On a relatively fresh installation of Windows XP with SP2 on a Compaq Presqrio desktop running an AMD processor, Windows XP SP3 was applied. After an apparently successful installation, upon reboot, at the Windows XP logo, the system quickly flashed a blue screen of death and rebooted. Fortunately, I was able to login to the computer in safe mode to…
Read More »CentOS, Scientific Linux (“SL”), and Oracle Linux are all based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (“RHEL”) code base. Though there are differences between them, the similarities are more than not. For whatever the reason, there are documented processes that permit the conversion from one of the aforementioned Linux distros to another. This conversion will document another approach based on…
Read More »GPG keys are stored in the /etc/pki/rpm-gpg directory, as part of the CentOS 6/RHEL 6 install. Looking though the contents of this directory, files like RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-release exist. To actually use the key to verify packages, it must be imported. The following command provides the contents of /etc/pki/rpm-gpg ls /etc/pki/rpm-gpg | xargs -n1 basename RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-6 RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-Debug-6 RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-Security-6 RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-Testing-6 There are two…
Read More »Instead of having to distribute an image file with a shell script that called for the file, an idea came to mind to embed the image into the shell script. Although one way was found, I devised an alternate simpler method to distribute the image file embedded in the script. The first method uses four lines of code. This method…
Read More »vsftpd (“Very Secure FTP Daemon”) is an FTP server for Linux and supports PAM (“pluggable authentication modules”). A virtual user cannot login to the Linux system and is considered more secure than using a “real” user whom can login to a Linux system. This guide offers a script that demonstrates yet another way to setup a vsftpd server using PAM…
Read More »Hyperic is a tool that offers visibility into applications and infrastructure across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. It consolidates discovery, monitoring, analysis and control of application, system, and network assets. Hyperic is available as vFabric Hyperic, the commercial version, and as Hyperic HQ, the open-source version. While similar, vFabric Hyperic offers additional features over the open source version. What this…
Read More »Script or batch file writing can be very rewarding, especially when the script written works as planned. What is particularly rewarding is when a shortcut is found that greatly simplifies how the script is written and executed. Here is a couple of shortcuts that I picked up from the Internet. The end result all seem to be the same. This…
Read More »Several years ago, I wrote a set of instructions how to install JBoss on a RHEL / CentOS Linux operating system. Then, the procedure utilized the GUI, mouse clicks, and the terminal. Well, as my comfort level with Linux has grown, so has the instructions into a script. A prerequisite for JBoss is Java JDK. For JBoss 5.1.0.GA, I elected…
Read More »A user has a laptop with one VGA connection which is currently connected to an external monitor. The user wanted to add another external monitor to the equation. The laptop is neatly tucked away and hidden from sight, so the use of the laptop screen is not an option. The docking station that compliments this laptop does not offer support…
Read More »The Powerline Network Adapter uses the existing home electircal wiring as a wired network cable. A wireless bridge is used to connect two LAN segments via a wireless link. The Powerline network Adapter is sold as a kit and offered by several companies. However, for this test, the Actiontec Powerline Network Adpater Kit (SKU # PWR511K01) is used to compare…
Read More »A Toshiba laptop running Microsoft Windows 7 with an AMD processor had been working without issue. After updating several drivers, a Runtime Error! message box presented itself upon each reboot, regardless of the power source. More specifically, a Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library error box for the program C:\Windows\system32\atibtmon.exe. It turns out that the error is a result of a…
Read More »A Hewlett Packard HP DL380 G3 server running Windows 2003 needed support for USB 2.0 to transfer files from the server to an external hard drive as a backup. There didn’t seem to be any definitive answer or resolution to this after several hours of Internet searches. After coming across a USB 2.0 adapter card at a reasonable price, it…
Read More »A fresh, vanilla installation of a Microsoft Windows 2003 SP1 server without updates was introduced to a test environment. It was added to a workgroup. Client workstations are Microsoft Windows 7. A few shares were created on the server, however, from the workstations, the users were faced with a network error pop-up message. The solution is a simple fix. Basically,…
Read More »I have been running a Microsoft Windows 7 desktop since 2009, in that time and many Microsoft updates later, the C:\windows\winsxs directory has grown to a significant size in proportion to the rest of the hard drive. There is a way to clean this up. Here are screenshots of the before and after cleanup attempt. Note the savings of 4.8…
Read More »On a Windows 7 computer, a Windows Security pop-up warning that These files might be harmful to your computer message appears each time a file is copied from that Windows 7 workstation to a network resource. There is a work-a-round for this that has worked for me, so I thought I would pass it along. Click Start > Control Panel…
Read More »While in the process of updating a development virtual machine of CentOS 5.6, it became clear that the updates would not update CentOS 5.6 to it’s final release of CentOS 5.9. The traditional yum update approach produced the status of No Packages marked for Update. However, a couple of additional commands produced the desired result of CentOS 5.9. The traditional…
Read More »A little while ago, I wrote an article Convert mAh to mWh and mWh to mAh for Notebook Laptop Batteries that provided the calculations needed to convert from mAh to mWh and vice versa. The intent was to simplify the navigation in researching the purchase of a replacement battery. As many battery manufacturers present different pieces of information which makes…
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