Upgrade Windows 7 Beta Build 7000 to Windows 7 RC Build 7100

Thursday 02 July 2009 at 05:45 am Windows 7 RC is out, and the official party line from Redmond is that you won’t be able to upgrade your January build 7000 beta in place (or any build prior to 7077 for that matter).  Bill wants you to perform a clean install.   Turns out that you CAN upgrade a 7000 install with a few fiddly steps... (more)

Servers4Linux is live!

Saturday 09 May 2009 at 09:17 am My new web site, www.Servers4Linux.com, is up and running.  This site is about how to use "industrial strength" server hardware for running Linux. Since I'm on a budget, I like the cheap stuff you can find used. There's a lot of clueless people selling really expensive server hardware on Ebay for a song. Usually it's a bit "different" perhaps, say running some exotic CPU architecture or something. That's good. That means you can get it cheap because "lusers" can't run Windows on it. Better for you.

Hey! A new wiki!

Tuesday 05 May 2009 at 7:26 pm I'm fiddling with a install of MediaWiki on this server.  After I loaded it, I've been tweaking it.  I'm using the Help section to document the tweaks.  So far, I've figured out how to add a logo, require users to be logged in in order to make edits, etc.  Check back to see what I've tweaked next.

Installing MediaWiki on a default load of Fedora 10

Sunday 03 May 2009 at 1:39 pm Fedora 10 comes with a mediawiki rpm package.  It sort of works.  Here's my (messy) notes on how to load MediaWiki on Fedora using the supplied mediawiki package.

Installing MediaWiki on a he.net server

Sunday 03 May 2009 at 1:37 pm Hurricane Electric (http://he.net) is my ISP and virtual host provider.  I like them.  I recently installed MediaWiki on my he.net server.  It actually was pretty easy, as he.net had pre-installed and pre-configured all the pre-requisites.  Here's my notes on getting it working.

Secure Shell Load Balancing (On The Cheap!)

Saturday 21 March 2009 at 12:32 pm

At work, I (Greg Porter) have a lot of students (hundreds) that need to use ssh to log into a couple of unix hosts. Most of the students use one particular host, vogon.csc.calpoly.edu. When vogon gets busy, or fork bombed, or hangs, all those users are SOL. It'd be nice if we had multiple ssh hosts behind some sort of ssh load balancer. Of course, we can't afford a real load balancer.

We figured it out with iptables, and so far it seems to work.

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Using the Citrix web client with Fedora

Friday 27 February 2009 at 12:47 pm

Cuesta College, one of the places I (Greg Porter) teach, only allows you to access your cuesta.edu email 2 ways.  You can use their web based Outlook Web Access, which looks really lame and clunky if you're not using Internet Explorer.  (I use Firefox on Fedora.)  The other way you can access your mail is by using Cuesta's Citrix Presentation Server which uses the Citrix ICA Client plugin for your browser to get access to remote apps at Cuesta like Outlook or Office.  (No other access methods are allowed, no POP, no IMAP, my mail is "stuck" on campus.  I could launch into a rant about how silly that is, but I'll do that another day.)

There's a couple-three flaming hoops you have to jump through to get Firefox to use the ICA client...

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Vista bad. Windows 7 good.

Saturday 21 February 2009 at 11:15 pm

I (Greg Porter) recently dumped XP as my home machine operating system.  The main reason I had XP was to play games, and now that new games require DirectX 10, which requires Vista, I said goodbye.

So I went with Fedora 10.

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NetworkScripting.org!

Monday 16 February 2009 at 10:57 pm An associate and I (Greg Porter) have started a new web site, NetworkScripting.org, where we will chronicle all the fancy tricks we do with Unix/Linux/Active Directory integration, providing unified home directories to Unix/Linux/Windows clients using Solaris with ZFS, NFS and SAMBA, managing hundreds of Linux workstations withYUM, etc., etc.  Check it out!

It's Christmas in February

Tuesday 10 February 2009 at 11:55 pm At Cal Poly, we've needed more storage in the lab for a while.  We recently got a HP EVA 4100 disk array.  It's pretty sweet. (more)