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.
Tag: time
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Opengroupware install on Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake
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 (more…)
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Epson stylus photo 825 clogged print head woes
I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned my Epson stylus photo 825 before, but I’ve had one for a couple years. The really nice feature (I thought) was the ability to print direct from camera memory cards (at the time I bought it, this was much more rare than in current printers.) Anyway, it had GREAT print quality and could print up to the edge of the paper. Unfortunately, I use my laser printer (monochrome hp 4p) for 95%+ of my day to day printing and the epson sat unused for stretches of time and eventually I’ve wound up with a bunch of jets clogged on the print head. I’ve been taking increasingly drastic steps to try to get the thing to print well again.
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Daylight Savings Changes on linux systems
Might should have typed this up sooner, but… a while back I did an article on the daylight savings changes with regards to Windows 98 and how timezone editor tzedit could be used to make sure these OS’s kept the correct time. Well, on the linux side of things there’s not a lot to the fix either. Depending on the age of the install you may have an update available that addresses your daylight savings change, but if not… here’s how to do it. wget ‘ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007c.tar.gz’ – then tar -xzvf tzdata2007c.tar.gz……. then…
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Sleuthkit – windows and linux file recovery
http://www.sleuthkit.org/ Sluethkit… is a collection of tools for forensic analysis of a system. Usually it’s something that would be done when you’ve had a suspected rootkit on the system and you boot to another operating system with sluethkit installed (maybe livecd/etc.) and want to try to analyze and hunt for traces of the rootkit. However you do have some similar procedures for forensic analysis that you would for the “I accidentally deleted a file” syndrome… For both situations you DON’T want to be running the live filesystem that’s affected.
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Site hosting tons of email addresses
A little over a year ago I was doing a web search for my email address (something that’s worth doing from time to time.) I ran across my name in a text file hosted at a domain called…..
http://www.freestuffengine.com/ There is a different site active at that domain now (although I don’t know if it’s owned by the same group, it may be….) Anyway, there were VERY large text files with (according to the file name) a million addresses. And YES… mine was in there.my address was in a file called…. nima_1million_1of2.txt
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Free Windows addons and utilities
I’ve spent much of my time the last few years looking at windows support from the linux side of the fence. Certainly linux boot disks and the like are among the most useful utilities that I’ve used. However, I am reminded from time to time that there is a good share of freely available utilities on the Windows side of things. http://www.mdgx.com/ is a site devoted to not just the free windows and dos utilites and add ons… but to quote the site…
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Windows 98 and the upcoming daylight savings time change
Of course, you
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be using Windows 98 anymore, it’s unsupported (i.e. no security updates.) However the reality is that there are quite a few Win 98 installs out there perking away. But, with the recent law change with regards to the start/end of Daylight savings time in the US… many Windows 98 users may have to resort to changing the time manually. There is another way though..
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Extended support for XP Home and Media center
I want to make a note of this here… Microsoft has announced that XP Home and Media center editions will get extended support on par with that of XP Pro. Essentially this means security updates for these versions of the OS should be available until 2014. Previously support for XP Home was to have ended as soon as December 2006, but was then extended modestly until after the release of Vista. The “Home” oriented products weren’t given the same length of support as the “Professional” or Business class products at that time. This announcement puts the two versions of XP on par with Pro.
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Handy DNS tools online
There are some tools that I make use of almost daily. Either because something strikes my curiousity or because of necessity to find out a bit more about a computer issue. DNS lookup tools fall into the category of “must have” for the kind of stuff I wind up doing. Whether it’s a whois lookup to see who is a contact for a given domain, looking to see when a domain expires or just looking up reverse dns information to find out where the machine is located that’s been trying to enter the ssh server. Of course, spam blacklist lookups are handy too. I’m adding a few links to the sidebar for some of the more useful of these…