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Linux Desktop Adoption: Hitting a Brick Wall?
edited by on July 25th 2007, at 00:28

Found this article to be so true...

http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/18417.

 
Client-only MythTV
edited by on July 24th 2007, at 23:38
In light of my media guide (which is still under heavy development), I did a bit of experimenting with MythTV.
The result of my experiment is pretty nifty: I now have the ability to watch TV on my laptop (without a TV tuner), as long as I have a connection to my media PC (where the tuner is). Want to know more? Read on then...

As you know (or perhaps not yet), MythTV consists of two parts: a backend server (which does all the work: managing records, accessing hardware and so on), and a frontend client (basically controls the backend server, look up recordings, watch actual TV, etc.).
These two parts communicates with each other using the IP stack. While (according to the Gentoo ebuild maint  ...
 
Brother moved out... (part 3)
edited by on July 22nd 2007, at 18:20

The move is as good as completed. I still have to clean up several stuff and such, and there are still some things that have to be moved out (like my father's encyclopedia).

The moving chapter is pretty much finished, well, accept the clean up of course. I'll post a picture as soon as I get there.

 
The Simple Guide to a Media PC
edited by on July 13th 2007, at 18:10
Because of my move, I had need of a media PC system, which allowed me to watch TV, record from TV, watch DVDs, listen to music and more. Buying a pc with Windows Media Center was not an option: linux has very wonderful applications and utilities to build such a sytem. For hardware, I had an old pc which I used as a server, but because of the wonderful capabilities of VMware, I decided to convert the machine to a so-called Media PC.

To contribute my efforts to the community, I decided to create some sort of a guide. It is not a real how-to, but rather the steps I took to get things running, along with descriptions and solutions to caveats and problems I encountered.
The guide can be found i  ...
 
Brother moved out... (part 2)
edited by on July 13th 2007, at 17:35

Some more intermediate shots of my own move...

More photos will be found in the gallery (if it ever gets finished, that is).

 
Brother moved out...
edited by on July 2nd 2007, at 21:14

My brother Kurt moved out this weekend. His house is finally finished, or at least, just up to the point it is liveable.
Since we shared a room, you can believe I'm happy to finally have the Kingdom for myself. The reconstruction (so to speak) has already begun...

Attached are the very first photo's, in the very early stage of the reconstruction.
This part pretty much shows my soon-to-be-my bed. Most of the old cupboards and closets have already been thrown out; you can see the markings on the walls and such.

 
Sprung a leak...
edited by on July 2nd 2007, at 21:02
Well, isn't this great... Thought I had a quiet weekend (well, relatively quiet, read the next post), with a bit of gaming and such. But apparently, my oh-so-wonderful water-cooled video card thought otherwise.

Twas Friday afternoon: I booted up my pc. Although it was a bit more silent than usually, I discarded it as being the bit cold weather of these days.
Thought it would be neat to do a bit of retro-gaming, and fired up the old Half-Life 1...

About two minutes in the game, alarms and whistles and popups went off, and as the message your card is too hot appeared on the screen, I distinctively shouted out: WTF!
I quickly cranked up the ATI console, and saw an astonashing 113 degrees C !   ...
 
The importance of battery backup in a RAID controller
edited by on June 28th 2007, at 15:34
Did a test on two DL380 G5 controllers to check out the difference between having a battery or not on a P400 SAS RAID controller. The results are remarkable, to say the least.

Both machines are fairly identical when looking at disk configuration: both have a P400 SAS controller with an equal amount of storage, but srv1 has 512MB with battery, srv2 has 256MB without battery.

I ran a dd test of a file, and this is the output:

srv1:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=./dump.dump bs=1k count=81920008192000+0 records in8192000+0 records out8388608000 bytes (8.4 GB) copied, 48.282 seconds, 174 MB/s

srv2:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=./dump.dump bs=1k count=51200005120000+0 records in5120000+0 recor  ...
 
[Exchange] mailbox sharing and delegation
edited by on June 26th 2007, at 09:23
 
[Mac] Memory stick not empty after deleting files
edited by on June 24th 2007, at 20:24

A friend of mine had this problem with her camera storage thingy. If you're a MacOSX user, you might want to read up on the symptoms and solution on her blog.
Extra thanks go to Heidi for this.

 
Finding Windows uptime
edited by on June 11th 2007, at 11:37
In linux, punching in uptime provides you with how long the system was up without a reboot. But how to do this in Windows? There is no real indication to be found anywhere. Here's how.

The uptime can be found using the command prompt.

Do a start -> Run, punch in cmd and hit Enter (like you normally would).
Type in the command:

net statistics server

(and hit Enter).
Find the line that starts with Statistics since...: it will tell the time the server was up from.

Note that you could shorten the commands like so:

net stats srv

The above has been tested with: Windows 2000 (all versions), Windows XP (all versions), and Windows 2003 (all versions). It will probably work on Vista as well.
  ...
 
OpenVPN on Vista: issues
edited by on May 21st 2007, at 17:59

Running OpenVPN on Vista, works, but requires some workarounds.
Current list of issues:

  • connection gets established, but route addition fails with route addition failed usingCreateIpForwardEntry

Read further for the solutions...

connection gets established, but route addition fails with route addition failed usingCreateIpForwardEntry

This problem always occurs on a Vista. What happens is that while the connection does get established, the routes are not being added properly, because of an API change in Vista.
To circumvent the issue, add this line to your OpenVPN config file:

route-method exe

This way, the route addition is called directly using the commandline utility.

 
[series] Bakuretsu Tenshi
edited by on May 17th 2007, at 17:32
While at the surface, it resembles NGE a bit, the comparison stops at the looks of two of the main characters: set in a near future Tokyo, where crime is high, and the population suffers from threads of violence and oppression, not only by the various yakuza syndicates, but also the new law enforcement, whose totalitary reign scares all. However, there are changes at hand, in the form of four teenage girls. At first, hired guns for a respectable syndicate, their allegiance changes when they uncover a secret conspiracy, going all the way up to law enforcement...
A fast-paced, mecha action anime, with cute main characters: what more do you want?

Working title: Bakuretsu Tenshi (USA: Burst Ang  ...
 
Exchange 2000/2003: change in-/outgoing SMTP port
edited by on May 17th 2007, at 15:24
Because of (Belgian) providers limiting SMTP (port 25) traffic to their own servers, makes it necessary for us (as an 3rd party ISP) to allow our customers to use our own mailserver for all outgoing mail. To circumvent this limitation, we've configured the mailserver to listen on port 26 as well.

For our customers with only a few mail clients (so no local mailserver), this is usually not a problem. A quick change of the SMTP port, solves their issues. For people that have a catch-all mailbox (and a local mailserver), the mailserver itself usually allows the change.

Of course, some of our clients have Exchange servers, and there, the change was not that obvious.
After a bit of a search, we'  ...
 
Windows XP: Illegal System DLL Relocation
edited by on May 14th 2007, at 21:10

It's a bit of an old post, but ran into this problem more than once.
If you get the message:

Quote
The system DLL user32.dll was relocated in memory. The application will not run properly. The relocation occurred because the DLL C:\Windows\System32\Hhctrl.ocx occupied an address range reserved for Windows system DLLs. The vendor supplying the DLL should be contacted for a new DLL.

A hot-fix can be downloaded at: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/935448.

 
HP Proliant ML350 G5 woes: part 3
edited by on May 7th 2007, at 11:09
It would've been too easy if the solution (read my previous post about this topic), would've just worked. With the source of the HP OpenIPMI package available (it seems to be included in the download), I thought it would be snap to get it compiled for our Etch kernel. I was wrong...

Downloading the .deb for sarge doesn't work on Etch right away because of a kernel version difference. Moreover, while the source of the OpenIPMI driver has been included, it does fit neatly into the kernel source, but the compiler bombs out with this:

  CC [M]  drivers/char/ipmi/ipmi_msghandler.odrivers/char/ipmi/ipmi_msghandler.c: In function 'ipmi_smi_watcher_register':drivers/char/  ...
 
HP Proliant ML350 G5 woes: part 2
edited by on May 4th 2007, at 15:05
After a call to HP, there seems to be a solution present.
Apparently it's a known issue on these boxes, when one is using the open source IPMI, instead of the HP OpenIPMI.

The resolution was to install HP OpenIPMI. The full description is below:

Quote
DESCRIPTION
On an HP ProLiant ML350 G5 server configured with a single processor, if
the HP System Health Application and Insight Management Agents for Linux
are installed without the HP OpenIPMI (hp-OpenIPMI) device driver
loaded, a console message is displayed indicating that there is a
problem with the system fan and that the server will shut down in 60
seconds. After 60 seconds has passed, the server reboots. When this
occurs, the followi  ...
 
HP Proliant ML350 G5 woes
edited by on May 3rd 2007, at 16:01
Some time ago, Debian has finally been adopted officially by HP as a supported Operating System. They even have released packages for Sarge for it.
Of course, in the meantime, Etch is the new stable of Debian, thus, I had to revert back to the old tweaking ways, described at http://debian.catsanddogs.com/. On the various DL380 G5's I've worked with, this went very smoothly, and it runs perfectly. On the ML350 G5, it's something else...

The machine is a new ML350 G5, with a dual-core Xeon 5120. The system runs Etch AMD64 (stable), and everything seems to be in order. Installation of the agents went flawlessly either (with a bit of script tweaking to make up for the version difference).

The   ...
 
[PC] Tomb Raider - Legend
edited by on April 29th 2007, at 23:45
Lara Croft is once again back, and better before.
After the gloomy story of TRAOD (aka TR6), she returns to a more classic setting and content, while renewing the gameplay.

Title: Tomb Raider Legend (Tomb Raider 7)

Release date: April 2006

Developed by: Crystal Dynamics

Published by: Eidos

Genre: 3rd person 3D action adventure

Website: http://www.tombraider.com/

At the age of 9, Lara Croft survived a plane crash in the Himalayas. Unfortunately, her mother did not. On her own, Lara managed a 10-day hike from the crash site to Kathmandu.
The rest of her childhood, she stayed under the care of her father Richard Croft, count of Abbingdon and archeologist. When Lara was 18, her father die  ...
 
[PC] Half-Life 2: Episode One
edited by on April 29th 2007, at 22:19
The continuation of Half-Life 2 is here... Find out what happened after the events of Half-Life 2. A must-have for all Half-Life fans...

Title: Half-Life 2: Episode One (aka: Half-Life Aftermath)

Release date: June 2006

Developed by: Valve

Published by: Valve

Genre: first person shooter

Website: http://ep1.half-life2.com/

Half-Life 2, already been considered by many organization and reviewers as the best fps, is been continued by episodic releases. The first one, episode one, takes place right after the events of the original Half-Life 2, where the Citadel's portal has been destroyed, and the G-man (as we all came to know him) wants to return Gordon to the eternal void to wait in stas  ...
 
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