Tag Archive for ‘Computers’ at elwoodicious

Tag Archive for 'Computers'

Linux is ready for the desktop or ZaReason is mother-in-law approved.

Published by james on April 28, 2008 in Linux. 6 Comments

I’m sort of tired of the question whether or not Linux is ready for the desktop or if it is grandma suitable. Maybe it is because Management and I have been using it with no exceptions for the last 4 years that I am a bit touchy on the subject but the question is silly and the often the responses more so. Think of it, would you ask if OSX is ready for the home user? Is Microsoft ready for the enterprise? No, you likely wouldn’t unless you are being snarky.

Case and point. My mother-in-law wanted a laptop for her birthday. She is running Windows XP on an aging HP desktop and wanted an OS that is secure and easy to use as well as a laptop that is well made and affordable. My recommendation? Go with ZaReason (she got a LightLapSR and now, after playing with it, Management wants one for herself).

Yes, I know I keep beating the drum for this builder but they build a great machine and have an excellent support team but more importantly, their machines “just work” and with all the peripherals she has collected over the years. From printers, scanners, to cameras, and iPods she is not left out in the dark with any of those devices. She was able to flip open the laptop, register herself as a user, sign onto her network, and check her mail in less time than it takes to make a cup of tea.

My mother-in-law is not a technocrat. It has taken her years to get comfortable with her XP machine but only comfortable in the sense that she has a passing familiarity with the way things are done on it. A couple of minutes after getting set up she found Mahjongg and was busy collecting tiles. She is much like 90% of the users out there. They want to surf the Internet, check their email, watch movies, manage photos and music, and maybe play a couple of hands of solitaire. Linux can do all of that and more.

Bottom line, Linux is ready for the desktop and ZaReason is mother-in-law approved.

Graphical Map of My iRiver H320

Published by james on April 25, 2007 in Random. 0 Comments

Considering The SOHO

Published by james on November 14, 2006 in Hardware. Closed

When not scraping, sanding, painting, and generally following orders from Management, my time is backfilled and my bank account is padded by doing help desk work on the side, usually cleaning up Windows boxes that have been neglected and abused as well as the occasional hardware upgrade for the tech phobic, but the best work are the small offices that I maintain as these are the places where the dollars need to be stretched for the greatest return.

At the moment I have one client with a very small office that when set up was configured like a home network with an emphasis on ease of use over security. The result is two Windows 2000 PCs and one Windows XP laptop joined by a password free Workgroup and connected to a cable modem through an aging Linksys router. The PCs themselves are getting long in the tooth having been purchased some six years ago and to add insult to injury he has been battling virus outbreaks with increasing regularity. I make sure that he stays on top of definitions and patches but the network itself is inherently insecure and added to that both machines are logged into as local admins.

Plain vanilla SOHO

He has given me a list of things he would like to see implemented when or if he proceeds with upgrading or reconfiguring the existing network including somethings I would file under necessity: automated backup plan, network firewall solution, and centralized and secure file sharing. While 2000 is still a serviceable OS, I’m leaning towards recommending that he purchase two machines to replace those boxes and to go with XP Professional, skipping Vista for now. Surprisingly, I’m not recommending he deploy Ubuntu, SUSE, or Fedora for the simple fact that it might be too much change for him and his employees and XP, when configured properly, is a fairly rock-solid OS.

The first possible configuration maintains the general layout of the network but would allow for remote administrative access as well as centralized file sharing and automated backups by redeploying one box to act as an SSH and file server.

Slightly more complicated…

The purple lines represent an SSH tunnel, the red is vnc, and the blue for file sharing and backups, and you can plainly see what my choice for the server OS. This configuration is most likely the one he will sign off on as the topology closely resembles what he has grown accustomed to but I do have a second configuration in mind to further enhance security.

Just a little more complicated…

The inclusion of the Smoothwall appliance will go a long way in enhancing security, particularly if I shift tactics and push that they log into their PCs as regular users and reserve the admin account for special cases. The Smoothwall appliance can also be deployed on the remaining 2000 PC to make better use of the hardware with the only cost being replacing the router with a switch.

All things considered, I think that the two options make the best use of his money and could go a long way in enhancing the security of his network as well as functionality. We’ll see what he goes with.

The Superblock Corruption

Published by james on August 7, 2006 in Linux. 6 Comments

Post Rock? Post Punk Prog? Turntablism? Art Rock? Noise? A friend of mine thinks that The Superblock Corruption would make a fine name for a band and so would I if it were not for the fact that those three little words ruined my Friday night.

All fired up to install the set of 400GB SATA drives, I upgraded my installation of Ubuntu earlier that evening, and around 9:20 PM rebooted and logged in to make sure that everything was running fine. Confident that it would only take the time to track down a torx driver I shut down, popped the case, and got to work setting up the drives. Everything went smooth until I booted up.

The new drives were detected and with a flash a message flew by saying that the BIOS had been updated then it prompted me with the on-time question of which drive I wanted to boot from. Choosing the master drive I struck the enter key and waited. “No OS Found,” was the message that greeted me. Ctrl-Alt-Delete thinking maybe I chose wrong but this time the monitor went dark while the hard drives churned. Reducing the variables is my mantra when troubleshooting so I powered down and removed everything from the chain that could cause a problem except the boot drive. Nothing.

Gnashing my teeth in frustration I turned off the PC, unplugged and reset all the cables, counted to ten, and rebooted. This time greeted by the graphical boot process monitor my spirits lifted and I felt all was under control, that is until it paused on the Checking Root File system. “One-One-Thousand. Two-One-Thousand. Three-One-Thousand…” At fifteen, “FAILED”, and the system belches out to the command line as root stating matter of factly that Superblock Corruption was detected and I need to run fsck. I reboot into safe mode with the same error plaguing me and attempt to run fsck to repair the superblock.

By 9:50 I learn that UFS is comprised of several parts and the one vexing me is described as “containing a magic number identifying this as a UFS file system, and some other vital numbers describing this file system’s geometry and statistics and behavioral tuning parameters.” Great! I also learn that the command “newfs -N /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s6” doesn’t work, “The command newfs is unrecognized”, and that “fsck -F ufs -o b=32 /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s6” yields the same error that superblock corruption exists and I need to run fsck. Fsck indeed!

Around this time my niece fires off the first of many IMs in a near panic as her Sims2 installation melted down. Between reboots I walk her through uninstalling the game:

Her - “UJ! Sims is broken. cant play it!”
Me - “Won’t launch?”
Her - “no. :`-(”
Me - “Try uninstalling, use Add/Remove”
Her - “UJ, there is no addremove”
Me - “Start–>Control Panel–> Add/Remove Programs”
Her - “I did it from the EA menu”
Me - “Try a reboot and install again.”
Me - “Hold on. fsck is fscking up on me.”
Her - “k”
Her - “wait. fsck???”

And so it goes on as we try and get the game to install and run. Fortunately, she managed to get the core Sims2 game to install but unfortunately none of the expansions will even though we work on it until past midnight.

By this time it is nearly 10:00 PM, and while juggling my niece I resign myself to the plain fact that I cannot boot to this drive and that I need to begin recovering data and getting my hands on my backups. Luckily, I can boot without X running and run mysqldump and tarball the pertinent directories for a near full recovery. Superblock still plagues me during this process but I am able to recover nearly everything I can remember and I tuck it into a safe location so that I can boot to the live CD and dump it to my flash drive.

11:35 PM and the server is 85% operational the only exception is that this blog was rendering as if I had no defined CSS and that permalinks yielded 404 errors. This is the trouble I have with Linux. It runs stable enough that you only need to do things once and when something goes wrong or you need to re-build it is like you are a n00b all over again. Around 12:15 AM I realize that my configuration for WP requires mod-rewrite to be enabled: “sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/rewrite.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/rewrite.load“. Hey, it’s my website complete with images, CSS, and permalinks!

The night wears on as I put together my cron-jobs, troubleshoot a buggy Drupal installation, bonus for being able to upgrade to the latest build without trashing the database; score Drupal (3) - Me (1), and being rebuilding my music collection on these massive drives. Sometime on the cusp of 2:00 AM I finish with eyes burning and shoulders stiff I turn off the monitor and shuffle off to get ready for bed thinking that I only have a handful of hours before I need to talk Peri out for his morning walk.

Lessons learned:

Always backup before upgrading either the OS or the hardware.
Make regular complete backups and always have them available on removable media.
Try and be helpful to your niece even though she should be in bed.
Superblock corruption makes for a better band name than an error late on a Friday night.

Yay Me! Two 400GB SATA Drives!

Published by james on July 31, 2006 in Hardware and Linux. Closed

Sometimes it pays to talk about your hobbies at work. As most of you know I am a music junkie and while I don’t have the biggest collection out there it is on the heavier side clocking in around 165.1 GB; 32552 tracks playable over 102.6 days straight. The box that my collection resides on is a bit of a lumpy headed hydra with a 60 GB master flanked by 80 GB and 200 GB spares which makes it inelegant at best and often a pain in the ass to set up and administer proper backups. In steps my boss with a pair of 400 GB SATA drives and a controller card, “Make a mirrored set and sleep well at night”.

So here’s my plan to get my new massive storage set up and running:

Upgrade box from Ubuntu 5.10 to 6.06.
Shut down and add controller card and drives.
Bring up box and cross fingers that all is recognized.
Add logical set to fstab.
Enjoy my new expanded storage!

If all goes well then I have the near insurmountable task of retagging and organizing my entire collection into something that is less like a roomful of socks that blew up and more like a well ordered library. A whole different beast that I’m not too keen on tackling. If anyone knows any bash scripts that can help automate moving files in to folders based on Artist/Album I’m all eyes and ears.