Classic Tech Tips Archive

It almost seems like I'm back to the 6-10+ posts I day I used to do around here... I should mention that I'm just clearing out a few things that I wanted to get posted and clean out the bazillion tab…

Haven't had the chance to try this one firsthand yet, although I've been watching for this. You may be familiar with ies4linux which is a script that uses wine to download/install multiple versions o…

Anyone that's setup software raid on a system with multiple storage adapters has probably run into this kind of issue, but I thought I'd mention it. Last weekend I built a machine to replace my serve…

I thought I had written about this once before, but when I searched the site to find the solution I had come across before, I couldn't find my post.... so, sorry if this is a duplication, but I've ru…

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 availa…

A few days ago I had reason to investigate iscsi and AoE (ata over ethernet). Both are protocols for sharing a physical drive over the network at the block level. Let me put it in context first. Trad…

I've done one or two mentions in the past of ways to recover/reset lost windows passwords and thought it was probably time for another "brain dump/web research dump" of things that I've run across. T…

One of the tools I looked at having for my expanding kit has been a usb wireless adapter that would work with minimal install on Windows/Mac or Linux. As you can imagine.... it's not as straightforwa…

Yes, I'm still around and even though I haven't posted, it's been a busy few months. In some ways it's been very nice to not force myself to read through a couple hundred news feeds a day to keep up …

I've noticed several times in the last week a server of mine that is using postfix has rejected messages due to a failure in the lookup at relays.ordb.org. At first, I thought this was just a false p…

I've replaced bare email addresses on web page with either an encoded variation of the email or with a contact form to discourage spam scrapers and other automated tools from using it for a spam magn…

I saw this a few weeks back and think it's a good idea. Essentially why don't we have a .bank domain registration and limit it to just financial institutions the way .gov is limited to government reg…

There's no better way to say it, netcat is SOO useful, and there is an encrypted variation... cryptcat, you can do quite a few interesting and useful things VERY easily with these two utilities. (*It…

For a few months now (since the demise of bluefrog actually) I've noticed that the level of junk mail has gone up on my own mail server. Yes, I use spamassassin to filter and tag, but the volume of s…

Wordpress has a great plugin available to automatically keep your google sitemap updated, but I've done a few static websites in the last few days and just wanted a good, quick, web generated sitemap…

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 us…

I haven't been overwhelmed with VMware server's web interface. You can start a virtual machine, or see statistics, but you can't create virtual machines. Well, from the VMWare forums I did find a cou…

One of the things I have a tendency to do is save licence key - web confirmation pages to a pdf by printing. It gives a good capture of the document and saves me from actually having another paper to…

Here are a few other notes on linux software raid. I created a directory called raidinfo to keep information in to make it easy to maintain the raid array. First... from the software raid howto, I've…

I like nx server and client, it can really make good use of low bandwidth connections to get a gui link. But, by default it's quick and easy to setup gnome and kde login sessions within nxclient, but…

Not really, news, but I was reminded again this evening that mail is not available at the command line in recent default installs of Ubuntu (or kubuntu /xubuntu). If you're like me and make use of th…

ah... the joys of *nix utilities.... I've just successfully tested a "capture" of a live, running system into a virtual disk image. No, I don't mean that I booted up with an imaging utility. I took a…

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 th…

Is it just me or does it seem like about half of google sign in pages are out of order. (GMail seems ok) Adwords, Analytics, and Adsense all refuse to bring up the login box. (Main page for adwords a…

I've stayed away from politics on this site, the main reason is I figure the surest way to offend visitors is politically, these days so many people seem so starkly divided into one political camp or…