Archive
Posts from 2011
Making sense of the various NAS hardware and software solutions
This past weekend I realized I had a sufficient need at home for some type of centralized storage solution. Ideally this solution would allow me access my data from all of my machines via NFS, CIFS and iSCSI, and have some capabilities to stream music and videos across my wireless network. The number of NAS solutions I found astounded me, and I have been digging through reviews to see what is good. During my research, I came across a slew of hardware and software solutions…
$ read more →A walk down DOS memory lane
This past weekend I started cleaning out a ton of old stuff. Like most geeks, I hate to get rid of things that may one day be useful. While reviewing the contents of one of my tech tubs, I came across some nostalgic DOS software and books from the early 90s. The first item was a stack of old software, which included Turbo Pascal, Turbo Assembler, Turbo C++, System Commander and DOS 6.22 on 1.44" floppy disks: I also uncovered my good old DOS beyond 640K book: Ahhhhh -- this led me down memory lane…
$ read more →All good things (opensolaris) must come to an end
This past weekend I unsubscribed from my last opensolaris mailing list. While reflecting on where technology is heading, I had to take a few minutes to reflect on where things were just a few years back. I remember vividly the day that the opensolaris.org website came online. After the announcement came out, I spent 24 straight hours signing up for mailing lists, reading documentation and reviewing the source code for a number of utilities…
$ read more →Getting started with Windows Server 2008
This past year I finally took the plunge and started learning Windows Server. At first I was extremely apprehensive about this, but as I thought about it more I realized that a lot of companies are successfully using Windows Server for one or more reasons. In addition, most environments have a mix of Windows, Linux and Solaris, so this would help me understand all the pieces in the environment I support. Being the scientific person I am, I decided to do some research to see just how viable Windows Server was…
$ read more →A nice graphical interface for smartmontools
In my article out SMART your hard drive, I discussed smartmontools and the smartctl comand line utility in detail. The article shows how to view SMART data on a hard drive, conduct self-tests and shows how to configure smartmontools to generate alerts when a drive is about to or has failed. Recently I learned about GSmartControl, which is a graphical front-end to smartmontools. While I've only played with it a bit, it looks like a pretty solid piece of software…
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