Bare with me here. This is a great technique. I think you’ll thank me later after doing what this article suggests.
Homes and businesses today have lots of network devices. Using DHCP is the easiest way to get those on the network, but if you ever want those different devices to talk to each o...
Linux/Ubuntu (maybe others) – ssh key-based authentication made easier.
You know that you shouldn’t be using passwords to remotely connect to a different machine, but setting up key-based authentication has always been just a little too much hassle to bother. It really is simple, but ther...
May 2021 Update
Added kernel, header, module removed command to purge them from APT.
Clarified /forcefsck options, slightly.
Jan 2020 Update
A little cleanup.
June 2018 Update
The big ideas below haven’t changed. Really the main change is to using apt instead of aptitude or apt-get for pac...
Many of us backup important data to optical disks like CDROM or DVD media. Over time, that media is known to fail. This means that every 5-10 years, a plan to migrate all the critical data to newer media needs to be included. It also means that when data is stored to this type of media, steps shou...
Today I wanted to add another OS to a netbook, an Asus Eee. My common practice is to boot a gparted ISO from a USB flash drive, move some data and partitions around and add a new logical partition to the end of the extended partition space. Write everything back out to disk. Then I’d boot th...
It is possible to run the Android development environment inside a KVM virtual machine. Below is how....
So I was watching the HNN show for this week and near the end they showed a list of companies and the counts for unpatched, yet known vulnerabilities in their software. Below is the list. Not surprising me, but Adobe is at the top … again.
CompanyCount
Adobe25
HP18
Apple15
Oracle14
Novell12
...
A first look at Natty Narwhal, aka Ubuntu 11.04, under VirtualBox 4.0.6. I’m coming from this as a daily user of Lubuntu 10.04 LTS. I don’t use Gnome much as I find it bloated and slow.
I’ve been using Natty for about a week. In general, I like the new interface. It isn’t n...
Ok, not really 101 uses for a Password Manager, but many more than you thought, about 30.
Use A Password Manager
For the last few years, I’ve been trying to get anyone with more than 5 passwords to remember to start using a password manager, PM, as part of increasing your desktop security. Belo...
In this Tax season, I find myself needing to share sensitive documents with relatively unsophisticated people and organizations. How should I share my files with them?
The Options
There are a few options to get those sensitive files to a provider. I will attempt to list the options, then describe t...
Sometimes you don’t need the best quality or performance from a device, you just need it to work good enough for a purpose. I wanted a cheap NAS for my home network that supported 2 USB connected storage devices. No high performance needed, just easy access to disks over the network. No RAID.
...
Scott the Storage Guy wrote a little blog post about the offsite storage options now that Mozy has removed their unlimited plan. Crashplan was his winner. It supports Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris, nice. Seems there’s a 15% off deal for former Mozy clients....
An article on Microsoft Trained Brain Syndrome that spells out some interesting points.
Still Need MS-Windows – Probably
Sadly, even if you do change to Linux for your daily use system, you’ll still probably need a Windows machine to run some software like TurboTax or the latest games. Th...
Some days I feel like a broken record. For the last 5+ years, ever since USB v2.x has been available, people have been spending WAY TO MUCH to have an inferior portable hard disk. We won’t get into all the reasons that you’d want an external hard disk here – just know that they ar...
Came across this article form 2004 about a small business that dumped Microsoft after the BSA showed up and discovered 8 installed, but not used, pieces of software on their systems. Keeping up with software licenses is tough. The software marshals arrived, closed his business for the audit and found...
I like backups. I like them more since losing many, many GBs of data over a decade ago – before I got backup religion.
Many of the long term readers know that I’m always looking for a better backup method.
Back-In-Time
Rdiff-backup Isn’t Perfect
VM-Explorer for Backups
I’ve bee...
By some standards, my 10,000+ digital photo collection is either very large or trivial. I suspect that professional photographers probably have hundreds of thousands of photos. Many of those will have different post-processing.
Organizing, backing up and archiving digital photos and images doesn̵...
I was going to create a Top 10 List of 2010 here. Then started looking through the articles and some constant themes can out.
Virtualization For Desktops and Servers
Tagged as Virtualization
Laptop Virtualization
VirtualBox Performance Tips
VirtualBox on Ubuntu
KVM on Ubuntu
Win7 and...
I received a Thermaltake BlacX Duet eSATA USB Dual Hard Drives Docking Station for Xmas. I’d asked for it since almost no non-nerd would have known what it was. Today was the first day that I got a chance to plug this baby in.
First Impressions...
Last night I did a little presentation on Using VirtualBox on a Desktop. I’d give myself a D+ for a grade on the presentation. Fortunately, it was a small and highly interactive crowd. I tried to cover too much stuff. Also, I showed how to do this on a Windows host OS with a Linux client OS ...
Last week, I visited some relatives. Their computer running MS-WindowsXP had at least 1 rootkit installed and a number of viruses and spywares. This machine was running Firefox with NoScript (disabled) and Thunderbird for email. The main user is not very technical, but uses Firefox, Thunderbird, Qui...
This article is extremely out of date and probably not very useful for steps to get quicken working on current Linux releases.
For many people, Quicken is the program that prevents them from switching to Linux 100%. This week, I finally took the time to install Quicken 2011 Premium under Linux Lubun...
We all get computer viruses, eventually. There is nothing anyone can do, but whether it is a small inconvenience or a major computer-doesn’t-work-for-weeks issue is up to you.
It doesn’t matter which operating system you have. Viruses have been written for it. It is true that since 92% o...
It had to happen eventually. Regardless of how careful we all are, if we run MS-Windows-something, our PCs will get infected. One of my family members, who lives a few states away, got infected with at least 1 virus, probably a botnet and a keylogger too.
I’m working on a plan to deal with th...
To have a web site on the internet, you need just 4 things.
Registrar – these guys sell you the .com, .net, .org, .co.country, etc …. They maintain the ‘whois’ record. That’s it. The Registrar needs a record that points to your … DNS provider – also called...
