Contrary to what some people would have everyone believe, Microsoft don’t screw up very often. However, when they do screw up, they seem to screw up with style.
This Christmas I was off work from 18th Dec to 28th Dec inclusive – quite a long time and also a bargain, at only 5 days of annual leave for a total of 11 days off work. It was nice to be away from a computer screen, only returning to check email and play a few games. Anyway, I digress.
There are plenty of people around who will happily slate Microsoft (sorry, that should be Micro$oft), Windoze, and Internet Exploder. The majority of these people will, unprompted, extoll the virtues of Linux.
I won’t lie, I like Microsoft. I think Windows is the best all-round family of operating systems available. And I use Internet Explorer as my default browser, even though I have Firefox and Chrome installed.
But I also run a Linux server. It is a modest beast. It has a Sempron processor, three hard disks around 200-500GB each, and about 1GB of RAM. It doesn’t need much, even though it acts as a mail server, a web server, and a DNS and network file server for my home LAN. It runs Fedora 11, which is actually quite nice.
I started using Linux with no experience, and with the help of some patience, a few good Internet resources, and good old intuition, I pretty much know what I’m doing.
About a week ago, my Internet connection started to die sporadically, at unpredictable intervals, for no apparent reason. I traced the lack of connectivity down to the DNS service on the Linux server not responding to requests, and this led me to realise that the server would not respond to any kind of request at all: SSH, HTTP, or even ping.
So imagine my surprise, when after a lot of investigation (and I really do mean a LOT of investigation) it turned out to be Samba, the service which handles network file shares.
As soon as RAID controllers started being built into affordable motherboards, I decided using RAID for my home PC was a good idea. For the last 6-7 years, I have used RAID on every PC I have built.
There are several RAID configurations. RAID 0 (striping) utilises two or more identical hard drives, and splits each file equally across them, yielding much faster disk performance (limited by the throughput of the disk I/O controller) as the disks read and write at the same time. The total available storage is the sum of the individual drives’ capacity. RAID 1 (mirrored) could be considered the opposite of striping, in that each file is written to all disks. This effectively provides realtime backup since the content of all drives in the array is identical, with no performance cost.
I’ve only ever used RAID 0. For a home PC, RAID 1 doesn’t offer any real benefits that cannot be achieved with a half-decent backup policy, but effectively doubles the cost of disk space if you use two disks.
Installing and configuring CUPS with an HP PhotoSmart 8150 was ridiculously easy, since CUPS comes complete with HPIJS (the HP linux print drivers). The printer is attached via a USB hub on port 1.
To start, install CUPS and its documentation package. Strangely enough, the docs include a lot of the files required to run the CUPS web interface.
ipkg install cups
ipkg install cups-doc
My new PC has been giving me a hard time recently. And it’s my own fault.
When I built it, I decided it should have a 64-bit processor. Of course, that’s 32 bits more than anyone actually needs at the moment, but it’s the way forward. Allegedly.
Bad Behavior has blocked 250 access attempts in the last 7 days.