s worth reminding you. When you replace a PC, you might keep the hard drive around for a short period to make sure you have all your data, but PLEASE plan on finding some way to delete or wipe or nuke or destroy ALL the data on the drive.

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  • Mandriva 2006

    Of course, another bit of news the last couple of weeks was the release of Mandriva 2006 by Mandriva Linux. Of course Mandriva is the former Mandrake, which merged/bought Connectiva and then acquired Lycoris, so this is the first release to start drawing on the extended talent pool that they’ve now acquired. From what I’ve seen it looks VERY nice. I’ve got the isos on a removable hard drive and have been looking for a chance to get the install going on my laptop.

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  • Linux home office article part 3

    Newsforge has the third article in their series on Best Practices for the Linux Home Office. The main highlighs in this entry are RAID and backups and disaster recovery.

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  • Late in updates

    I haven’t covered anything this morning mainly because I’ve been fighting with a Windows XP install. I’ll give details on it later. I think I’m finally in the last stages of that and will try to do some updates while I wait. It is bogging down the system a bit. (The install is into a virtual hard drive via qemu).

  • Computers without hard drives….

    Flexbeta has a story basically about knoppix and how a computer even without a hard drive can still be useful. Knoppix, of course, is a linux live cd that boots into a full desktop operating system. It has many uses, but flexbeta focuses in on some of the basics: web browsing, checking web based email, streaming audio, playing games, editing office documents and downloading files (to a memory stick or some other usb media.)

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  • Applause for Dell

    I usually work on desktop computers and so have complaints from time to time about the way desktop computer manufacturers design access to their components. They’re improving overall, but sometimes you’ll still find something that you’d just like to slap an engineer over… Recently I had to swap a keyboard on a Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop. (Spilled drink.) I must say, congratulations to whoever designed the laptop for the easy access to the keyboard replacement.
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