brentashley

I finally got around to figuring out how to image some various machines onto a newly installed cheap 5400rpm 80Gig drive I have on one of my home boxes.

I had contemplated tools like Norton Ghost and PowerQuest DriveImage but I wasn’t looking forward to farting around with multiple boot floppies to get network and PCMCIA drivers happening for my laptops and various other machines.

I took a look around for some Open Source stuff and came across PartImage, which comes on the Knoppix 3.3 CD.

I booted up my trusty Knoppix CD, opened a shell, and did the following:

… at which point, I was launched into the partimage program which has a full-screen text-based ui that is easy to navigate.

Within minutes I was copying my NTFS partition over the network with gzip compression at about 40 MB per minute.

I’ll have to do some testing on another machine I have, blowing away and restoring partitions. I can only hope it will be as smooth as it has been so far!

— update:

I just saved, trashed and restored a 250MB QNX FAT partition on a celeron333 machine using the System Rescue CD, following the exact same steps as with Knoppix.

Saved the 250Meg partition without compression in 2 min 38 seconds over the network, resored it in less than 5 minutes.

Gotta love the net.

I wanted to play a DVD today that my wife had brought back from England, but my DVD player choked on it saying the disc is restricted to Region 2, whereas of course the DVD player is set for Region 1.

I hopped on Google with my cheap $59 DVD player’s model number and within two minutes, I had the instructions to permanently set my player to Region Zero (all regions) simply by using my remote control to enter a code.

Now I can play discs from anywhere. Woohoo!

Made it to the meetup. Snowy today, traffic horrible. Tim stayed in Brampton so no cam, but I’m online at http://www.blogchat.com

I’ll be going to the WiFi meetup again tomorrow Wed 14 Jan at 7pm. Tim Aiello will be there with his Linksys webcam, which we’ll broadcast from http://meetup.megahuge.com (link will fail if you try it now – only active during meeting) via some SSH port-forwarding magic. We’ll also be available for text chat at http://www.blogchat.com, so no need to brave the forecasted -35 Celsius windchill!

I’ve been doing a bunch of wireless lately with my laptop. On publicly available networks, whether paid or free, WEP is usually not enabled, so anyone could easily come by with a tool like kismet and watch your traffic including POP and FTP passwords etc.

As an independent consultant, I don’t have a corporate network with VPN access through which I can secure my communications, so I’ve had to make do with what is available to me.

I have SSHD, smtp and a web proxy server running on my home network, so on my Win2k-based laptop I have set up a PuTTY connection with the following ports forwarded:

6588 – http/s proxy
25 – smtp (allows relay only from self)
110 – pop3 forwarded to pop3.simplefilter.com

On the laptop, I have a hosts file entry mapping the pop3.simplefilter.com to 127.0.0.1, smtp set to localhost, and my browser and Trillian proxy set to localhost:6588.

With this setup, all I have to do is run PuTTY, connect securely via ssh to my home machine, and then all HTTP/S, POP, ICQ, MSN, and YAHOO traffic happens securely through my tunnel. Running netstat on my machine shows one connection home and a bunch of localhost connections.

Microsoft has a new campaign to provide corporations with “the facts you need to make the choice between Windows and Linux”.

One of their facts, titled “WinTel Server 10 Times Less Expensive to Operate Than Linux Mainframe”, says:

Microsoft-sponsored benchmarks prove that multiple WinTel Web servers perform better than a Linux mainframe acting as a Web server consolidator

An odd comparison to be sure, like comparing apples to orchards. How do multiple WinTel Web servers stack up against multiple Intel Linux Web servers, I wonder?

By leading off with such transparently evasive comparisons, I’m really not encouraged to attach any credence to the rest of their arguments, however valid. I can’t say that I really even care to read on to the meat when the headlines and intro blurbs make their assessment of my intelligence pretty clear.

It seems that spammers generally observe the western/christian holidays. The quiet that my inbox and blog comments enjoyed over the past week has been replaced with a barrage of spam since yesterday.

I went out today and got a Zonet 4-port KVM switch complete with cables from Logic Computer House for CDN$89.

Works fine with Linux on my server machine (both console and X), Win2k, DOS and Windows 9x so far. There’s no reason why it wouldn’t work with anything, really, because there is no interaction with the operating system. It’s great because it emulates keyboard and mouse for the non-active ports so my compaq computers will boot without me hooking a real keyboard to each of them.

Cables are very high quality well shielded, can do up to 1920×1440 resolution without ghosting.

Amazing deal, really. Used to be a single high quality KVM cable set was at least $50.