Computer Tips -Tech Info

This is just a glimpse of the kinds of things I get to do day to day… A week or so ago I had a client that had received a used scanner from a friend. The scanner was a Microtek Scanmaker 4800. I was a bit concerned as her pc still has Windows 98 and […]

This last week virtualbox announced that they have released a version of their virtualization software as open source. There is a pay version as well with more features. (*read on for features available in the full version.) While I appreciate them making the core virtualization open source and currently they are likely the most advanced […]

I ran into this some time back and found the solution a few months later and was reminded today to document it here…. The situation is this… Linux host for VMWare server, the guest machine has usb support and in vmware, you can go to VM, Removable devices and in spite of the fact you […]

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 […]

OK, I know there are probably quite a few looking at this thinking…. “Hello where has he been?” when I’m talking about playing around with software raid under ubuntu linux, but…. in spite of all I’ve done supporting desktop systems and even small business servers I’ve never had an opportunity to setup a raid array. […]

Apple is fixing 15 security flaws with the 10.4.8 version upgrade of Mac OS X. (There is a second update as well…. Security Update 2006-006). In typical fashion there are a bundle of issues in these updates. Several address remotely exploitable vulnerabilities.    Send article as PDF   

I’ve seen skype I just haven’t used it personally until very recently. In fact there was a place (dialpad?) that I had used once upon a time for a few free long distance calls online. It was neat, but had some limitations (delay). It quickly became non-free and frankly the microphone I have hooked up […]

As I said, I mistakenly uploaded a page of links that I use for the main administration across many sites to this domain. Unfortunately, the server preferred using the index.html to the index.php that serves up the USUAL home page. So, for about an hour after my slipup…. the main page for this site showed […]

USB thumb drives seem fairly simple, nothing hazardous…. but Lexar has recalled several models of the Firefly series as well as the JumpDrive Secure II, 1GB model. The affected Firefly sizes are… 256MB, 512MB, 1GB and 2GB. They apparently have a “risk of burns to consumers and property damage.” I would assume the risk is […]

For Windows system administrators that have sweated over the perils of usb drives and memory sticks…. Intelliadmin has a tool for you. It’s a small utility that will allow to remotely disable usb drives over the LAN. It won’t affect usb mice/keyboards – just usb storage. So, if your network security policy doesn’t like USB […]