Author Archive

Sometimes I have to check drives under their native operating system. Recently I wanted to access a ntfs partition directly under Windows running inside a virtual machine. Here’s how to (easily) do it: #>VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename ./ntfs_test.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sdb -register VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.5.4 (C) 2005-2007 innotek GmbH All rights...
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I have a home server I use for all kinds of stuff when I’m away. I have set it up recently so that it can serve a folder mounted over the network from a Windows machine. And this is where the fun started! The folders and files appear correctly, I can navigate and I...
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I wanted to play a bit with the Mozilla Firefox 4.0 beta. Well, if you go to the download site there’s no apparent way to download the 64 bit version of Firefox. This is where I got it: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/4.0b1
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God a fancy new drive? SSD maybe? TRIM support advertised? Well, here’s how you can check if TRIM support is actually enabled and working in your windows installation: Start a command prompt window (WIN+R, type cmd and press enter) In the command prompt window type the following: fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify You will get...
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I recently found out that the power management inside the new I5 and I7 Intel processors is much more inteligent than what the older core2 has. For example a core2 would throtle back based on temperature only just before the critical point. The newer I5s and I7s would turn cores on/off or independently slow...
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A backup NAS I set up for a client had some problems – i.e. from time to time the network card would hang forcing a reboot (the machine was headless). The disks in the nas are RAID 1 providing redundancy in case of failure. We wanted the same with the network. So, nothing easier...
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Let’s say you run a headless server and you want to fsck the main partition. The easy solution in this case is (if possible) to force fsck to run on the next boot. If you run slackware than all you really need is to create an empty file in /etc called forcefsck You could...
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I recently had to set values of a set of values from a column from lowercase to Firstuppercase. Nothing easier, run the following code on the database: UPDATE `affected_table` SET `field_in_question` = CONCAT(UPPER(LEFT(`field_in_question`, 1)), SUBSTRING(`field_in_question`, 2))
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One of my clients called be mecause every now and then his was bugged by Windows XP to change his password. This seemed weird as XP doesn’t do this by default. Probably it was set to expire by someone or by some friendly security suite. Fortunately the solution for this expiring password problem is...
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Like I said some time ago I had to move my websites from a shared host (bluehost) to a dedicated sollution. Well, the websites I host (for clients, friends and myself) don’t account for the need of a dedicated server so I searched for a virtual sollution. I finally came to the conclusion that...
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